can be read but not writtenâ. The novel, the short story, the poem, were redefined as a âgalaxy of signifiersâ. As Richard Howardsums up, Barthesâ conviction of reading was: âWhat is told is always the tellingâ. And Harry Levin wrote: âTo survey his [the writerâs]; writings in their totality and chart the contours of their âinner Landscapeâ is the critical aim of current Structuralists and Phenomenologists. All of these approaches recognize, as a general principle, that every writer has his own configuration of ideas and sentiments, capacities and devices.â
Barthesâ brilliance, with its element of divine playfulness, made and makes enthralling readingâfor those of us who share at least sufficient of his cultural matrix to gain aesthetic pleasure and revelation from his cited âsignifiersâ. Itâs a detective game, in which the satisfaction comes from correctly interpreting the clueâelementary, for Sherlock Holmes, but not for my dear Watson. Barthes, in the structural analysis of Balzacâs novella
Sarrasine
, is the Sherlock Holmes who, deducing from his immensely rich cultural experience, instantly recognizes the fingerprints of one cultural reference upon another. The reader is Watson, for whom, it may be, the âsignifierâ signifies nothing but itself, if there is nothing in the range of his cultural experience for it to be referred
to
. It is a swatch that does not match any colour in his spectrum, a note that cannot be orchestrated in his ear. So that even if he is told that Balzacâs clock of the Elysée Bourbon is actually chiming metonymic reference to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and from the Faubourg Saint-Honorè to the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, and then to the Restoration as a âmythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspectââthere remains a blank where that reader is supposed to be reading âwhat is not writtenâ. The signifier works within a closed system: it presupposes a cultural context shared by writer and reader beyond literacy. Without that resource the reader cannot âreadâ the text in Barthean abundance. âWords are symbols that assume a shared memoryâ, says Borges. TheFaubourg Saint-Honoré is just the name of a district, it has no elegant social/intellectual associations, either as an image conjured up from visits to Paris or as a symbol described in other books, visualized in paintings. The Bourbon Restoration brings no association as a âmythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspectâ because the reader doesnât know the place of the Bourbon Restoration in French political and social history. The polymath interchange of the arts, letters, politics, history, philosophy, taken for granted by Barthes, is not the traffic of that readerâs existence.
When one says one writes for âanyone who reads meâ one must be aware that âanyoneâ excludes a vast number of readers who cannot âreadâ you or me because of givens they do not share with us in unequal societies. The Baudelairean correspondences of earlier literary theory cannot work for them, either, because âcorrespondenceâ implies the recognition of one thing in terms of another, which can occur only
within the same cultural resource system
.
This is the case even for those of us, like me, who believe that books are not made out of other books, but out of life. Whether we like it or not, we can be âreadâ only by readers who share terms of reference formed in us by our educationânot merely academic but in the broadest sense of life experience; our political, economic, social, and emotional concepts, and our values derived from these; our cultural matrix. It remains true even of those who have put great distances between themselves and the inducted values of childhood; who have changed countries, convictions, ways
Learning to Kill: Stories