The Space Between

Barthes’ Influence

The reader’s freedom can never be absolute. Hypertext does not free readers from all authorial intention. In practice, hypertext simply entangles the reader in a new set of nets “of a different order” (Tuman 60), and it provides a chance for readers to see, as Laura Mandell writes, that authorship

is not, or not only, a matter of plumbing the depths of one’s soul, but rather that it is fundamentally intertextual: it makes tangible in the reading process the fact that authors gaze not off into space but into open books scattered around their work space, or appearing on multiple windows or screens (212)

Writing is a kind of seduction, a deal between the reader and the author in which the reader attempts to get to know the author and vice versa. The reader, of course, seeks to understand what the author has written, but the author’s seduction still comes through. The reader is held in a trance by the author’s power to weave a narrative, but as in the novella “Sarrasine,” which Barthes makes an example of in S/Z, and as Barbara Johnson points out in her careful reading of Barthes, readers can and do resist the author’s seduction.

Referring to the unique structure of S/Z, Johnson writes that the “purpose of these cuts and codes is to pluralize the reader’s intake, to effect a resistance to the reader’s desire to restructure the text into large, ordered masses of meaning” (4). S/Z reades “Sarrasine” out of order, along a series of codes and themes that Barthes establishes for this particular reading. This reordering not only explores the power—or ineptitude—of authorial intent, but it also demonstrates Barthes’ reading power. He attempts to demolish the power the author holds over the text by refusing to blindly follow the narrative and lose himself in it. His apporopriation of “Sarrasine” displays the characteristics of a hypertextual reading, including his acute awareness of the medium and of his position, as reader, relative to the text.

Barthes’ hypertextual reading fulfills what he sees as the goal of a literary work: “to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (Barthes 4). He goes on:

Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader. (4)

Barthes says texts which exist only to be read—where the act of reading is nothing more than a “referendum” that decides whether the text’s ideas are rejected or accepted—are “readerly” texts. The opposite, “writerly” texts, are “ourselves writing,” before any ideologies or organizing systems are applied to that writing. The writerly text is always present, always an action performed, and it always has a “plurality of entrances” (5) that the reader can find. To interpret a writerly text is to recognize its inherent plurality (5).

Barthes acknowledges some tension between denotation and connotation. Polyvocal texts, texts in which more than one voice seem to speak, follow the path of connotation by acknowledging the existence of multiple, coexisting meanings. The univocal text relies on denotation, supporting one privileged meaning or definition (7). Connotation articulates “a voice which is woven into the text,” which corrupts the “purity of communication” by offering relationships within the text that do not necessarily correspond to authorial intent. Denotation, on the other hand, represents the innocence of readerly texts, a fundamental faith in the sentence as communicator of truth and simplicity (9).

But writing and language are far from simple, and Barthes’ language in S/Z is ideal for describing the Web, which is reflected by the number of critics who quote him. One passage that gets the scholarly treatment often is this one:

In this ideal text, the network are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminate (meaning here is never subject to a principle of determination, unless by throwing dice); the systems of meaning can never take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language. (Barthes 5-6)

When considered as one very large hypertext, the Web displays the plurality Barthes describes. The Web has no natural linearity. Though individual pages and sites are authored and coded, no one sets the reading order. Readers “enter” the Web through any number of “doorways.” Each page that makes up the Web can in fact be an entry point. From there, readers progress along unique reading paths each time they log on.