Barthes’ brilliance, with its element of divine playfulness, made and makes enthralling reading — for those of us who share at least sufficient of his cultural matrix to gain aesthetic pleasure and revelation from his cited ‘signifiers’. It’s a detective game, in which the satisfaction comes from correctly interpreting the clue — elementary, for Sherlock Holmes, but not for my dear Watson. Barthes, in the structural analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, is the Sherlock Holmes who, deducing from his immensely rich cultural experience, instantly recognizes the fingerprints of one cultural reference upon another. The reader is Watson, for whom, it may be, the ‘signifier’ signifies nothing but itself, if there is nothing in the range of his cultural experience for it to be referred to. It is a swatch that does not match any colour in his spectrum, a note that cannot be orchestrated in his ear. So that even if he is told that Balzac’s clock of the Elysée Bourbon is actually chiming metonymic reference to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and from the Faubourg Saint-Honorè to the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, and then to the Restoration as a ‘mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect’—there remains a blank where that reader is supposed to be reading ‘what is not written’. The signifier works within a closed system: it presupposes a cultural context shared by writer and reader beyond literacy. Without that resource the reader cannot ‘read’ the text in Barthean abundance. ‘Words are symbols that assume a shared memory’, says Borges. The Faubourg Saint-Honoré is just the name of a district, it has no elegant social/intellectual associations, either as an image conjured up from visits to Paris or as a symbol described in other books, visualized in paintings. The Bourbon Restoration brings no association as a ‘mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect’ because the reader doesn’t know the place of the Bourbon Restoration in French political and social history. The polymath interchange of the arts, letters, politics, history, philosophy, taken for granted by Barthes, is not the traffic of that reader’s existence.
When one says one writes for ‘anyone who reads me’ one must be aware that ‘anyone’ excludes a vast number of readers who cannot ‘read’ you or me because of givens they do not share with us in unequal societies. The Baudelairean correspondences of earlier literary theory cannot work for them, either, because ‘correspondence’ implies the recognition of one thing in terms of another, which can occur only within the same cultural resource system.
This is the case even for those of us, like me, who believe that books are not made out of other books, but out of life. Whether we like it or not, we can be ‘read’ only by readers who share terms of reference formed in us by our education — not merely academic but in the broadest sense of life experience; our political, economic, social, and emotional concepts, and our values derived from these; our cultural matrix. It remains true even of those who have put great distances between themselves and the inducted values of childhood; who have changed countries, convictions, ways of life, languages. Citizenship of the world is merely another acculturation, with its set of givens that may derive from many cultures yet in combination becomes something that is not any of them.
Posing to himself the big question, Tor whom do we write?’, Italo Calvino wrote: ‘Given the division of the world into a capitalist camp, an imperialist camp and a revolutionary camp, whom is the writer writing for?’
While — if he has any sense — refusing to write for any camp, despite personal political loyalties (and I think there are more of them than Calvino allows), the writer certainly writes from within one of them. And the reader reads from within one. If it is not the same as that of the writer, he is presumed at least to ‘read’ in the writer’s signifiers some relevance to his own, different cultural matrix. But frequently the reader does not find equivalents, in that culture, for the writer’s referential range, because he has not ‘read’ that range. He cannot. The signifying image, word, flashes a message that cannot be received by a different set of preconceptions. This happens even at apparently homogenous cultural levels. In reviews of your fiction and the interviews to which you are subjected, this process can hatch in your text like a cuckoo’s egg. What comes out is unrecognizable, but the reader, the reviewer, journalist, insists that it is yours.
I experienced this when I came to the United States for the publication of a novel of mine entitled Burger’s Daughter. The daughter and other characters in the story were centred round the personality of Lionel Burger, exemplifying the phenomenon — and problem — of ideology as faith in the family of an Afrikaner who, through becoming a Communist, devotes his life and theirs to the liberation of South Africa from apartheid. In reviews, Burger was unfailingly referred to as a liberal; I myself perpetrated the unthinkable lack of deference to a famous talk-show personality when I contradicted his description of Burger as a noble white liberal.
He’s not a liberal, he’s a Communist, I interrupted.
But it was no good. None of these people ‘read’ me because in the ethos of mainstream American society a Communist could never be, no matter in what country or social circumstances, a good man. Yet it had to be acknowledged that Burger was a good man because he was a fighter against racism; therefore my signal must be that Burger was a liberal. This is not a matter of misreading or misunderstanding. It is the substitution of one set of values for another, because the reader cannot conceive of these otherwise.
Yet not politics but class most calls into question the existence of the generic reader, the ‘whoever reads me’. And by class I mean to signify economics, education, and, above all, living conditions. The cultural context from laws to latrines, from penthouse to poorhouse, travelled by jet or on foot.
I grant that the difference between the material conditions of life signified in the text and those of the reader must be extreme, and manifest in the dogged daily experience of the reader, if the writer cannot be ‘read’ by him. As the seventeen-year-old daughter of a shopkeeper in a small mining town in Africa, I was able to ‘read’ The Remembrance of Things Past. Why? Because, although the lineage Proust invented, so faithful to that of the French noblesse, genuine and parvenue, could not signify for me, the familial mores from which the novel sets out, so to speak, and are there throughout — the way emotions are expressed in behaviour between mother and child, the place of friendship in social relations, the exaltation of sexuality as romantic love, the regulation of daily life by meals and visits, the importance of maladies — all this was within the context of middle-class experience, however far-flung.
And by the way, from where did I get the book? Why, the municipal library; and I could use the library because I was white — and so for me that also was part of the middle-class experience. No black could use that library; in the concommitance of class and colour a young black person of my age was thus doubly excluded from ‘reading’ Proust’s Meseglise and the Guermantes Ways: by lack of any community of cultural background, and by racist material conditions. .
Hermeneutic differences between writer and reader are still extreme in our world, despite the advance in technological communications. There is a layer of common culture spread thin over the worlds, first, second, and third, by satellite and cassette. The writer could count on the ‘signifier’ ‘Dallas’ or ‘Rambo’ to be received correctly and fully by any reader from Iceland to Zimbabwe, and almost any other points on the map culturally remote from one another. But the breadth of this potential readership paradoxically limits the writer; producing, it would seem, something close to the generic reader, it confines the writer to a sort of primer of culture, if he expects truly to be ‘read’. It excludes signifiers that cannot be spelt out in that ABC. The writer’s expectations of readership have diminished in inverse proportion to the expansion of technological communications.