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BARTHIAN AND BAKTHINIAN SEMANTICS:MONOLOIC AND DIALOGIC SEARCHES

Roland Barthes’s search for the meaning oflinguistic signs has led him to conclude thatliterature, as it constantly calls language intoquestion, is the only proof and assertion of humanfreedom. With the cue received from Ferdinand deSaussure, he has logically applied the principlesof structuralist semiotics to the study of popularculture and, has convincingly, affirmed that everyform of human social behaviour employs its own signsystems, governed by their own rules. Alwaysconcerned with the distinction between nature andculture, Barthes does not consider the signs oflanguage natural, though they are arbitraryconventions like the signs of other socialconventions, performances and practices. He haselaborated the Saussurean idea that it is themutual difference of signs in structural contextsthat generates meanings. In a syntagmatic context,according to him, no sign is natural. And wherethey seem to be the most natural, the mostartificial they are. In the essays in Mythologies(1957), Barthes has re-emphasized the idea that thesign-signified relationship is arbitrary and thatmeaning is an artificial and motivated culturalconstruct.

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However, in “The Death of the Author” (1967),Barthes ha fought deconstructively against author-centeredness in literary criticism, as it is “theepitome and culmination of capitalist ideologywhich has attached great importance to the ‘person’of the author” and has celebrated “thedesacrilization of the image of the author.”1 Assigns (words) evoke meanings from their semioticdifferences, once the artefact (syntagmaticstructure) comes into being, the writer has noauthority in determining the final (?) meaning ofthe text. Mercilessly, Barthes has pulled down theauthor from the high pedestal and has tried tounceremoniously bury him deep. His argument is thatsimultaneous to “the death of the author” “thebirth of the reader” occurrs; every new readermarks the textual signs and maps their meanings indiverse cognitive contexts, giving room for newdiscoveries and new connotations; the text may havea single author, but its plentiful readers canexploit its semantic suggestiveness endlessly.

In his semiotic analysis of everyday life,Barthes has espoused the Marxian version ofSartrian existentialism as defining human freedomas the freedom of choice. The encoding of amessage, therefore, involves the selection ofappropriate codes for the message, an existentialpraxis that deliberates on the form and content of1 David Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, London: Longman, 1990, 167-172

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communication. The author’s selection of signs froma paradigm and their syntagmatic placing are viewedas intentional and premeditated. As thecommunicator’s motive indicates, authoring is not adisinterested endeavour. Nor is it a purposelesssign game without semantic orientation. So Bartheshas considered every form of communicationartificial, never reflecting the ‘real’ reality. Hehas questioned the traditional view which heldlanguage and literature real and natural. Accordingto him, this is part of the historic socialdeception practised by the bourgeois society whichconveniently treats the conventions of language asnatural. Barthes is convinced that the clarity ofFrench prose is a bourgeois characteristic whichshould be broken by the motivated practice ofillisibilite (unreadability), the opposite of clarityand a strategy for questioning.

Though, with the idea of intentionality,Barthes modified Saussure’s concept ofarbitrariness, his “Death of the Author” is anintense argument for asserting the autonomy of thereader. As author-centred literary criticismimplicitly ratifies the exploitative bourgeoissocial system and its concomitant idea ofsupernatural predetermination of class distinctionsand privileges, he has attacked the mimetic theoryof literary creation that claims to reflectreality. Relishing the plurality of meanings,

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Barthes has given prominence to the reader and hasdirected him to seek liberation in language. In“From Work to Text” (1977), Barthes has subtlydifferentiated a “Work” and a “Text”; the former, acollection of syntagmatic encoding; and the latter,a product of semantic decoding. He stated: “Whilethe work is held in the hand, the text is held inlanguage: it exists only as discourse”2. The“Work”, as he has maintained here, is an authored,but unread, volume; the “Text” is the resultant ofreading, an “irreducible plurality.”3 A text inwhich, and with which, a reader can “write” newmeanings is an ideal “writerly” text; but a textwhere the reader passively consumes pre-cookedmeanings is a “readerly” one.

However, Barthes has not worked out the author-reader dichotomy in a dialectical manner. Instead,he proceeded to negate and nullify the authorialsemiotic presence in the text: “The Text…is readwithout the father’s signature…The Text can be readwithout its father’s guarantee: the restitution ofthe intertext paradoxically abolishes the conceptof filiation.”4 Here, in his enthusiasm toprivilege the reader, Barthes has ignored thesocio-linguistic and socio-psychological

2 B.Das &J. Mohanty, eds. “From Work to Text”, Literary Criticism: A Redaing,., OUP, 413-4203 B.Das &J. Mohanty, 4164 B.Das &J. Mohanty, 417

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components, the constituents of the author’sconsciousness.

According to Barthes, the ideal reader resiststhe fascism of language and will not allow any“enunciative subject” to preside over thedispensation of meaning. The lexical differencethat helps saying and meaning something, alsoprevents something else from being stated orsuggested. Barthes’s conclusion is that literaturegives room for eternal interpretation. As no finalmeaning is necessary and possible, the texts arealways open and, resisting closure, they subjectthemselves to endless interpretations. The reader,ideally, questions the ‘texted’ language, engaginghimself in an uninterrupted monologue, a unilateralinterpretation of the codes. In Barthian reading,the patriarchal author suffers elimination as he isnot treated as the signatory of the instruments ofmeaning. As it gives almost anarchic freedom to thereader, the reading process becomes an unendingmonologue and ends up as a reductive or misdirectedendeavour. It culminates in an impressionisticannexation of signs and their signifieds.Eventually, reading degenerates to a reactionaryeffort that deflects the signs from their projectedtargets, something that Barthes as a critic of thebourgeois system had always disapproved. As Barthesignores the social and ideological factors whichinfluence both the author and the reader, and, how

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they happen to be ‘written into’ and ‘read from’the text, his line of argument inevitably ends upin a lopsided privileging of the reader. He seemsto subscribe to the old pleasure principle ofliterature: “Text…. is linked to enjoyment(jouissance), to pleasure without separation.”5 In theworld of Barthian semiotics, the reader trails thefrills of anarchic interpretative freedom. Ignoringthe fact that the reader, like the author, was aproduct of the complex social and historicalprocesses, Barthes idealized him: “…withouthistory, biography, psychology; he [the reader] issimply that someone who holds together in a singlefield all the traces by which the written text isconstituted”6

Though, by virtue of his personal creativefaculty the author can distinguish himself from theother members of the society, he is also exposed tothe positive and negative influences of ideologieslike them. Whether he likes it or not, all sorts ofideologies will address the ‘author-subject’ in himand will get themselves inscribed into hisconsciousness. Social history, ridden with classconflicts, inscribes itself on the author’sconsciousness which, subsequently, leaves itsindelible mark on the signs. The class character ofthe signs in the composition, visible to a

5 B.Das & J. Mohanty, 4206 Roland Barthes, “The death of the author”, Modern Criticism and Theory—A Reader, Ed. David Lodge, London: Longman , 1990, 171

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discerning eye in varying shades of intensity, hasits source in the author’s ideological position.Signs are the direct or indirect vehicles ofclass ideology. The author intentionally erectsideological sentry posts of signs to guard hismessage from anarchic readers and also to lead themto the heart of the matter, the experience embodiedin the message. He has a rhetorical axe to grind!

Barthes’s concept of the author was influencedby his opposition to the Feudal Patriarch and thepost-Renaissance capitalist, the dispensers ofmoney, meaning and power. Clearly, he struck aparallel between the author and the bourgeois, theowner of meaning and the custodian of capital,respectively. Desiring to clean the semiotic worldof all authorial monopoly over meaning and,emulating Nietzsche, who pronounced the death ofGod, Barthes tried to conduct the funeral rites ofthe “Author-God” whose demise was thought to havetaken place in the backyard of Deconstruction. Itwas almost an obsessive conviction in him that “…the birth of the reader must be at the cost of thedeath of the author.”7 A fact that Barthes ignoredis that, in modern times, the author is no god. Heis not a patriarch in the field of letters. Thedemocratic composition of the society allows everyindividual to be an author, and simultaneously, itallows every individual to be a reader. The reader7 Roland Barthes, “The death of the author”, Modern Criticism and Theory—A Reader, 172

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and the writer change their persona according tochanging contexts. A reader may be a writer in onecontext and vice versa. Readers and writers aremembers of the same society, sharing the sameideological field, and they are engaged in diverserhetorical practices. The proliferation ofdifferent kinds of media allows ample freedom forall to transmit and receive signals. It is not fromthe exalted pedestal of the author-god alone thatmodern writers communicate. Democracy, despite itsbourgeois limitations, provides ample space formulti-level dialogues. Besides, the democraticspread of literacy has made language and literatureaccessible to all; literacy and literature are nomore elite affairs. There are many who havesomething to speak or write and there are many whowant to hear the spoken or read the written. Nomore a deity, the author is only one of the demos,a Whitman speaking to fraternal humans. The authoris not a class antagonist to the reader. The modernauthor and the modern reader cohabit, cooperate andcommunicate as well as they confront and contradictmutually. In short, they exist and functiondialectically. The modern reader is not a passiverecipient framed in pre-fabricated semantic codes.He is an interested party in the process ofdialogue. Through the mediation of the text andexploiting the umpteen dialogic possibilities opento them, the author and the reader engage each

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other in incessant, purposeful and targeteddialogue. There need not be any class antagonism orhigh-low dialogic voltage variation between them tomake communication possible. On democratic plains,with mutual respect and a sense of camaraderie,they make fraternal dialogues possible. Stayingtogether on the same side, they can engagethemselves in dialogues for breaking social andclass barriers. The author-reader dialectics canprogress from the level of thesis-antithesis to ahigher level of semantic synthesis.

It is Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory thatcounter-weighs the unilateral or lopsidedimportance given to the reader in Barthiansemiotics. Unlike Barthes, Bakhtin sets a greatstore by the social psychology of language and,very logically, examines the dynamics of ideologythat automatically in-forms every sign during itssyntagmatic gestation. The society and theindividual breathe and live in ideologies and,naturally, according to him, every sign bears theirstamp. Ideologies are subtly inscribed into thesigns and, through them, into human consciousness.As the historical evolution of the society hasresulted in class stratification, the diverseideological formulations, which receive localhabitation in signs, have their distinct classcharacter. More often than never, the writer, whochooses signs for transmitting his message, is

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guided, consciously or unconsciously, by theinvisible presence and force of ideology. Theconsciousness of every member of the society,including that of the writer and the reader, isformed through a historical process that hasbrought class stratifications into existence.Therefore, when ideologies pervade the signs andsigns become the transmitters of humanconsciousness, the class character of the membersof the society gets semiotic statement. The writerand the reader are not ideologically innocent. Theyhave their class ideology and characterrhetorically charged in the linguistic codes.

Though Barthes has touched upon the ideas ofSaussure, Jakobson and Derrida, he does not developany of them into a philosophy of language. Is heeclectic? Whatever, Barthes is a consistent criticof the middle-class bourgeois attitude whichreinforces the idea that the available social orderis natural as language and its meaning.Substantiating the findings about the arbitrarinessand artificiality of language, he has criticallysubmitted that the present class differences arenot natural, but artificial and deserving oftransformation. However, unwittingly perhaps,Barthes has quated the social structure with thelinguistically structured text and vested the taskof its semantic de-structuring with the reader. Hedoes not view the meaning which emanates from the

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text as of any social consequence. Contrary toBarthes, Bakhtin has a philosophy of language, aunifying theory termed “translinguistics”. The ideaof “dialogue” as an informing principle ininterpersonal relations is central to Bakhtin’sphilosophy of language which, in itself, is a partof his comprehensive Dialectics of Nature andSociety. Therefore, differing from thestructuralists, who sought the source of meaning insemiotic differences, Bakhtin considers all wordsas bearing the imprint of the society and ascapable of impacting upon it ideologically. Thenumerous ideologies, which are part of theplurality and fluidity of the society, get workedinto the linguistic signs, the words. Unlike thelinguist, the user of the language adapts words tochanging situations and creates new meanings tosuit the new, but concrete, social situations.Whereas the linguist falls into the trap of form,the language user creates a meaningful novelty.

Bakhtin’s life-long concern, as in the case ofBarthes, has been with the nature of language andits everyday application. Bakhtin has alwaysrelished the plenitude of differences and theplurality of meanings arising out of the complexfactors which make dialogues possible. Recognizingthe social dynamics of dialogue, Bakhtin has workedit up into a comprehensive set of conditions wherecommunication can take place inexhaustibly.

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Bakhtin’s specific term for referring to theincidence of communication enacting differences invalues is “utterance”. Difference, to him, is notmerely the Saussurean formal difference that givesroom for meaning; but it is also a difference invalues, with social base, semiotic form andideological charge.

The difference between Barthes and Bakhtin canbe seen as an extension and explication of thesimilarities between them. Both value “freedom” asthe supreme point of achievement of the humanconsciousness. Barthes considers literature to bethe only realm where the reader can experienceabsolute and untrammelled freedom. Master ofinterpretations, the Barthian reader relegates theauthor to the position of an unwelcome guest. Thetext can offer a free meal of meanings to him whorelishes them, unmindful of the cook. But it is afact of common experience that the reader, like agod, cannot make meanings out of semioticnothingness; he is effective only in an inter-semiotic void. Barthes over-privileges the readerand gives him absolute and almost anarchic freedomfor over-interpretation. The result of a partialvision, it unilaterally marginalizes the author andforces him to fade into comparative insignificance.

Subtly differing from Barthes, Bakhtin viewseverything in the light of his concept of“Dialogue”. For him, therefore, the experience of

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freedom is not to be derived from the absence ofthe author. Nor is it a celebration of the death ofthe author. As Katerina Clarke and Michael Holquistnote, “Liberty for him [Bakthin] is grounded not inthe will of a monologic God, the inevitable courseof history, or the desire of man, but rather in thedialogic nature of language and society”8.Bakhtin’s position is, thus, dialectically socio-linguistic. His dialogism guides him to move awayfrom the Personalists’ claim of monopoly in meaningand the Deconstructionists’ assertion of semanticanarchy. He holds the view that meaning is neitherthe author’s nor the reader’s. Meaning is not ownedby “I” or “You”, but by “We”, the dialectical unionof the author and the reader. Meaning is thedialectical product of two social events--ofwriting and of reading. Meaning is ‘of’ the text,‘by’ the text and ‘for’ the ‘texted we’. The readerproceeds to the meaning, whatever, through thetext, the literary signs. The author-readerdialectics produces meaning. To his voice theauthor gives meaning with the voice and the meaningof others. He speaks to, and with, the others.Meaning is the resultant of the dialogue betweenthe authored text and the ‘texted reader’. ToBakhtin, “the word was a two-sided act. It isdetermined equally by whose word it is and for whomit is meant…A word is territory shared by both8 Katerina Clarke and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1984

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addresser and addressee, by the speaker and hisinterlocutor.”9

The idea of the possibility of infinite numberof meanings is a tall deconstructionist claim. Aliterary sign is always loaded with the ideologicalconsciousness of the speaker/writer. Ideology isthe terrain where the social politics of economicsand class works either visibly or invisibly, butalways causing subterranean ideological turbulence.The text, an utterance, bears ideologicalinscriptions on the consciousness of the author whodesigns a dialogue with his possible readers. Theauthor’s ideological intentions, manifest orburied, address the reader rhetorically. But, likethe writer, the reader, as he also does not live inany ideological vacuum, is, concurrently, an agentand a victim of the ideologies active in thesociety. With receptive ears and discerning eyes,he scans the utterance, the text. He becomes a‘texted’ reader. No reader passively accepts theliterary statements as his semantic sensors areideologically charged. He reacts and responds. Histryst with the text is a meeting of two ideologies,two views and two propositions. At the meeting,agreement and disagreement are possible. However,only within the frame of the script, the dialogicprocess of reading can progress to the next stageof semantic synthesis. The writer, stating all he

9 The Bakhtin Reader, Marxism and Philosophy,

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had to say in the text, lets the reader decode thesigns to ferret out the meaning. The meaning is theresult of a synthesis. The dialecticalconfrontation or consensus of the writer’s and thereader’s ideological positions moves on to asynthesis, eventually evolving towards a higherlevel of social dialogue. But it can take placeonly within the specific semiotic parameters,socially and arbitrarily determined. Never can atext be semiotically anarchic and be, at the sametime, semantically centric. No reader can bury hisauthor alive. Every really great author refuses tobe buried alive. He is alive in his signs, in spiteof his biographical absence.

Necessarily, the author-reader relationshipneed not be a producer-consumer relationship. Oncethe text has come into being, the author goesbehind the curtains. His presence is latent in theideological inscriptions in the text, the corpus ofthe signs. While reading, what happens is adialogue; the absent author and the silent readerengage each other in a semantically eloquentdialogue. Reading is always dialogic. The author,hidden in the text, interpellates the readerideologically; though impalpable, hisinterpellations are semantically suggestive. Thedialectical (thesis--anti-thesis) relationshipproceeds inevitably the height of synthesis. Onreading a text, the reader’s consciousness, with

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its class ideology and character already wroughtinto it, confronts it [text] as a structured set ofsigns. The work which offers a text to the readeris rhetorically framed and ideologically charged.Its existence is not purposeless. Theintentionality of the author is a presence, madepalpable through the specific selection andpatterning of signs. A work is a semiotic fortress,built up sign by sign, with the author’sideological intention cementing the bricks fast andstrong. Unless there are too many cracks andcrevices in the base and the battlements, most ofthe adventurous readers will find the prison–houseof language too strong for them to break out.

That the meaning of a text is alwayssemiotically guarded is proved by a passage spokenby Rosencrantz in TheHamlet. In “Two Characters inThe Hamlet: Marginalization with a Vengeance”, it isstated: “Taken alone, the passage is a thoughtfuland imaginatively successful passage, worthy of awise and accomplished statesman.”10 Freed from thecontext, Claudius’ speech on the role and power ofkingship (spoken to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,immediately after the play within the play) losesits dramatic meaning and serves another purpose.Though the passage, “intrinsically good” if lookedat in isolation, is not well known because the

10 Wilfred L.Guerin, Earle Labor, et al, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, 4t h ed. OUP, 270-275

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context acts as the determinant; Rosencrantz andGuildenstern are “among the jellyfish ofShakespeare’s characters”. The totality of thedramatic context, marked by the various signsequences like plot, character and dialoguedetermine the meaning and purpose of the passage.The semiotic structures that the playwrightemploys, stand vigil on the reading process andcompel the reader to return to dialogue.

Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1952) is aretelling of the Salem witch hunt, the dramaticrecreation of an aspect of American history whichwas marked by religious superstition, bigotry andgreedy selfishness. Dramatically revisiting theevents of the closing years of the 17th centuryMassachusetts, Miller could provide a very powerfulmetaphor for the political situation in Americaimmediately after the Second World War. As thereligious bigots of Salem did with those whodissented with the authority, McCarthy tried toexorcise the United States of communist witchcraft.From the timing of the production of Miller’s play,the spectators could easily discern its immediatepolitical relevance. The play has at its core theconflict between Christian religious authority andthe individual’s freedom to pursue any faith. Whatis true in the context of religion is applicable toany other political or social dogma. No spectator,whatever interpretative freedom he may grant

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himself, can ignore the basic conflict that isdramatically represented by different charactersand their dialogue.

Every reader of Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not GoGentle into that Good Night” experiences theheroism of life that refuses to go into thedarkness of death without a fight. Impossible it isfor any reader to indulge in anarchicinterpretation of the text though none of itslexical terms is barred by time and place. Onlytowards the end of the poem, the reader understandsthat it is the imperative request of a son to hisdying father. The night, the light, the day, thebay and the sun are all either good or gentle orsad or fierce. All are abstract and unspecific. Butevery reader will feel the intensity of the passionfor human heroism in the face of death. The poem, apassionate plea to refuse the impending darkness ofdeath, is an invocation to assert human dignity.Ernest Hemingway’s Santiago in The Old Man and the Seaand Captain Ahab in Moby Dick are certain centralcharacters who compel the reader not to take offhis eyes from them and, thereby, from the centralidea of the text. That these texts have stood thetest of time suggests that their semioticorganization is masterminded by the writers in sucha way that they can engage the readers in perpetualdialogue.

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Bakthin does not approve of the possibility ofunlimited meaning because words occur and registermeaning only between two speakers. It is the socialavailability of signs which enable thespeaker/writer and the listener/reader to use them.Both are users of linguistic signs. Deliberately,from a vast paradigm, the writer chooses the mostsuitable signs for effective communication andgives them a local habitation, a syntagmaticstructure, a new form. The speaker has a targetedaudience, an addressee. Every word/sign is a dart,aimed rhetorically at somebody, a social being. Hemight have sharpened the arrows and made thestrings very taut before shooting. Thesepreparations are bound to have their impact on aspecific addresser. Modern novel, the mostdemocratic of all literary genres, has its specificreaders though Barthes might state that democracyhas revolutionized reading. There are separatereaders for detective novels and science fiction.In the days of Feudalism, when class distinctionswere very sharp and evident, the elite sections ofIndia had their Sanskrit literary forms while thelowly ones had to satisfy themselves with theirfolk art and literature. In Kerala, where theNamboodiri’s had their Kathakali and Koodiyattam,the untouchables had their Kakkarissi and Kolkali,both genres of folk drama and folk dancerespectively. The separate texts had their separate

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readers in mind. Bakthin’s author always recognizesthe presence of a reader. He is fully convincedthat every utterance is a social gesture and has asocial genesis. The language of literaturecomprises social words; they are not isolated orabandoned, but related and captured for specificpurposes.

The reader is not an abstraction, and, readingis not a futile exercise in the social void. Socialhistory, biography and psychology define thesemiotic space of the reader. The reader’sknowledge of a language, his semiotic competence,determines the text and temper of hisconsciousness. Like the author, he is unconsciouslyshaped and shadowed by the class structure of hissociety. Transmitted by the author, the literarytext reaches the reader whose antenna will beactivated only if there is a commonly sharedsemiotic field. Dialogue takes place when there isa correspondence of signs. The literary signs ofthe Chinese offer only an unwelcome façade to thenon-Chinese. The Sanskrit epics of India areimpenetrable to the vast majority of Indians whoare unlettered in it. Certain physical pre-conditions, like a semiotic rapport between theauthor and the impending reader, are essential forthe enunciation of textual meaning. The text, thesyntagmatic representation of an aspect of theauthor’s consciousness in linguistic codes, will be

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vulnerable to the reader who knows not the weaponsof the trade. A semiotic kinship between the authorand the reader is necessary to make meaning out ofreading and to make reading meaningful. The‘authored text’ and the ‘texted reader’ should beconnected dialectically.