1Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3304 Notes 10B

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 anextended sentence to which the syntactic categories comprising a sentence are then applied.Of particular interest for Structuralists (or, more accurately, narratologists), therefore, is thesyntagmatic axis of a given literary text.

What arouses Barthes’s interest here, however, is the presence of descriptive detailsin writers like Flaubert and Michelet (what he calls “notations” [141]) for which “structuralanalysis, occupied as it is with identifying and systematising the major articulations ofnarrative, usually and heretofore has left out, either because its inventory omits all detailsthat 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 oratmosphere” (141). If, however, “analysis seeks to be exhaustive . . ., if it seeks toencompass the absolute detail, the indivisible unity . . . in order to assign them a place in thestructure, 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 thenarrative’s semiotic structure” (142), is “related to description” (142). Even if the object inquestion, 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 “generalstructure of narrative, at least as it has been occasionally analysed till now, appears asessentially predictive; schematizing to the extreme, and without taking into account numerousdetours, delays, reversals, and disappointments which narrative institutionally imposes uponthis 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 comesto the fore, that is, it is the relationship between the text and the world it seeks to signifywhich becomes important. (His use of the word ‘referential’ here does not imply that hedisagrees with Saussure’s critique of referential models of language. He uses it rather, todenote that axis of language, the paradigmatic, which signifies the Real and which functionseven 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 followingquestion: “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 aconcern with offering descriptions of the beautiful: “description has long had an aestheticfunction” (143). The term for this is the “epideictic, a ceremonial discourse intended to excitethe 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 MiddleAges, description is “constrained by no realism; its truth is unimportant . . .; there is nohesitation to put lions or olive trees in a northern country; only the constraint of thedescriptive 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 verystrong” (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 thetyrannical constraints of what we must call aesthetic verisimilitude” (137). The object ofdescription itself, Rouen, changes little despite the fact that Flaubert rewrote the passage sixtimes, 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 objectper se is the “rules of le beau style” (144): Rouen is “in fact only a sort of setting meant toreceive the jewels of a number of rare metaphors” (144). It is as if “Rouen were notable onlyby its substitutions (‘the masts like a forest of needles, the islands like huge motionless blackfish, the clouds like aerial waves silently breaking against a cliff’)” (144). That is, Rouen itselfis almost lost in the multitude of comparisons which Flaubert uses to signify it, that is, torender a particular impression of the place. Barthes’s point in all this is that this descriptionof 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 ofrepresentation” (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 alonejustified its description” (145). This mixture – this interweaving – of constraints has a doubleadvantage” (145), one functioning to temper the opposing tendency, the aesthetic tosafeguard 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, transitoryattitudes, insignificant objects, redundant words)” (146) in an effort to render a “pure andsimple ‘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 true-to-life (the lifelike) and the intelligible” (146). In the “ideology of our time, obsessivereference to the ‘concrete’ . . . is always brandished like a weapon against meaning” (146).This “same ‘reality’ becomes the essential reference in historical narrative, which is supposedto 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 thesufficient justification for speaking” ( speaking” (146): the fact that such and such an eventreally occurred or that such and such an object really exists/ed is justification alone to includeits description. It is not accidental, Barthes suggests in this regard, that “literary realismshould have been . . . contemporary with the regnum of ‘objective’ history” (146), to whichmust be added the “contemporary development of techniques, of works, and institutions basedon the incessant need to authenticate the ‘real’: the photograph (immediate witness of ‘whatwas here’), reportage, exhibitions of ancient objects . . ., the tourism of monuments andhistorical site” (146). The Real is “supposed to be self-sufficient, . . . strong enough to belieany 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 (theyare alleged to simply report what transpired) and that which literary writers do (the goal ofall ‘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 isnever 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’sinterpretations of reality. Realism would like us to forget this distinction, however, profferingitself as reality itself rather than what humans have agreed is real. There is a “break betweenthe 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 thenineteenth century and of which the novel is the genre par excellence seeks to present itselfas 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 literatureobscures the true nature of the sign’s relationship with the referent. Realism is predicatedupon an illusory conception of the referential nature of the sign according to which the signis thought to exist in a mimetic, one-to-one correspondence with the referent. To achieve asemblance of such a relationship, however, what Realism does is suppress the true nature ofthe sign which consists in the attachment of a signifier to a signified (or a concept aboutreality) rather than reality itself. Barthes puts it this way: the

‘concrete detail’ is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and asignifier; the signified is expelled from the sign, and with it, of course, thepossibility of developing a form of the signified, i.e , the narrative structureitself. . . . The truth of this illusion is this: eliminated from the realist speech-act as a signified of denotation, the ‘real’ returns to it as a signified ofconnotation; 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’slittle door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘thereal’ . . . which is then signified. . . . (147-148)

The example drawn from Flaubert’s novel given by Barthes may be rendered in the Realistscheme of things as

b-a-r-o-m-e-t-e-r <---- barometer

when in reality, this schema should in fact appear thus:

b-a-r-o-m-e-t-e-r (Sr)-------------------- -----> the real object which predicts weatherbarometer (Sd)

From this point of view, Barthes argues, the “very absence of the signified, to the advantageof 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 makenotation 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 thegoal of much contemporary literature is to “empty the sign and infinitely to postpone its objectso 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 ofdenotation (described above) and one of connotation, ideological significance may accrue toeven a seemingly simple and apolitical object of description such as a barometer. This wouldneed to be specified on a case by case basis. However, for Barthes, what is implicitly crucialhere 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 theaccumulation 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 theaccumulation 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 signifiedat the heart of this mode as a whole. Why does the Realist literary text present itself as if itwere in a one-to-one relationship with the socio-historical context which it is attempting todescribe? Why does it cast itself as if merely seeks to label reality? What is the purpose ofcreating 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? Theanswer: to efface the role of ideology in the construction of reality by proffering the illusionof an unmediated re-presentation of the Real in language. In other words, the goal of Realismis to create an illusion of reality that masks the fact that this is but what one humanly-madeinterpretation of the world, to be precise, the outlook of a particular class, and to encourageothers to accept it as natural, as a fact. (It is not accidental that the novel was the pre-eminent 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.) Throughthe literary mode called Realism which rose to dominance in the nineteenth century, theBourgeoisie 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) = Realism (Sr)

-----------------------------------------------Dominance of the bourgeois world view (Sd)

Language-Object/Denotation/Meaning Myth/Connotation/Signification