 |
| Roland Barthes |
Barthes book S/Z was published in 1970. The book is above Balazac's thirty page story 'Sarrasine'. Barthes's method of analysis is to divide the story into 561 'lexies' or units of meaning, which he then classifies using five 'codes', seeing there as the basic underlying structures of all narratives.
The five codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are:
1) The proairetic code - This provides indications of actions. ('The ship sailed at midnight' they began again', etc)
2) The hermeneutic code - This code poses questions or enigmas which provide narrative suspense. (For instance the sentence 'He' knocked on a certain door in the neighbourhood of Pell street
3) The cultural code - This code contains references beyond the text to what is regarded as common knowledge. (For example, the sentence 'Agent Agentis was the kind of man who sometimes arrives at work in odd socks' evokes a pre-existing image in the reader's mind of the kind of man this is - a stereotype of bungling incompetence perhaps contrasting that with the image of brisk efficiency contained in the notion of an 'agent'.
4) The semic code - This is also called the connotative code. It is linked to theme, and this code when organized around a particular proper name constitutes a 'character'.
5) The symbolic code - This code is also linked to theme, but on a larger scale, so to speak. It consists of contrasts and pairings related to the most basic binary polarities male and female, night and day, good and evil, life and art, and so on. There are the structures of contrasted elements which structuralists see as fundamental to the human way of perceiving and organising reality.