Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes

Author:Roland Barthes
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: Semiotics & Theory, Performing Arts, Literary Criticism, General
ISBN: 9780374521363
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1978-06-30T23:00:00+00:00

112 | IMAGE - MUSIC - TEXT

is not who writes (in real life) and who writes is not who is.

1

In fact, narration strictly speaking (the code of the nar-

rator), like language, knows only two systems of signs:

personal and apersonal. These two narrational systems do

not necessarily present the linguistic marks attached to

person (/) and non-person (he): there are narratives or at

least narrative episodes, for example, which though written

in the third person nevertheless have as their true instance

the first person. How can we tell? It suffices to rewrite the

narrative (or the passage) from he to /: so long as the

rewriting entails no alteration of the discourse other than

this change of the grammatical pronouns, we can be sure

that we are dealing with a personal system. The whole of

the beginning of Goldfinger, though written in the third

person, is in fact 'spoken' by James Bond. For the instance

to change, rewriting must become impossible; thus the

sentence 'he saw a man in his fifties, still young-looking...'

is perfectly personal despite the he ('I, James Bond, saw...'),

but the narrative statement 'the tinkling of the ice against

the glass appeared to give Bond a sudden inspiration'

cannot be personal on account of the verb 'appeared',

it (and not the he) becoming a sign of the apersonal.

There is no doubt that the apersonal is the traditional mode

of narrative, language having developed a whole tense

system peculiar to narrative (based on the aorist

2

), designed

to wipe out the present of the speaker. As Benveniste puts

it: 'In narrative, no one speaks.' The personal instance

(under more or less disguised forms) has, however, gradually

invaded narrative, the narration being referred to the hie

et nunc of the locutionary act (which is the definition of

the personal system). Thus it is that today many narratives

1. J. Lacan: 'Is the subject I speak of when I speak the same as the

subject who speaks?'

2. E. Benveniste, op. cit. [especially Chapter XIX].

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