Roland Barthes

Reality Effect

Roland Barthes. "The Reality Effect." [Not sure on source]

• read with Freedgood 2006 for opposing perspective
  • From Freedgood 10: " The problem with the kind of typically constricted reading Barthes rightly dismisses is precisely that it does not allow for causal, material, and conceptual connections beyond the covers of the text, or outside the frame of the narrative -- such are the basic rules of literary reading. But a literal approach to literary reading -- an approach that breaches, temporarily, the narrative frame and the symbolic system of the novel -- would assume that the barometer [in Flaubert's A Simple Heart ex. from Barthes] might be an index of something culturally significant both within the novel and outside it, especially given that the barometer does literally provide an index."
  • Rachel Buurma DH Seminar: Barthes revises this in The Preparation of the Novel, it seems like in the way Freedgood indicates above
• 11 [Flaubert's barometer or Michelet's knock on the door] ...these authors, like so many others, produce notations (data, descriptive details) which structural analysis, occupied as it is with separating out and systematizing the main articulations of narrative, ordinarily, and up to the present, has left out, either by excluding from its inventory...all those details which are 'superfluous' (as far as structure is concerned), or else by treating these same details...as fillers, padding (catalyses), assigned indirect functional value in that, cumulatively, they constitute an indication of characterization or atmosphere, and so can finally be salvaged as part of the structure.
  • structuralist -> poststructuralist: showing the limits of structuralist analysis
• accounting for "the entire surface of the narrative fabric," but not the actual fabric that constitutes the page (De Grazia & Stallybrass 2013, Dane 2012)
  • the limits of purely literary analysis and poststructuralist theory's congeniality with book history
• "useless details" as "narrative luxury" that increase the "cost of narrative information"
  • the piano might be signifier of bourgeois status, but the knock on the door?
• 12 "insignificant" in the strong sense -- apparently detatched from the semiotic structure of the narrative
• narrative: predictive, forward moving ("traffic control")
  • "...at each juncture of the narrative syntagm, someone says to the hero (or to the reader, it does not matter which): if you act in this way, if you choose this alternative, then this is what will happen"
• description: additive, analogical - "Description is quite different: it has no predictive aspect; it is 'analogical', its structure being purely additive, and not incorporating that circuit of choices and alternatives which makes a narration look like a vast traffic control centre, provided with referential (and not merely discursive) temporality."
• What are insignificant details doing? "Is everything in the narrative meaningful, significant? And if not...what is...the ultimate significance of this insignificance?"
• rhetoric of vivid description (hypotyposis)
• balance of aesthetic (requiring meaning) and referential (reference to real world external to text) constraints
  • the idea of a real referent prevents a spiral into endless detail
• 15 But this same 'reality' becomes the essential reference in historical narrative, which is supposed to report 'what really happened.' What does it matter that a detail has no function in the account as long as it denotes 'what took place'? 'Concrete reality' becomes a sufficient justification for what is said. History...is in fact the model for those narratives which accept, as a filling for the gaps in their functions, notations which are structurally superfluous. It is logical, therefore, that realism in literature should have been, give or take a few decades, contemporaneous with the reign of 'objective' history[.]
  • nice connection to Waverley (Scott, 1814) and Griffiths 2016
• 16 the illusion of a referent: if it refers to something real, we don't have access to it
  • "Semiotically, the 'concrete detail' is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign, and along with it, of course, there is eliminated the possibility of developing a form of the signified, that is, the narrative structure itself. (Realist literature is, to be sure, narrative, but that is because its realism is only fragmentary, erratic, restricted to 'details', and because the most realistic narrative imaginable unfolds in an unrealistic manner.) This is what might be called the referential illusion. The truth behind this illusion is this: eliminated from the realist utterance as a signified of denotation, the 'real' slips back in as a signified of connotation; for at the very moment when these details are supposed to denote reality directly, all that they do, tacitly, is signify it.... It is the category of the 'real', and not its various contents, which is being signified[.]"
  • chair is there not to signify "chair" but to signify reality
• sophisticated rhetorical attempts to access reality but knowing they only have words that may refer to only other words