"'Oh, you fashion me to your own taste. What tyranny! You don't want me for myself!'" (233). These lines struck me as the perfect rendering of how we always read/see - and, in a way, unavoidably so. While Barthes may deem it hermeneutical analysis, defining pieces of text with the aid of 5 self-structured codes, he is (cognizantly, I think) fashioning the text according to his own taste. If Barthes were to repeat his project, breaking the text into pieces different than that of his first analysis, wouldn't he come up with an entirely different explication? While some of the code-assignments would likely remain the same, others would change, showing the ultimate mutability of the text as twisted, tyrannized, and fashioned to fit the reader's taste. While I, alas, do not put myself (or a reader)through the tortuous process of inscribing every permutation of my understanding and fashioning of the text, I know without a doubt that it is occurring with every line I read as I make personal associations, see the words through a psychoanalytic lens, through the haze of too little sleep, caffeine, and sugar, etc.....

Another fascinating passage is where Barthes states, "Mediation upsets the rhetorical - or paradigmatic - harmony of the Antithesis (AB/A/B/AB) and this difficulty arises not out of a lack but out of an excess: there is one element in excess and this untoward supplement is the body (of the narrator)....It is by way of this excess which enters the discourse after rhetoric has properly saturated it that something can be told and the narrative begin" (28). I have never ever contemplated the role of the "body" of the narrator in reading or creating, I guess always apprehending it as some detached voice making the story "make sense", the tailor of the fabrications (similar to my never really thinking about the glue that binds the pages in the book, also providing order and sense). So when Barthes said this, it made me stop and think about how the narrator does fill this fascinating role - at one time supporting and underscoring the Symbolic structure of the text, while at the same time serving as the Real, with its consequent rupture of the Symbolic order. I think the more I try to make sense of this, the less I am doing so, so I'm going to stop now....

~ Cassie