[Shower Thoughts] - [Thoughts] - [Shower] = [Barthes] · 3:54am Oct 8th, 2017
I've spent an hour now trying to write about Barthes.
It is five in the morning, and I have tried very hard to write about Barthes.
I am done trying to write about Barthes, and I am now writing about Barthes, except I am done editing or planning or abusing my backspace key. I am going to write about Barthes, so help me, because I have thoughts. I have thoughts that I care about and want to get out of my head. Out of my head means onto paper. Internet paper.
Roland Barthes was a french literary theorist of the past century who, in the one of his articles that I read, suggested that there was a divide between "readerly" and "writerly" texts. The article was called S/Z. This is a very silly name for an article about anything, but in his defence, he was French.
A "readerly" text is one where we understand all that is signified by the signifiers, which is fancy talk for words meaning what you think they mean. The word "apple" refers to the known quantity of a usually red, green or yellow fruit. This is not to say that it has to be a simple text, nor does it mean that metanarratives (stories about telling stories) or otherwise self-aware texts aren't "readerly", but a readerly text is one where you can understand the narrative based on its words. My way of putting it: A machine would theoretically be able to answer the question “what was the text about?”
The rarer variant is the “writerly” text. They aren’t necessarily only metanarratives, but they resist an easy reading. This means more than that it requires effort on the part of the reader. It's not just a difficult text. A writerly text requires the reader to complete it. If a readerly text is a glass full of lemonade, the writerly text is lemonade powder. You pour yourself into it to make lemonade.
The glass of a readerly text is already full. The meanings are laid out for you, and there is no room for the "you" that is the secret ingredient to a writerly text.
An obvious example of a writerly text is a crazy-ass book like Nabokov’s Pale Fire. It contains at the very least four different narratives, and every time you decide what you think the book is really about, the book resists you and says “no, try again”. That the subject is the reader/writer relationship makes everything even more confusing.
TL;DR: It's "so meta", and then some.
Many will say Pale Fire is an excellent example of a writerly text. Unlike most books, they will say Pale Fire demands that the reader enters the book and does active work in completing the narrative. You even have to make decisions and disregard parts of the book, and that qualifies it for Barthes' "writerly" texts.
That's my understanding of a half-forgotten article by Barthes. Still with me? Ready for me to make my "point"? I think you'll be disappointed. I don't have a rebuttal. I know better than to try to pick a fight with big names within the field. Even I lack the ego for that.
My point is simple. I feel inspired yet insulted, because I don't understand where one can find a truly readerly text.
What kind of reader can approach a text without entering into it? I don't see how you read a text without being yourself. I don't see how you separate yourself from your reading experience and read something like a blank non-person.
I also don't see what kind of writer can produce a text that does not have enough space between its words to support a pluralistic reading. I don't understand how anyone can believe any set of words can be unambiguous. I don't see how a writer can think that any narrative is ever only a single narrative to the determined reader.
Barthes likely did not mean to suggest so sharp a divide between the "readerly" and the "writerly". Likely, he does this for the sake of conversation, and I've taken the bait, egged on by the same part of my brain that frowns at the word "literature" as anything other than a subjective quality marker. I get upset about "literature". I get aggressive when people get snooty about words and narratives, so... fine. I'll chew and swallow this bait.
If anyone here has read Barthes' stuff even once, you will no doubt perceive this like a drunken rant culminating in thoughts as profound as "but... humans have five fingers, but also five toes, am I the only one who noticed?!" All this stuff is probably pretty obvious, but yo, Barthes? I mildly disagree in my sleep-deprived stupor.
Only until the Drain Monster strikes.
A readerly/writerly spectrum perhaps? 1-10 scale less to more writerly.
Are there any books most people have read that are a five?
I've read some readerly books tho. As much as they get anyway. "Bully. Hate." "Girl. Love." "Evil. Destroy." That kind of stuff but even in that I'm speculating on what I'm not seeing. Fun stuff tho.
Heh, if I understand you right, this reminds me of people who claim to give an 'unbiased' opinion. Or the divide between ethics in a bubble, and ethics based on how, where, and who you grew up with. I can't really see any of them existing without a bias personally. Humans are biased, and if a human looks to make something without bias, well, it won't work, because they have a lifetime of thoughts, facts, and personal conscious and unconscious beliefs attached to them.
To read a story without assumptions, expectations, or going by past experience sounds...impossible to me. A book that makes you think one thing and then throws you for a loop makes sense, almost sounds more like a mystery novel to me that never reveals the killer, but I may be misunderstanding due to never having read Pale Fire.
So... when life gives you yourself, make lemonade out of powdered books? c.c
4690852 I've done some research, and my current theory is that humans in fact have ten fingers and ten toes.
Until the Drain Monster strikes, of course. Have to make provisions for that, as you so wisely say.
4690916 A scale makes for a far less engaging discussion on the topic, I guess. My takeaway from Barthes is mostly that the reader should be aware of these qualities in a text. In a very conservative reading of Barthes, the only truly readerly texts are self-aware texts with multiple layers, such as Pale Fire, Breakfast of Champions and such.
4690985 If Barthes is read in the strictest sense, the answer is "no, it's not like that at all"—it's about self-awareness and metanarrative functions. At the same time, in the last serious discussion I had on S/Z, we pretty much agreed that a big part of it is the existence of a subjective self, and how it interacts with a text that allows for this. In that sense, it absolutely is like this ridiculous idea of objective critique/unbiased reviews.
That said, Pale Fire can't really be compared to a mystery novel unless you implicate yourself as a possible culprit. It is a text with narrator interpreting a text within the text, explaining how this text is allegedly inspired by his life, claiming ownership of this text, while also explaining how he is not who he seems to be. The book talks about the relationship between reader and text, while also investigating it both from a reader-author perspective, as well as reader-narrator and narrator-author, though to a less obvious degree than something sillier like Breakfast of Champions.
I'll probably get a lot of crap for reducing this grand work of genius to a paragraph's crummy explanation, but yeah, that's why it's a classical example of a readerly text. It brings the reader face to face with their role as a reader.
Bleugh. It's morning and my appetite for thinking about this has passed. I'm going back to writing ponies now.
4691085 Quite frankly, in my waking, sober hours, that is as much wisdom as I could ever hope to extract from this myself. I'm gonna write pony fanfic instead of having lemonade though.
For the record, the metaphor works so much better in my native language.
4691121
...You mean to tell me your native language isn't English? <.< I am astounded, sir.
4691144 I appreciate it as a compliment, I think, but no. A different branch of the Germanic languages entirely.
4691200
Well, not so far removed, then. :B
4691144
I'll take "Things Present Perfect Knew 4 years ago, but forgot" for 200, Alex.
This "rant" makes more sense than I was lead to believe it would. And it is, I suspect, far less controversial an opinion than it seems you've made it out to be. You're right, of course, that a reader has to put themselves into any narrative to get anything more than facts from it. I suspect that, like the whole Kinsey scale thing, stories exist on a spectrum from "everything is what it is and nothing is deeper" and "here are words, assemble at your own convince." I know I have at least tried to make something that I suspect would fall further towards the writerly side of things than the average work. But I'm not sure exactly where a line could be drawn. The example you give (I've never heard of, let alone read it, sounds like a gigantic troll to be honest. If you must go at the story with a red pen, removing parts of it to make sense of it, was it ever a coherent story, or was it just parts of different ones thrown into a blender with a bucket of glue?
Well, that is my quote of philosophy met for tonight. I'm off to do something very unambiguous and logical. Preferable with some sort of fitness function I can maximize to prove myself objectively correct :P
4691749
Knowing things for 4 years is not on my character sheet. :B
Categorizing works of art is generally about drawing artificially distinct lines on a spectrum. Much like classifying anything organic.
That said Barthes probably means "readerly" texts take very little putting your own spin on things, rather than none of that at all.
4691749 It's a trap, though. Barthes' arguments aren't that simple. This is just me making them simple, likening them to simpler and more modern ways of thinking about this as obvious, because reader engagement with texts has been transformed exactly through postmodernist trends that Barthes was instrumental in discussing. I think my prof would give me her :|-face if she read this, because while I think she would agree, it's jumping to the answer without acknowledging the process of finding that answer.
The last one hundred years have completely changed how literature is viewed, how characters are written (modernism) and how readers, authors and characters engage with each other (postmodernism). I'm not disagreeing with Barthes, not really. We're all sitting here in a post-Barthes world saying the stuff he said is obvious, when he's one of those who made it obvious for us to understand thus.
4692201 As per my reply to Kits above, the existence of this as a spectrum is not obvious. Barthes' texts are mostly over fifty years old, and my mistake was bringing this up without making that clear. This isn't new wisdom, it's like... acknowledging these past arguments that brought us here.
4693408
Eh, the existence of a spectrum is obvious from my experiences with people trying to classify things like animals (Platypus-- mammal or bird?) and genres (which are stupid and artificial and yet sometimes useful), rather than any actual study of literature theory (which I have not done). Human endeavors generally fall on spectrums as does everything else that arises organically. That said, I can't deny the possibility I've picked up something by osmosis. Influential thinkers cast long, deep shadows that entangle their influence in ways that are hard to pick up on.