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Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3304 Notes 10B

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ROLAND BARTHES “THE REALITY EFFECT” (1968) Barthes, Roland. "The Reality Effect." The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. 141-148. As a Structuralist, Barthes’ interest in such essays as “The Structural Analysis of Narrative” is in tracing the structure of prose narratives. Prose narrative is treated as if it were an extended sentence to which the syntactic categories comprising a sentence are then applied. Of particular interest for Structuralists (or, more accurately, narratologists), therefore, is the syntagmatic axis of a given literary text. What arouses Barthes’s interest here, however, is the presence of descriptive details in writers like Flaubert and Michelet (what he calls “notations” [141]) for which “structural analysis, occupied as it is with identifying and systematising the major articulations of narrative, usually and heretofore has left out, either because its inventory omits all details that are ‘superfluous’ (in relation to structure) of because these details are treated as ‘filling’ (catalyses)” (141), whose only function is to “constitute some index of character or atmosphere” (141). If, however, “analysis seeks to be exhaustive . . ., if it seeks to encompass the absolute detail, the indivisible unity . . . in order to assign them a place in the structure, it inevitably encounters notations which no function” (141) and which seem to “correspond to a kind of narrative luxury, lavish to the point of offering many futile details” (141). “Insignificant notation” (142), that is, those elements ‘apparently detached from the narrative’s semiotic structure” (142), is “related to description” (142). Even if the object in question, for example, Flaubert’s barometer, “seems to be denoted by a single word . . . it is [in fact] located . . . in a syntagm at once referential and syntactic” (142). The “general structure of narrative, at least as it has been occasionally analysed till now, appears as essentially predictive; schematizing to the extreme, and without taking into account numerous detours, delays, reversals, and disappointments which narrative institutionally imposes upon this schema” (142). By contrast, description performs no such predictive function: it is in fact “purely summatory” (143). It is justified by “no finality of action” (143). In other words, what this emphasises is that in descriptive interludes, it is the paradigmatic axis which comes to the fore, that is, it is the relationship between the text and the world it seeks to signify which becomes important. (His use of the word ‘referential’ here does not imply that he disagrees with Saussure’s critique of referential models of language. He uses it rather, to denote that axis of language, the paradigmatic, which signifies the Real and which functions even in the less descriptive and more predictive segments of the narrative.) In other words, both axes, the paradigmatic (or as Jakobson would term it, the metaphoric) and syntagmatic, are at work in any narrative and one would do well not to ignore the former. The “singularity of description” (143), its “isolated situation” (143), raises the following question: “Is everything in narrative significant, and if not, what is ultimately, so to speak, the significance of this insignificance?” (143). In “Rhetoric” (143), there has long been a concern with offering descriptions of the beautiful: “description has long had an aesthetic function” (143). The term for this is the “epideictic, a ceremonial discourse intended to excite the admiration of the audience” (143). A related term is “ecphrasis, the detachable set piece . . . whose object was to describe places, time, people, or works of art” (143). In the Middle Ages, description is “constrained by no realism; its truth is unimportant . . .; there is no hesitation to put lions or olive trees in a northern country; only the constraint of the descriptive genre counts; plausibility is not referential here but openly discursive” (144). This is also visible in Flaubert where the “aesthetic purpose of description is still very strong” (144). This is particularly true of his description of Rouen (“a real referent if ever

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there was one” [144]) in one of his novels which is, as Barthes puts it, “subjected to the tyrannical constraints of what we must call aesthetic verisimilitude” (137). The object of description itself, Rouen, changes little despite the fact that Flaubert rewrote the passage six times, corrections which “do not in any way issue from a closer consideration of the model” (144). What is far more important in Flaubert’s description than approximation of the object per se is the “rules of le beau style” (144): Rouen is “in fact only a sort of setting meant to receive the jewels of a number of rare metaphors” (144). It is as if “Rouen were notable only by its substitutions (‘the masts like a forest of needles, the islands like huge motionless black fish, the clouds like aerial waves silently breaking against a cliff’)” (144). That is, Rouen itself is almost lost in the multitude of comparisons which Flaubert uses to signify it, that is, to render a particular impression of the place. Barthes’s point in all this is that this description of Rouen is perfectly “justified, if not by the work’s logic, at least by the laws of literature: its ‘meaning’ exists, it depends on conformity not to the model but to the cultural rules of representation” (145). The aesthetic imperative is balanced, however, by what Barthes terms “‘realistic’ imperatives” (145), that is, by “referential constraints” (138) so that it appears as if the “referent’s exactitude, superior or indifferent to any other function, governed and alone justified its description” (145). This mixture – this interweaving – of constraints has a double advantage” (145), one functioning to temper the opposing tendency, the aesthetic to safeguard against the “vertigo of notation” (145) (what another translator renders as a “downward spiral into endless detail”), the referential lest “realistic description” (145) be “reduced to fantasmatic activity (a precaution which was supposed necessary to the ‘objectivity’ of the account” (145). These “irreducible residues of functional analysis” (146) all “denote what is what is ordinarily called ‘concrete reality’ (insignificant gestures, transitory attitudes, insignificant objects, redundant words)” (146) in an effort to render a “pure and simple ‘representation’ of the ‘real’, the naked account of ‘what is’ (or has been)” (146). It “appears as resistance to meaning” (146), confirming the “great mythic opposition of the trueto-life (the lifelike) and the intelligible” (146). In the “ideology of our time, obsessive reference to the ‘concrete’ . . . is always brandished like a weapon against meaning” (146). This “same ‘reality’ becomes the essential reference in historical narrative, which is supposed to report ‘what really happened’” (146). The “nonfunctionality of a detail” (146 matters little “once it reports what took place’” (146). He argues that “‘concrete reality’ becomes the sufficient justification for speaking” ( speaking” (146): the fact that such and such an event really occurred or that such and such an object really exists/ed is justification alone to include its description. It is not accidental, Barthes suggests in this regard, that “literary realism should have been . . . contemporary with the regnum of ‘objective’ history” (146), to which must be added the “contemporary development of techniques, of works, and institutions based on the incessant need to authenticate the ‘real’: the photograph (immediate witness of ‘what was here’), reportage, exhibitions of ancient objects . . ., the tourism of monuments and historical site” (146). The Real is “supposed to be self-sufficient, . . . strong enough to belie any notion of ‘function’” (147), and “without any need be integrated into a structure” (139) mainly because the “having--been-there of things is a sufficient principle of speech” (139). Barthes reminds us of the distinction, however, between realism and verisimilitude: since antiquity, the “‘real’ has been on History’s side; but this was to help oppose the [merely] ‘lifelike,’ the ‘plausible,’ to oppose the very order of narration (of imitation or ‘poetry’)” (147). Since Aristotle, literary theorists have drawn a distinction between what historians do (they are alleged to simply report what transpired) and that which literary writers do (the goal of all ‘imitation’ is to portray not what actually happened but what is probable or plausible). Reality, he argues, “could in no way contaminate verisimilitude . . . because verisimilitude is never anything but opinable” (147), that is “entirely subject to (public) opinion” (147).

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Barthes, significantly, defines the ‘vraisemblable’ as not reality itself but human beings’s interpretations of reality. Realism would like us to forget this distinction, however, proffering itself as reality itself rather than what humans have agreed is real. There is a “break between the ancient mode of verisimilitude and modern realism” (147): a “new verisimilitude is born, which is precisely realism (by which we mean any discourse which accepts ‘speech-acts’ justified by their referent alone)” (147). The realism which rose to dominance in the nineteenth century and of which the novel is the genre par excellence seeks to present itself as the unvarnished truth, that is, as the verbal mirror of life as it is/was actually lived. Barthes describes this as the “referential illusion” (148) because such a view of literature obscures the true nature of the sign’s relationship with the referent. Realism is predicated upon an illusory conception of the referential nature of the sign according to which the sign is thought to exist in a mimetic, one-to-one correspondence with the referent. To achieve a semblance of such a relationship, however, what Realism does is suppress the true nature of the sign which consists in the attachment of a signifier to a signified (or a concept about reality) rather than reality itself. Barthes puts it this way: the ‘concrete detail’ is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign, and with it, of course, the possibility of developing a form of the signified, i.e , the narrative structure itself. . . . The truth of this illusion is this: eliminated from the realist speechact as a signified of denotation, the ‘real’ returns to it as a signified of connotation; for just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do, without saying it, is signify it; Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘the real’ . . . which is then signified. . . . (147-148) The example drawn from Flaubert’s novel given by Barthes may be rendered in the Realist scheme of things as b-a-r-o-m-e-t-e-r

the real object which predicts weather

From this point of view, Barthes argues, the “very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, . . . becomes the very signifier of realism” (148), producing thereby a “reality effect” (148). This “new verisimilitude is very different from the old one” (148), proceeding from the “intention to degrade the sign’s tripartite nature in order to make notation the pure encounter of an object and its expression. The disintegration of the sign” (148) in realist literature “occurs in the name of a referential plenitude” (148) whereas the goal of much contemporary literature is to “empty the sign and infinitely to postpone its object so as to challenge, in a radical fashion, the age-old aesthetic of ‘representation’” (148). Indeed, given Barthes’s notion that there exists two levels of signification, one of denotation (described above) and one of connotation, ideological significance may accrue to even a seemingly simple and apolitical object of description such as a barometer. This would need to be specified on a case by case basis. However, for Barthes, what is implicitly crucial here is less a question of searching for the mythological (Barthes’s synonym for ideological) dimension of particular objects such as barometers described in realist novels than that of the accumulation of such seemingly minor details. The crucial question for Barthes, as I

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mentioned at the outset, is thus what is the significance of such insignificance? Why the accumulation of so many trivial details? What is, in other words, their ideological function? Indeed, what is at stake here is the ideological signification of the suppression of the signified at the heart of this mode as a whole. Why does the Realist literary text present itself as if it were in a one-to-one relationship with the socio-historical context which it is attempting to describe? Why does it cast itself as if merely seeks to label reality? What is the purpose of creating such an illusion of reality, a “reality effect” (148) (rather than depicting reality itself) which can only come about through the suppression of the existence of the signified? The answer: to efface the role of ideology in the construction of reality by proffering the illusion of an unmediated re-presentation of the Real in language. In other words, the goal of Realism is to create an illusion of reality that masks the fact that this is but what one humanly-made interpretation of the world, to be precise, the outlook of a particular class, and to encourage others to accept it as natural, as a fact. (It is not accidental that the novel was the preeminent genre and realism the predominant literary mode in an era [the nineteenth century] which was also marked by the dominance of the middle classes in Western Europe.) Through the literary mode called Realism which rose to dominance in the nineteenth century, the Bourgeoisie sought to use the arts to perpetuate their own economic and political hegemony. Hence, the following schema: the absence of the signified (Sr) -------------------------------------Realism (Sd) =

Language-Object/Denotation/Meaning

Realism (Sr) ----------------------------------------------Dominance of the bourgeois world view (Sd) Myth/Connotation/Signification