A Critique of Roland Barthes To Write: An Intransitive Verb?

By Andrew N. Adler

Copyright 1989 by Andrew N. Adler. All rights reserved.

Roland Barthes searches for what he calls the fundamental categories of language (145).1 Initially, he marshals evidence for the existence of two dichotomies that supposedly inhere in the structure of all language namely, the opposition between personal and impersonal pronoun modes, and the opposition between personal and impersonal verb tenses. Next, given this universal property, he invokes the deep structure assumption, which he refers to as the postulate of homology. Essentially, he argues that these relatively superficial dualities provide clues to an inevitable polarity in the way in which anyone transfers meaning through any symbolic order. If communication does so proceed through fixed channels governed by formal rules, then Barthes essay implies two important results: First, we cannot transgress these channels simply by clever manipulation of surface elements, such as pronouns. Such games will only lend ambiguity and deception to our attempted communications. Second, seemingly divergent efforts at conveying meaning (e.g., in science, literature, history, and psychology) actually share similar limitations and horizons. Since all aspects of culture balance precariously over the same pitfalls, the elucidation of a general practice of undeluded writing might, to some degree, rescue all disciplines. The details of this program rest upon the distinction between discourse and the impersonal. Of course, every communication is written by a human being, the implied narrator [nonciateur] of the whole text. Yet in discourse, Barthes insists, utterances of a particularly human point of view or origin manifest the presence of the implied narrator.
1Barthes,

Roland. To Write: An Intransitive Verb?, in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey & Eugenio Donato (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press), p. 145. All subsequent parenthetical citations refer to page numbers in this article.

(Presumably, as we discuss below, the impersonal text contains no such clues about the humaneness of the implied narrator.) In literary discourse, for example, the reader participates not only in the point of view of characters, who have their own subordinate discourses, but also in the perspective of the implied narrator who in some way shows the characters experiences to the reader. In a third-person account (Carrie saw Bill leave the house), we can locate an implied narrator who, with whatever degree of reliability, watched Carrie watch Bill leave and told the reader so. Even an omniscient or anonymous nonciateur usually still intervenes as a person stage-managing the text. The language of discourse employs the particular pronouns and verbs that attempt (unsucessfully) to transcribe the verities of human agency and human action, respectively. The things that we do in our daily lives apparently occur in a sort of (biological or chronological) time where actions can be completed, continued, or repeated in time past, present, and future. Barthes asserts, however, that discourse inevitably neglects to communicate the essence of such personhood existing through time. More generally, he proposes that discourse, by its very nature, is neither subjective nor objective. I now discuss these two related claims.

(1) Subjectivity Let us assume (temporarily) that an individual can possess an interiority, a subjective experience antecedent to any effort to describe this psychical state via language. Let us assume that Jill is happy. The moment, though, that Jill writes, I am happy, she has already failed to convey her emotions qua emotions. Happy is a fixed, conventional

signifier that predates Jills specific experience. Therefore, happy is not an image of Jills or anyone elses direct state of mind. Technically, people who think that their emotion has some relationship with the feeling that others describe as happy will avail themselves of the same word. In Jills sentence, the verb am, too, really strives to arrest the fleeting moment at which Jill wrote. But the instant is gone. Use of the present tense delivers a sense of continuous yet fleeting in the readers mind, but the verb itself cannot exactly transcribe the intensity or duration of the feeling. It cannot re-enact the moment. Indeed, Barthes suggests that the I on the page merely represents a site for a subject-substitute, a character called the first-person narrator. Once again, conventions of usage can make a character appear to evolve through time or behave realistically, but the pronoun never guarantees that the reader will innocently restore the stored-up personhood (140). For the I is mobile in ways beyond the control of the writer, as we will relate in detail below.

(2) Objectivity Consider the same problems from the other side, that of the reader: Given the fact that a reader must interpret the writers words, the writer has created meaning (a set of stable referents) only insofar as the reader finds it on the page. The significance of the word happy depends upon the readers psychological constitution and his idiosyncrasies of usage, upon his conception of sad and ecstatic, and perhaps upon his conception of what the writer intended. Similarly, supposedly objective calendar time cannot encapsulate time independently of how the reader unpacks it. For example, even stream-of-consciousness writing (which once purported to lie closer

to unadulterated experience) represents a convention: A reader unfamiliar with the technique will most likely find it uncommonly unlike his own consciousness. Returning to the use of I, the problem may be illustrated by recapitulating Barthes seemingly innocuous example of me speaking directly to a friend in the first-person about my experiences: Barthes actually is describing what psychologists call the fundamental attribution bias namely, that other people often believe that my personality is more stable and homogeneous than I sense it to be. From my vantage point, I perceive that I have freedom, but others try to collect facts about me into a cohesive image Andrew. Psychologists and philosophers enumerate many reasons why this gap (or bias) exists. Barthes point is that discourse can never bridge the gap. When I say I, I hope to indicate my psychological self at that moment. But my friend receives the code I as a relatively complete and recurrent sign. He rationally construes the very pronoun, regardless of context, as a composite of conventionalized and interpreted psychical states and time-frames quite different from what I intended. The pronoun, then, is a symbolic structure devoid of any psychological standing. The gap widens further when the context becomes less propitious. If I write down my thoughts, and someone I do not know reads that text, such a reader can easily reverse my intentions. Nothing prevents him from conceiving my declarations as ironic, my questions as rhetorical, my objective reporting as autobiographical, or my autobiography as relatively purified fiction. Barthes optimistically proposes that some instances of writing the impersonal circumvent this difficulty. Apparently, nearly every

language has a verb tense (the aorist) that does not signify any connection between the events recalled and any continuing, completed, or repeated events. Also, every language has a pronoun mode (the he or it mode) that does not necessarily denote an implied narrator. This empirical information, Barthes believes, supports the hypothesis that language contains an avenue suited for past-tense narrative that does not get entangled in the difficulties described above. Such an avenue, Barthes continues, would seem ideal for scientific or historical writings in particular. The theorist claims that the pronoun he, employed in a specific sense, is absolutely non-person [and] situated outside of [discourse] (139). According to Barthes, this is only the case when we cannot intelligibly substitute the word I for he. Consider the sentence S: The tinkling of the ice against the glass seemed to give Bond a sudden inspiration (140). Barthes deduces that it makes no sense to dictate that a phenomenon seemed to give me a sudden inspiration; hence, sentence S is impersonal. * * * * * * * I criticize Barthes sole and great opposition of person and nonperson for the basic reason that Barthes artificially polarizes the world and ignores the actual continuum between person and non-person. Barthes admits that I and you are transformable. Presumably, I can not know who I am unless I separate the idea of myself from that of others, although this separation is never fully articulated2 and symbolic transformation stays possible. So far, this view anticipates Lacans point that no aspect of consciousness can evade the structure of language;
2Compare

Derrida, Jacques. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Macksey & Donato, pp. 250, 254.

interiority takes its meaning only through the vehicle of the symbolic I. Further, the concept of I can exist only in relation to the concepts of you and he. Still, Barthes does not take the more radical step, as I do now, of hypothesizing the reversibility of I and it. I can behave in some respects as an inanimate object, and so it is unreasonable to imply that I use the pronoun I to refer solely to those aspects of myself that qualify as uniquely human. In the galaxy of signs, then, it seems likely that objects analogously partake of some human definition as well. To take an empirical example, a pair of anthropologists have suggested that when Louis XIV declared, Ltat, cest moi, the king would have been taken quite literally. That is, his culture made much of the unity between the physical body of the monarch and a mystical instantiation of his right to rule: a divine spark of authority, if you will. The body politic was a part of the rulers self.3 All of this sounds confusing to twentieth-century Americans because the body politic has subsequently become relatively metaphorical (on the continuum between literal and metaphorical signifiers). But, the vestigial royal we should show clearly enough that personhood and its absence can be deliberately and inseparably mixed within a pronoun. To take another example, various oriental languages contain linguistic forms very different from the Indo-European,4 and oriental religions make relatively few distinctions between subject and object. So,

3Huntington, Richard and Peter 4From personal discussion with

Metcalf. Celebrations of Death (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979). Leslie Stone, a graduate student in Chinese Studies, about Mandarin pronouns and modes of address, I have gained a glimpse of evidence to corroborate this assertion. I have not yet attempted to further educate myself about such matters.

the oriental linguistic culture probably does not support Barthes univalent conception of the first-person. Additionally, the philosophers own methodology casts doubt upon his conclusions. He admits in another essay that the complex ruses of language foster a reality effect,5 whereby a surface element may appear intelligible even when deeper, fundamental categories deny that very intelligibility. For instance, Barthes would contend that romanticism thrived, even though it wallowed in the contradiction of the linguistic I retaining personal expressiveness, until the underlying linguistic theory exposed the problem. Before then, some surface elements must have encouraged the deception. Yet any theory, including any metatheory, is an incomplete code generated out of previous discourse. Its adherents can never possess full awareness of its limitations: ambiguities may still masquerade as truth. In Barthes case, he cannot prove that the impersonal records something truly essential. But, to continue my critique along a similar path, let us suppose that if Barthes dichotomy seems comprehensible, then it does display a significant result, per the homology postulate. So, if Barthes Sentence S contains none of the ambiguous consciousness of normal narration, I will concede that one can indeed erase personhood and escape discourse. Nevertheless, Barthes test is inconclusive because the sentence, The tinkling of the ice seemed to give me a sudden inspiration, may well be intelligible if ensconced in a piece of fiction. The novels author may want explicitly to evince his uncertainty about the status of his own subjective
5Barthes,

Roland. Historical Discourse, trans. Peter Wexler, in Social Science Information, vol. 6, no. 4 (International Social Science Council, Aug. 1967), p. 154.

consciousness. He then permits the reader a glimpse of the division between implied narrator and symbolic character by pointing out the disparity between me on the page and the author himself: He judiciously equivocates by writing seemed.6 Returning to empirical formulations, we note that Barthes has exaggerated the magnitude of historical fluctuation in mode of discourse simply because it suits his claim to novelty. Yet in fact, some Romantic Age writers achieved self-consciousness about the scandal of language. To sketch just one instance of many: Coleridge begins Kubla Khan with a panoramic (if not omniscient) description of Kubla Khans pleasure-dome and its surroundings. Suddenly (at line 37), the narration switches to a firstperson account of a vision I once saw of a woman playing a dulcimer. The narrator then promises: Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight t would win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air One could read this poem as a description of a physical palace, with this description followed by a poets lyrical monologue. But, one can just as rationally construe the narrator of the monologue as the same character who speaks the opening, panoramic lines. In that case, the poet-character has already built the dome! Arguably, Coleridge meant thus to expose the implied original narrator (i.e., himself, the origin of dome-building) by the change in voice.

6Here,

seemed can be interpreted a-psychologically: that is, one can say that the text itself equivocates about itself. Ironically, the more well-versed a reader is in Barthes and other literary theory, the more he or she will make sense out of Sentence S.

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From the Periclean Greeks to Cervantes, Shakespeare, Sterne, and continuing to the present day, authors of fiction have often overtly and even self-consciously intruded into their texts, sometimes through third-level narration, ironic and enigmatic points of view, and similar tricks. Barthes admits that classical, mixed discourse quickly alternates personal and apersonal nonciation through a complex play of pronouns and descriptive verbs (139). In what way is post-modern writing different? Barthes praises Robbe-Grillets Je suis seul ici maintenant (141). Yet if Robinson Crusoe had spoken these words, must we then dismiss them as deluded interiority? In pointing out the methodological impasses in claims of objectivity beyond the human heart, I do not wish to imply that various writings are not relatively impersonal or personal. In fairness to Barthes, he probably offers the impersonal merely as an ideal. After all, as Peter Brooks maintains,7 Barthes suspects all metalanguages, including his own. Indeed, in To Write: An Instransitive Verb?, Barthes agrees that his own thoughts remain inconclusive and largely theoretical (135), that personal prejudices (144) color them, and that the tenets of linguistic anthropology remain provisional (135). Note, too, his uneasiness with anomalous cases that lie in between the poles he has defined and defended (137). The ideal of the impersonal coincides with the ideal of integral writing presented in Barthes Science vs. Literature.8 In the latter case, Barthes argues that theoreticians must actually practice integral writing for it to exist. In each article, though, the author himself does not yet engage in such critical practice: In To Write, he is content to deploy such traditional formulations as, It seems to me.
7Brooks, Peter. Savant of Signs, The New Republic (Oct. 11, 1982), pp. 27-31. 8Barthes, Roland. Science Versus Literature, The Times Literary Supplement (Sept.

28, 1967), p. 16.

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Barthes cannot find the unity and order he seeks. Phrases such as classical mixed discourse carry little force when applied to the complexities and true polyphony9 of language.

9See

Lacan, Jacques. The insistence of the letter in the unconscious, in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (Doubleday & Co.), p. 112.