M&D Barthes Empire of Signs

[David Ewers]

I thought I'd follow your lead here and see what the deal is with Mr. Barthes.  Thanks.  After doing some digging around, I found this:
http://monoskop.org/images/1/10/Barthes_roland_Empire_of_Signs_1983.pdf

I'm only about half-way through it, but I've already found a lot that's (generally and specifically) germane to M & D.  
Thought I'd share it, since it's a bit of a revelation to me.

On Jan 17, 2015, at 9:15 AM, alice malice wrote:

> M&D is taught in difficult classes to bewildered undergraduates and
> to pretentious graduate students and by professional readers of
> literature who have, so they suppose, a frame of reference, a level of
> understanding and sophistication far greater than that of Pynchon's
> audience or any of Pynchon's professional detractors (Wood, Kakutani,
> ...).
> 
> So, he writes, as Milton did, for the Elect? For a few heaven bound
> almost-angels who dance on the head of Pyn? That seems a contradiction
> given his leveling of high and low culture, his obvious sympathies for
> the non-elect, the preterit.
> 
> Why should Pynchon give up complexity, his trade, his craft, his
> innovations and experimentations, his genius...and so on, to satisfy
> Wood, Kakutani and their ilk?
> 
> Why makes things easy, convenient, or satisfy the reader's demands or
> expectations?
> 
> Who died and made the reader king?
> 
> The author died.  So says Barthes and it's a useful idea so we will
> make use of it and divide the author from the work. But the death of
> the author is not the death of the text.
> 
> Now the reader and the text are still alive. They give life to each other.
> 
> If the reader is dependent on the text and the text the reader, the
> author, though dead, haunts the reading yet, and challenges reader
> tyranny?
> 
> Connect the poetic objects (Aristotle's poetic silence to Eliot's
> objective correlative).
> 
> Some, McHale and others, call P's fiction postmodern and attribute his
> "fucking with the reader" as the next and obvious move after the
> Moderns made it super difficult, so Postmodern is a philosophical and
> physical paradigm shift. Sure.
> 
> But something else is going on here in M&D and we're on to it at the
> character level. The author, though dead, haunts these characters, not
> merely with the erasure of adjectives and adverbs (Joyce from Hero to
> Portrait); or the use of the objects and contexts and actions,  so
> passions and thoughts are not spelled out (narrators don't say, he was
> a dark and stormy cleric), and not with the fragments shored against
> ruins (though this is used to great effect in GR), but with
> anti-reason and anti-matter.
> 
> Connect wha?
> 
> So characters are fat not flat. They are stuffed pigs and they fly on
> the wings of a free and dead author, unbound from the reader's
> tyranny.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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