Barthes’S/Z is like a rock wall, the surface of which I scour for cracks and handholds that will support exploration. But either because my powers of penetration aren’t deep enough, or because Barthes’ regal prose is too inviolable, I make little progress in the climb.
I read “Sarrasine” first, the narrative text a palimpsest to the deconstructed. This only heightened the alienation I felt when confronted by Barthes’ application of his coding to the story. His approach seems very different from Gadamer’s; Barthes’ use of the scientific, the classificatory, to interpret the plurality of a text is far removed from the transcendent, life-altering encounter with a work of art Gadamer described. The codes and stars in S/Z were roadblocks to my reading, closing each path in the text as it opened. Perhaps this radically systematized approach was once necessary to make clear what I think we now take for granted—the multi-valenced nature of virtually any text that qualifies as literary; today, to me, S/Z is an impressionistic account of what interpreting a text (writing it as the reader) could mean, rather than a model for how to read.
—Ann