New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

196 CINEMATIC REALISM
the corollary effect of a cultural upgrading for the cinema; in a single
terminological stroke, film-as-text took on all the prestige of literature. In
“From Work to Text,” Barthes distinguished between the WORK, defined
as the phenomenal surface of the object, for example the book one holds in
one’s hand, i.e. writing read as a completed product conveying an intended
and pre-existent meaning, as opposed to the TEXT, defined as
a methodological field of energy, an ongoing production absorbing writer
and reader together. “We now know,” Barthes writes, “that the text is not
a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of an
Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings,
none of them original, blend and clash” (Barthes 1977:146).
Barthes further distinguished in S/Z between the READERLY TEXT
(“lisible”) and the WRITERLY TEXT (“scriptible”), or better between
readerly and writerly approaches to texts. The readerly approach privileges
those values sought and assumed in the classic text—organic unity, linear
sequence, stylistic transparency, conventional realism. The readerly text
posits authorial mastery and readerly passivity. To the author as God
responds the critic as “the priest whose task is to decipher the Writing of
the god” (Barthes 1974:174). The writerly text, in contrast, stimulates and
provokes an active reader, sensitive to contradiction and heterogeneity,
aware of the work of the text. It transforms its consumer into a producer,
foregrounding the process of its own construction and promoting the
infinite play of signification.
In his S/Z, a work often regarded as the premier work of poststructuralist
literary criticism, Barthes inventories the codes necessary to
the production of the classical “readerly” text, in this case the Balzac
novella Sarrasine. The illusion of realism, for Barthes, is founded on the
integrated functioning of five codes or “voices.” (The paradoxical
achievement of S/Z was to call attention both to the clasical readerly
features of the Balzacian text and to its multi-voiced and writerly nature.)
Among these codes are the follow-ing: (1) the HERMENEUTIC CODE;
(2) the PROAIRETIC CODE; (3) the SEMIC CODE; (4) the SYMBOLIC
CODE; and (5) the REFERENTIAL CODE. Barthes rather perversely
highjacks the word “hermeneutic” (from Greek hermeneuein, “to
interpret”) from the classical discipline of HERMENEUTICS—the
philosophical and exegetical tradition of interpretation—to refer to the
hermeneutic code, i.e. inculation of the enigma, the question to be pursued
throughout the text, in sum all the units whose function it is to articulate in
various ways a question, its response, and the variety of chance events
which either formulate the question or delay its answer; or even, constitute
an enigma and lead to its solution. While Barthes compares the
hermeneutic code to the Voice of Truth—the solution of the enigma
constituting the moment of revelation—the function of the hermeneutic
code is to delay revelation, to dodge the moment of truth by setting up