According to Roland Barthes, all narratives share structural
features that each narrative weaves together in different ways. Despite the
differences between individual narratives, any narrative employs a limited
number of organizational structures (specifically, five of them) that affect
our reading of texts. Rather than seeing this situation as limiting, however,
Barthes argues that we should take this plurality of codes as an invitation to
read a text in such a way as to bring out its multiple meanings and
connotations. Rather than reading a text for its linear plot (this happens,
then this, then this), rather than being constrained by either genre or even
temporal progression, Barthes argues for what he terms a "writerly"
rather than a "readerly" approach to texts. According to Barthes,
"the writerly text is ourselves
writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is
traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology,
Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of
networks, the infinity of languages". This closing of the text happens as
we read, as you make decisions about a work's genre and its ideological beliefs;
however, when you analyze any one sentence of a work closely, it is possible to
illustrate just how impacted with meaning (and possibility) any one sentence
really is. Barthes exemplifies what he means in S/Z, in which he takes a short story by Honoré de Balzac (Sarrasine)
and analyzes each individual sentence for its relation to five master codes.
The five codes are as follows:
The hermeneutic code (HER.) refers to any element in a story that
is not explained and, therefore, exists as an enigma for the reader, raising
questions that demand explication. Most stories hold back details
in order to increase the effect of the final revelation of all diegetic truths. We tend not to be satisfied by a narrative unless all
"loose ends" are tied; however, narratives often frustrate the early
revelation of truths, offering the reader what Barthes terms "snares"
(deliberate evasions of the truth), "equivocations" (mixtures of
truth and snare), "partial answers," "suspended answers,"
and "jammings" (acknowledgments of insolubility). As Barthes
explains, "The variety of these terms (their inventive range) attests to
the considerable labor the discourse must accomplish if it hopes to arrest the enigma, to keep it open". The
best example may well be the genre of the detective story. The entire narrative
of such a story operates primarily by the hermeneutic code. We witness a murder
and the rest of the narrative is devoted to determining the questions that are
raised by the initial scene of violence. The detective spends the story reading
the clues that, only at the end, reconstructs the story of the murder.
The proairetic code (ACT.) refers to the other major structuring
principle that builds interest or suspense on the part of a reader or viewer.
The proairetic code applies to any action that implies a further narrative
action. For example, a gunslinger draws his gun on an adversary and we wonder
what the resolution of this action will be. We wait to see if he kills his
opponent or is wounded himself. Suspense is thus created by action rather than
by a reader's or a viewer's wish to have mysteries explained.
These first two codes tend to be aligned
with temporal order and thus require, for full effect, that we read a book or
view a film temporally from beginning to end. Barthes at one point aligns these
two codes with "the same tonal determination that melody and harmony have
in classical music". A traditional, "readerly" text tends to be
especially "dependent on [these] two sequential codes: the revelation of
truth and the coordination of the actions represented: there is the same
constraint in the gradual order of melody and in the equally gradual order of
the narrative sequence". The next three codes tend to work "outside
the constraints of time" and are, therefore, more properly
reversible, which is to say that there is no necessary reason to read the
instances of these codes in chronological order to make sense of them in the
narrative.
The semantic code (SEM.) points to any element in a text that
suggests a particular, often additional meaning by way of connotation. In the
first lexia that I quote above from Barthes' S/Z,
"Sarrasine" is associated with "femininity" because of the
word's feminine form (as opposed to the masculine form, "Sarrazin").
The question of femininity later becomes an important one in Balzac's story
about a man's love for a castrato that he, at first, believes to be a woman. By
"connotation," Barthes does not mean a free-form association of ideas
(where anything goes) but "a correlation immanent in the text, in the
texts; or again, one may say that it is an association made by the
text-as-subject within its own system". In other words, Barthes marks out
those semantic connotations that have special meaning for the work at hand.
The symbolic code (SYM.) can be difficult to distinguish from
the semantic code and Barthes is not always clear on the distinction between
these two codes; the easiest way to think of the symbolic code is as a
"deeper" structural principle that organizes semantic meanings,
usually by way of antitheses or by way of mediations (particularly, forbiddend
mediations) between antithetical terms. The concept is perhaps most analogous
to Algirdas Greimas' understanding of antagonism and contradiction in narrative
structure. A symbolic antithesis often marks a barrier for the text. As Barthes
writes, "Every joining of two antithetical terms, every mixture, every
conciliation—in short, every passage through the wall of the Antithesis—thus
constitutes a transgression."
The cultural code (REF.) designates any element in a narrative
that refers "to a science or a body of knowledge". In other words,
the cultural codes tend to point to our shared knowledge about the way the
world works, including properties that we can designate as "physical,
physiological, medical, psychological, literary, historical, etc." The
"gnomic" code is one of the cultural codes and refers to those
cultural codes that are tied to clichés, proverbs, or popular sayings of
various sorts.
Together, these five codes function like a
"weaving of voices," as Barthes puts it . The codes point to the
"multivalence of the text" and to "its partial
reversibility", allowing a reader to see a work not just as a single
narrative line but as a contellation or braiding of meanings: "The
grouping of codes, as they enter into the work, into the movement of the
reading, constitute a braid (text, fabric, braid: the same thing); each
thread, each code, is a voice; these braided—or braiding—voices form the
writing".