S/Z

[Dave Monroe]

>From Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay (trans. Richard Miller, New York:
Hill & Wang 1974 [1970]), Sec. XXXII,  "Delay":

"Truth is brushed past, avoided, lost. This accident is a structural
one. In fact, the hermeneutic code has a function, the one we (with
Jakobson) attribute to the poetic code: just as rhyme (notably)
structures the poem according to the expectation and desire for
recurrence, so the hermeneutic terms structure the enigma according to
the expectation and desire for its solution.  The dynamics of the text
(since it implies a truth to be deciphered) is thus paradoxical: it is
a static dynamics: the problem is to maintain the enigma in the
initial void of its answer; whereas the sentences quicken the story's
'unfolding' amid cannot but help move the story along, the hermeneutic
code performs an opposite action: it must set up delays (obstacles,
stoppages, deviations) in the flow of the discourse; its structure is
essentially reactive, since it opposes the ineluctable advance of
language with an organized set of stoppages ... [...]  Expectation
thus becomes becomes the basic condition for truth: truth, these
narratives tell us, is what is at the end of expectation." (pp. 75-6)

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