Intertextuality: Readerly versus Writerly Texts
The following is from Kaja Silverman's Subject of Semiotics, chapter 6, "Re-Writing the Classic Text," which is devoted to explicating Roland Barthes's approach in his book S/Z to transforming a "readerly" text into a "writerly" text.
A readerly text "purports to be a transcript of a reality which pre-exists and exceeds" itself. Furthermore, the readerly text "tightly controls the play of signification by subordinating everything to this transcendental meaning" (242), that is, as McKee argues, a story is good (the aesthetic emotion readers experience is pleasurable) because all of its parts reflect a single controlling idea that "proves" itself against its counter idea.
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Controlling ideas and counter ideas participate both in symbolic codes (opposites) and cultural codes (often unquestioned cultural values that are reinforced in the text). The method here invites us to question the intertextual codes that often remain unquestioned, and in the process of the inquiry, to make them explicit. |
A readerly or classic text can be transformed into a writerly text because there are always surprising elements that challenge the "transcendental signified," (the main idea) or controlling value of the text (the combined controlling idea and counter idea). As Silverman defines it, the writerly text emerges at the site of the readerly text as if from an archeological dig, wherein the reader reveals "the terms of its own construction," terms which are rife with contradiction and filled with irreducible differences (246). Rather than a single unified controlling idea (transcendental signified), there are multitudes of controlling ideas or values struggling to assert themselves as meaningful approaches to the text. Your job in writing the third reading is to reveal this multiplicity of significations.
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Silverman claims that Roland Barthes' study of Balzac's "Sarrasine" succeeds in bringing together "an interpretive strategy which permits the reader (or viewer) to uncover the symbolic field inhabited by a given text, and to disclose the oppositions--sexual and other--which structure that field" (237).
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A symbolic field is constituted by opposites. For instance, what terms would be included as connotations of Robin Hood? Depending on who is regarding this character, he is a criminal or a hero. Then you can ask, what other characters/texts participate in this symbolic field? For instance, how about Batman? In a way, then, an intertextual precursor to Batman is Robin Hood. |
What gives us access to the symbolic field is discerning the connotative or polyvalent (many meanings) dimension of what are normally taken to be denotative or monovalent signs (see the discussion of the polyvalent versus/and monovalent register). In our everyday experience of reading a text, we do not articulate (theorize or make explicit) the connotative dimension of a text, because it is from a connotative dimension (our rhetorical stance--controlling value) that we read a text. To the degree that we remain unaware of the connotative dimension (the current background context) of a given text, to that degree we are locked into the position of a "consumer" of the text and its denotative (mimetic) meanings. The text then is what Barthes calls a "readerly" or classic text.
Barthes distinguishes five codes that serve as connections between texts: the semic, hermeneutic, proairetic, symbolic, and cultural. The first three (the semic, hermeneutic, and proairetic) are codes most conducive to close-reading generic patterns. Close-reading how a given text employs these codes promises to open up the connotative (the intertextual and polyvalent) dimensions of the text, which are called the symbolic and cultural codes. For, as Silverman argues, the presence of the codes within "one text involves a simultaneous reference to all of the other texts in which it appears, and to the cultural reality which it helps to define--i.e. to a particular symbolic order" (239).
Barthes claims that a series of five codes coexist within any given text, and that reading these codes allows the text to transform from a "readerly" text into a "writerly" one.
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[Barthes] defines the seme as a connotative signified, a device for delaying rather than facilitating the revelation of "truth." 255 So, as you read, pay close attention to those moments that you think about something beyond the meaning a word denotes. Being attentive to these moments will help reveal your own rhetorical stance (what you customarily project onto a text) and will help you to notice what is surprising in the text, which will then reveal connotative possibilities that challenge your rhetorical stance.
In the article "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community," James Porter explains that intertextuality reveals any given text to be composed of "traces" of other texts. Any given trace "iterates" elements of other texts and at the same time "presupposes" connotative meanings that are both symbolic and cultural. |
The Codes
Semic Code
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Defines characters, objects, and places through repetitively grouping a number of signifiers ("semes": words and phrases) around a proper name. Because this code defines characters, objects, and places, the semic code sets up relationships of power that often reinforce cultural codes. When characters, objects, or places break away from their expected performances (expectations fed by the semes), or there are surprising repetitions or patterns, those are locations to focus in on to conduct a close-reading.
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Proposes, maintains through numerous delays, and ultimately resolves enigmas. Barthes analyzes the hermeneutic code into ten parts that expand the semic code. All ten are not necessarily present:
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Proairetic Code
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This code determines the causal (cause and effect), narrative sequence and syntagmatic progression. This is the denotative, mimetic dimension of the text, wherein the reader encounters the juxtaposition of events, creates a connection between the two that is already presupposed in the unfolding action, which allows the reader to predict subsequent events that follow from their causes. This code also is a function of generic (that is, formal) conventions and the expectations they generate. When something in the narrative defies this code (like a deus ex machina), that unit of the narrative could serve as a site for close-reading.
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Symbolic Code
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Generates unresolvable oppositions (what are called "antitheses") that structure a given conflict, and ultimately reinforce dominant cultural codes (controlling values), for instance, between male and female subjects, between those who "know" and those who are ignorant, between those who suffer and those who inflict suffering, the rich and the poor, the clever and the stupid, the simple and the complex, the rule followers and the renegades, the responsible ones and the neer-do-wells, the cops and the robbers, etc. As you explore these polyvalent connotations, be on the lookout for ways to challenge the monovalent significance the text is designed to protect.
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Cultural Code
Ursula K. Le Guin examines the cultural codes at work in the genre of science fiction.
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Controls (via commonplace controlling values) all the other codes. Cultural codes "speak the familiar 'truths' of the existing cultural order, repeat what has 'always been already read, seen, done, experienced'" (Silverman 242).
Here are three cultural codes that might be considered the dominant controlling values that structure how the world shows up for us, as well as our roles within the occurring world:
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An example of a network of controlling values