In “The Reality Effect,” Barthes investigates the purpose of what we might today call “filler description” in literary fiction. By calling on passing details in a short story by Flaubert, he remarks that while these details may have some functional relevance with regard to a fiction’s characters or atmosphere, they’ve been overlooked in literary criticism because they don’t directly pertain to narrative structure. He goes on to explain that “insignificant notation” is detached from what we think of as narrative because it lacks a “predictive” quality. That means it isn’t temporal, or related to a chain of cause-and-effect that gives substance to a plot; it isn’t “significant” to this sort of contextual ordering that produces the legible “meaning” that de Saussure talked about with regard to language. Barthes then makes a brief foray into the aesthetic role of description and gives Flaubert some credit where it’s due: in his novel Madame Bovary, Flaubert “paints” his setting of the real-life town of Rouen not to capture it in its most empirically accurate state but to use it as a vessel for “the jewels of a rare number of metaphors,” and painstakingly revised his descriptions of the place simply to avoid the phonic repetitions he detested (144). He goes on to argue that–even while carefully crafted by the hand of an artist–Flaubert’s descriptions still lack meaning within the mechanism of narrative, and therefore fill a separate purpose even while being arbitrary. That’s all to say that these details are signs shed of what they would otherwise signify: they create the illusion of referencing something, but they surely don’t reference anything to do with plot. Standing “alone,” they have the effect of seeming “real,” just like rain hammering against your window on a Tuesday evening has no structural or symbolic meaning in your real life, it just “is.” Barthes makes the great point that harnessing mundane, random, but ultimately recognizable details is an important gesture in literary realism and part of a necessary breakthrough into that genre.

While Johnson doesn’t discuss Melville in terms of realism, I think “Melville’s Fist” makes for an interesting extension of what happens in fiction when the relationship between sign and the signified is complicated. As we discussed in class, the narrative structure of Billy Budd in fact hinges on the binary qualities of its characters being crisscrossed, the “tension between two incompatible possibilities,” the “polarizing gap between what was said and what was meant,” and that in the end maybe the late Melville was trying to draw our attention to the scrambled delineations of “difference between.” What Johnson seems to be getting at are the moral implications of reading, or judging, based on a simplified relationship between the sign and the signified (even if reversed in the Claggartian “ironic” way). Is that “insignificant notation” Barthes referred to–in which the sign is detached, points to nowhere, ultimately escaping judgment–another way of wielding ambiguity in fiction? Does Melville’s purgatorial use of ambiguity through Captain Vere, before the execution is finalized, create the “reality effect” in a story that would otherwise be allegorical and therefore plainly predictive? I don’t think they can be associated so simply, but reading Johnson has helped me rethink what the greater purpose of the “reality effect” might be. I’ve recently become very interested in what exactly makes a work of art (man-made, constructed, artificial by nature) feel “real,” I think especially in the context of virtual realities, the “deepfake,” the drive for immersion and roundabout ways of simulating whatever we want to think of now as “real life.” What is accomplished by getting at the “real” via the fictional or “fake”?

P.S. Sorry for the late-night post! Have been suffering at the hand of nyc housing applications, which I’ll say involves some concrete examples of the tension between two incompatible possibilities. (:

In her work, Melville’s Fist, Barbara Johnson winds up a classic American story and lets it totters off in new directions, playing with language and our concept of the role of characters in texts. Herman Melville’s Billy Budd reveals to us a few notable characters with apparently allegorical and archetypal roles that consumers of literature would quickly identify: Billy Budd, the innocent, naive, face-value do-gooder; John Claggart, the persnickety, paranoid villain; and Captain Vere, the trustworthy, mediating, authority figure. Johnson notes how masterfully Melville upends the perceptions of his cast through the prior two characters’ counter-intuitive actions. Billy, the beautiful and benevolent, kills while Claggart, the schemer, falls victim to an act of violence. Johnson describes this role reversal as a chiasmus, a crossing which breaks these two men into opposing functions. 

Farther along, Johnson expands this idea by explicating how the characters read their setting, circumstances, and each other. She writes, “It seems evidence that Billy’s reading method consists in taking everything at face value, while Claggart’s consists in seeing a mantrap under every daisy” (2330). They have a set intention, a kind of worldview that they purport to use as a lens by which to make meaning of their lives. Johnson notes that despite their own value systems and intentions, both the naive Billy and the contrarian Claggart act, think, and speak in ways that show their limited cohesion and consistency to their reading styles. Billy does not, indeed, take everything at face value, and Claggart maintains a bias – without critiquing or challenging the signs –  towards anything that fits his perception of treachery around every corner. There is a slippery nature to how they interpret the signs around them. They bring their own inconsistencies, multiplicity of logics, and human error to each reading of each other and life aboard the Bellipotent.

Vere, for Johnson, represents a third type of reader who takes into account the political and historical context as well as reads and speaks in an active performative manner distinct of the other characters. She postulates, “Vere, on the other hand, interrogates both past and future for interpretative guidance. While Budd and Claggart thus oppose each other directly, without regard for circumstance or consequence, Vere reads solely in function of the attending historical situation: the…mutinies (2332). He peruses not only the frames of mind and perspectives of the two antagonistic forces but also mulls over meaning within time and space – reading in a multidimensional way, as it were. Johnson aptly addresses how Vere’s poring over the situation in judgment also includes an introspective reading of self and how his interpretative performance will be received and subsequently interpreted itself. The layers pile on. As she explores Billy Budd beyond the limits of allegory and simple significations, meaning and language become playthings for Johnson. Rather than coloring within the lines and parsing out binaries such as knowing vs doing performance vs cognition, Johnson plays with the text and imagines the “deadly space” as “that which, within cognition, functions as an act …that which, within action, prevents us from ever knowing whether what we hit coincides with what we understand” (2337). The center of the issue evades and yet within this interior vacuum, rather than the supposed opposing boundaries, there remains a multiplicity of readings and meanings.

Johnson’s whimsy with reading characters as readers themselves is a pleasant and expansive twist that destabilizes limiting understandings of a two-dimensional fashion. This advent with the play of subject and object, language and the looseness of signs, signifiers, and signified, can be amplified further with a play in a different direction – that of the readers as characters, themselves acting, performing within a text. Just as Vere brings a wide context of the sociopolitical atmosphere with his reading, we flesh and blood readers enter the world of Billy Budd and Melville’s Fist with our own lived contexts and outer-world understandings. The physical scribblings on the pages of each work fail to become a text, and thus their characters, readers (or anything/anyone else), until the reader incarnates into said text. How could the meanings of the actions, speech, and personalities of the characters be altered through the interrelationship between each of them and each reader? How do sign, signified, signifier, and the space between and among and outside and inside and through each of these become infleshed and defleshed with each individual reader (and each reading done by one individual)? How can a text be further wound up and unleashed in new, undetermined, unpredictable directions? What are the limits between the “reality” within a work, the reality of the outside readers, and the multiple realities bridging and spinning between them? Just as Vere’s judgment, the act of speak-reading is, in turn, judged and read; perhaps there is some dynamism, reciprocity, and troubling of identifiers between characters as readers and us readers as characters as well.

In Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” he discusses the problem of the “center” in structuralist thinking and how despite the fact that structuralists look to this center for stability and organization, it does not even really exist due to the fact that meaning is fluid and shifting and the center can never be unchanging; it is arbitrary. In his critique of Levi-Strauss, Deridda notes that Levi-Strauss frames incest prohibition as a universal structure that is necessary for the functioning of society. He says that it is a foundational rule that structures kinship and social organization. Deridda argues that that incest taboo cannot be universally structured or fixed since ‘universal truths’ are ever-changing and involve the play of difference and interpretation. I may be over-simplifying or misunderstanding Deridda’s point here, but as I was reading I couldn’t help but think to myself, isn’t incest universally structured in terms of it’s right or it’s wrong?

I had a hard time understanding why Deridda uses this as an example since it does seem to me like a structure that either is or is not. Another example besides incest prohibition I was thinking about were the justice system / morality / laws. To me, this seems like an example that would better fit Deridda’s point: these are structures that are complicated and nuanced in relation to the fact that they are ever-changing, vary from one social structure to another, and have fluidity in terms of cultural norms and meanings. If I were to find some sort of answer to this query in Deridda’s work, he says “It could perhaps be said that the whole of philosophical conceptualization, which is systematic with the nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes this conceptualization possible: the origin of the prohibition of incest” (283-284). My understanding of this notion is that the nature/culture opposition is structured in such a way that it makes certain ideas ‘unthinkable’ such as the origin of the prohibition of incest. The actual original creation of this law or rule that prohibits incest is not something that is thought about, when really it is essential to understanding how the system functions.

I wonder how knowing a system or structure’s origin makes it more ‘thinkable?’ If Deridda is suggesting that structures are fluid and constantly changing, then wouldn’t knowing a structure’s origin be a moot point? In other words, if we take the example of the judicial system, wouldn’t the most recent law established or the most recent changing to a law be the most prevalent to a society or culture rather than the origin of that law? Deridda notes that once Levi-Strauss confronts the implications of the universality of the incest taboo, he has two possible paths. The one he says Levi-Strauss more so takes is that he acknowledges these discoveries but places no real ‘truth value’ on them. He says that Levi-Strauss conserves these older concepts “…within the domain of empirical discovery while here and there denouncing their limits, treating them as tools which can still be used. No longer is any truth value attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments appear more useful” (284). I struggle to grasp why Derrida believes this path is so wrong. If Derrida thinks that structure is unfixed, unstable, and always open to interpretation and meaning, how can any structure or system have any truth value? Shouldn’t he be celebrating the ability to abandon one meaning to move on to another more ‘useful’ one? Or is Derrida insinuating that it is impossible to attribute new meanings to structures without having a fixed point, or origin to jump off of?

In the two Mythologies we read by Roland Barthes, what stood out, after the class discussion, was the difference between the Structuralist approach in “ The World of Wrestling” and the Post-Structuralist approach he takes in “The Eiffel Tower” and in the differences there arises the temporal nature of signs that Culler writes of in regards to Saussure.  In class, it was noted that in “The World of Wrestling” one is left with a sense of Barthes’s ability to “exhaust” wrestling, analyze it to a form of completion and show how as a sign system it is complete as well. The analysis then is not temporal, but only of the spectacle itself as Barthes writes of it. He writes that of the audience in wrestling “what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees (13).”  There is the theatrical element in wrestling, each wrestler conforms to an expectation through their signification. “The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight (16).”  Then, as in the real world, suffering, defeat, and justice are contained and shown to the audience through a match (17). And what Barthes concludes is that wrestling makes reality intelligible, writing “What is portrayed in wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before a panoramic view of the univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction (23).”  Thus Wrestling is a way of giving the viewer a sign system that is completely intelligible, and not muddled, so the structure of wrestling is a truth, or I think this is what Barthes is getting at, and that there is a notion that there are sign systems that are completely understandable and reveal an idyllic, simplified version of “reality” for which the viewer can then use to understand an external reality that is not wrestling.

So in the later Mythology of the Eiffel Tower, Barthes moves away from the concreteness of the structuralist sign toward the emptiness of the post-structuralist one, I think.  Barthes writes, “This pure—virtually empty—sign—is ineluctable, because it means everything.”  This moves away from the concreteness which he posited for wrestling. In the vagueness of the Eiffel Tower then, as a sign, it can come to inhabit so much in the minds of those who think of it, who see it, who think of Paris and who visit the Tower. Similarly, it encompasses both ideas of “seeing” and “being seen” as one can view it from Paris and view Paris from it as it recedes from view. This then allows Barthes to argue that:

“This radiant position in the order of perception gives it a prodigious propensity to meaning: the Tower attracts meaning, the way a lighting rod attracts thunderbolts; for all lovers of signification, it plays a glamorous part, that of pure signifier, i.e., of a form in which men unceasingly put meaning (which they extract at will from their knowledge, their dreams, their history), without this meaning thereby ever being finite and fixed: who can say what the tower will be for humanity tomorrow? But there can be no doubt it will always be something, and something of humanity itself (5).”   

In this turn from the signs and signified in wrestling, which told the spectator how to read reality through wrestling into tidy conclusions, we get the post structural sign, a sign in which the viewer then assigns meaning to the sign and over time those meanings will and can shift, for example the signification of modernity. It is harder to see the tower now, I would argue, as a sign of modernity when we have reached the moon and built buildings like the Burj Khalifa, yet the tower still means something today to those who see it and think of Paris, as Barthes notes. I think this is the main difference between these two mythologies. The shift from concreteness to arbitrariness of signs.

The idea of signs in language over time was also mentioned in the Culler piece on de Saussure in reference to Synchronic and Diachronic perspectives (45-47).  Synchronic being the study of language at a singular moment and Diachronic being the study “of its evolution over time (45).”  Saussure opted for the synchronic study “because language is a wholly historical entity, always open to change, [so] one must focus on the relations that exist in a particular synchronic state if one is to define its elements (47).”  As Barthes uses the methodology of Saussure the Eiffel Tower mythology becomes more complex when one asks how to approach a sign over time.  I would argue that the Post-Structuralist sign, since arbitrary and meaningless, allows for the sign to shift in so many ways, that it becomes unstable, just as the Eiffel Tower is. So my question then is was part of the shift from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism in how to see a sign? Or a combination of seeing with the mass influx of signs in the then modern world? Perhaps in the modern world, the signs worth “mythologizing” are ones that somehow have persevered that transition from more concrete to arbitrary. In my head I am thinking something like a color, from Melville’s chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.  They expand over time, just as Barthes claims the Eiffel Tower will as well.  Also there is an essayist Eliot Weinberger who has an essay on “The Vortex” whose image and meaning he traces over time and cultures weaving from India to the Aztecs to Ezra Pound.  What then complicates the sign in this sense, in my head at least, is how to write and study one in a realm where there is this sense of “pure signifiers” that then can branch off in any which way as any person assigns some meaning to these “pure signifiers?”  Or perhaps Barthes achieves such a intelligible study of the Tower by looking at what gives it this ability to be a pure signifier as opposed to what all of its significations are. In this case, it would be interesting to see what would happen to wrestling when viewed in this way. Perhaps the viewers don’t leave necessarily with a sense of understanding, but wrestling signifies something else culturally, and viewers can apply what they want to the theatrics they witness?    

Roland Barthes shatters traditional literary interpretation, where meaning originated from the author but was constructed by the reader. In the section, The Death of the Author, Roland states, “As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intranstively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, the disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.” (page 1268) He opens allusion with this denial of the author’s meaning within a text. He reinforces this by declaring, “but there is one place where his multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.” (page 1271) The end of such a monstrosity makes the not ridiculously solitary authoritative interpretation.

In Mythologies, Barthes extends this claim to the mass culture, offering semiotic analysis on the latter. Professional wrestling, instead of being an authentic sport, is dismissed as a symbolic performance since “he combines a sharp eye for the social life of signs with a subtle critque of the naturalizations of the ethnocentric, patriarchal, petit-bourgeois French worldview”. (page 1263) His analysis of Paris Match includes a critique of how the media creates myths to sustain the ideologies of those already dominant. For example, the image of a diverse group of people smiling together in an ad for a company give the illusion of inclusivity while overlooking the company’s history of unfair labor practices or lack of diversity in higher positions.

His theories form the foundation for all literary and cultural studies, impacting reader-response criticism, semiotics, and media analysis. The authority of texts and cultural symbols is thus reframed in accordance with the shifting authority from the author.