ABSTRACT
Although structuralists of all persuasions would argue that reading is a structuring activity and that one should study the processes by which meaning is produced, many would challenge the view of structuralism presented in Part Two of this book. They might particularly wish to oppose the notion that reading should be studied as a rule-governed process or as the expression of a kind of ‘literary competence’. For the theorists associated with the review Tel Quel, the programme which I have presented might seem an ideological emasculation of all that was vital and radical in structuralism: an attempt to make it an analytical discipline which studies and describes the status quo instead of an active
force which frees semiotic practices from the ideology that holds them in check. Their argument might run as follows:
The claim would be that the kind of poetics which Barthes proposed in Critique et vérité – an analysis of the intelligibility of works, of the logic by which acceptable meanings are produced – has been rejected or transcended in favour of a more ‘open’ approach which stresses the creative freedom of both writer and reader. Speaking of a change in structuralism, which in his own work corresponds to the passage from ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’ (1966) to S/Z (1970), Barthes notes that
The argument is a curious one because it so closely resembles, given a difference in terminology, the attacks on structuralism from more traditional quarters. Those who oppose the idea of poetics do so in the name of the uniqueness of every literary work and the critical impoverishment that results from thinking of it as an instance of the literary system: the heterogeneity of readers and works, the possibilities of literary innovation, prevent one from encompassing in a single theory the forms of literature and the meanings it can produce. No science can exhaust the modalities of creative genius.
