Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 73.
19. Ibid.
io8
C O N C E P T S
not that some writings would be one and some the other, though obvi
ously jeunes chercheurs would find it more interesting to argue that writ
ings celebrated as oeuvres should really be treated as texts rather than to
continue to treat them as oeuvres. And note that within this perspective
the idea o f text could be charged with all the radical potential that Barthes
wants to give it. The claim would be that we should stop reading books in
relation to the idea o f l ’œuvre and conceive o f them according to this im
possible model o f le texte.
Alternatively, œuvre and texte could be two different classes o f objects
(roughly the traditional and the avant-garde). Barthes rejects this concep
tion more vigorously than the first sort, perhaps because this is what it
is easiest to understand him to be saying: avant-garde products are radi
cal, disruptive, indeterminate, good, and thus merit the appellation texte,
whereas traditional ones do not, though some o f them have some textual
good in them. When Barthes insists that lots o f contemporary writing is in
fact nothing but œuvres, not texte, it certainly strengthens the idea that this
is above all an honorific distinction.
The problem here is one that runs through Barthes’ book SIZ, with
its analogous distinction between le lisible, “the readerly,” and le scriptible,
“the writerly,” which Barthes will not let us take either as two types o f writ
ing or as two ways o f thinking o f writing. But in SIZ this constitutes an
interesting paradox in the methodological framework o f his engagement
with Balzac’s novella; one that enriches the book and illuminates some of
the paradoxes o f critical procedures generally, as when the supposed refusal
o f interpretation becomes an interpretation. But in “ From Work to Text,”
a brief expository essay that does nothing other than propose to illuminate
a methodological framework, the indeterminate character o f this opposi
tion becomes an unavoidable problem, not to say methodological incoher
ence. While opposing work and text, Barthes refuses to let text and work
be concepts that operate at the same level or in the same way.
One consequence o f this is that while Barthes’ account o f the distinc
tions helps students find du Texte in older works, it does not help much
for dealing with avant-garde works, which always fall short o f the radical
ideal and which are not much illuminated by accounts showing them to
fall short. His insistence that the move to text is not just a methodologi
cal shift but that there are indeed works (which sometimes contain du
texte) makes the idea o f the text seem something o f a fetish, an ideal object
so radical and disruptive that no actual discourse is adequate to the idea
(while o f course works really do exist). The asymmetry helps animate the
classic texts, in which one finds du moderne, but does not provide a good
framework for dealing with the texts on which Barthes’ scheme claims to
set highest value. The best rationale for Barthes’ asymmetrical opposition,
in fact, is that by valorizing text it functions above all to enable critics to
approach classic oeuvres in a new way, which rescues them from monu-
mentalization, releases various sorts o f intertextual and semiotic energies,
and generally revitalizes the study o f what Barthes later admitted was his
first love, French literature o f the nineteenth cen tu ry.A n d in this context
the fact that text is valued so highly that actual avant-garde works fail to ac
cede to the condition o f text prevents this opposition from working to val
ue contemporary, experimental works over the great writings o f the past.
Is short, the practical results o f Barthes’ asymmetrical opposition
may be quite admirable, but as a theoretical, methodological claim it cre
ates difficulties. The concept o f text that he develops might function well
in a univocal model, where we now read works as texts, but he insists on
maintaining the binary model where there are still works. Barthes’ essay
thus seems to undermine the idea o f text that it claims to advance and that
it presents so vividly.
One way to take Barthes’ essay is to try to reduce the asymmetry of
the concepts o f work and text and to note that each is a model, a concep
tion o f how things might in principle function. It is important to remem
ber that the idea o f the work as the realization o f an authorial intention
and as an organic whole is also something o f an impossible ideal, and thus
a goal o f analysis, so that it may function symmetrically to that Barthesean
ideal o f the text that is systematically set against it.^'
Barthes’ essay is, perhaps unfortunately, the most celebrated piece on
20. See Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 106-7.
21. Interestingly, Jacques Derrida develops the idea of oeuvre in two essays,
“Typewriter Ribbon” and “The University Without Condition,” in Without Alibi,
ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 133,
217. Oeuvres are signed, are products of an author, and are cut off from context in
Kantian fashion, but the oeuvre also cuts. See Peggy Kamuf, “Introduction: Event
of Resistance,” in Without Alibi, 17-22.
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