العمل الأدبي والنص عند رولان بارت
Roland Barthe's "From Work to Text"
العمل الأدبي والنص عند رولان بارت
أ.م. خالد قيس عبد
https://www.uoanbar.edu.iq/staff-page.php?ID=300
Roland Barthe's essay entitled "From Work to Text" is a seminal one in which he attempts to draw the essential distinction between a work and a text. He distinguishes between the classical work and the modern text. His essay is considered as "an expression of a determination not to acknowledge the old 'bourgeois' literature, and we should waste out time chasing shadows if we tried to assign his phrases any concrete meaning" (Thurley 288). He also traces the "relativization of the relation of writer, reader and observer (critic) (Barthes 878). The essay argues the essential changes seven elements through the movement from work to text: method, genre, signs, plurality, filiation, reading and pleasure.
The method means that the reader interacts with the text as a single unified body in a dialogic trend to keep the continuity of the meaning, what distinguishes the work from the text as "the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language" (Barthes 878). Since the relation between signifier and signified is not stable, according to Derrida, the reader's method of receiving the text should be dialogic so as not to consume it passively like the work. It is the reader's choice to engage the meaning productively as something destabilized, undecidable and attached to the absence not to the presence.
As far as the text is concerned, Barthes states that "the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a space of books (in library, for example), the text is a methodological field." (Barthes 878). From a poststructuralist perspective, the text is not considered an embodiment of absolute humanistic values as in the work, it is an exposition of specific fluid and relative values. The text "is experienced only in an activity of production" (Brathes 879). The text is in continuous communication with other texts and its values are changeable, what distinguishes it from the work. This essay marks a movement towards textuality from the idea of the work as a finished entity to the text as an open-ended one. The movement is attributed to the theory of different in Saussurean linguistics and structuralism. This new amalgamation is demonstrated by Derrida when he puts together the differing and difference. Therefore, Derrida argues that the present of the word is not the true one. He captures this in a self-coined term différance that contains both the idea of difference and the process of deferral of meaning. Thus, he destabilizes the relationship between signifier and signified (Bertens 126). He puts together the words differing and difference. Difference implies both the original idea of meaning that happens through the contrastive and goes beyond that as meaning is not finished.
The reader plays a pivotal role in in engaging and reproducing the text, he is "playing must be understood here in all its polysemy … playing the text as one plays a game, looking for a practice which re-produces it" (Barthes 881). The reader's subjective role represents a firm interaction and an inestimable part of interpreting the text through reproducing each reading of the text. Meaning, as Barthes indicates, is the outcome of the interaction between the reader's awareness and the text, as the text is destabilized and fluctuant according to the social, cultural and ideological states that require the meaning to be examined and re-examined.
Barthes ratifies that the text is characterized, and distinguished from the work, by its plurality of meaning as each reading refers back to a many previous texts that fortifies the fecundity of meanings. Here, he emphasizes the effectual role of intertextuality in terms of considering the reader as an active producer of meaning not a mere consumer of holistic meaning of the work.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts
and Contemporary Trends, 3rd ed. Edited by David Richter, Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007, pp 878-882.
Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: Basics. London: Palgrave, 2005.
Thurley, Geoffrey. Counter-Modernism in Current Critical Theory. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983.
Keywords: Roland Barthes1 from work to text2 Poststructuralism3