Barthes more than once said, ''A named meaning is a dead meaning,'' and one of his favorite images was of Orpheus (the signifier) condemning Eurydice (the signified) to eternal death by looking back at her. One might say that Barthes, contradicting Aristotelian Nature, abhorred everything that wasn't a vacuum. He was far too elegant and tentative, too much the dandy, to feel entirely at home in the West with its looming, unmistakable pregnancies of meaning. To me Barthes has always been unexpectedly funny, never more so than in the superficially sober and meticulous ''S/Z,'' his line-by-line analysis of a short story by Balzac. Barthes decodes and deflates the pretensions to meaning present everywhere in Balzac's ''realistic'' text, which he ends up by treating as a sort of grand computer stocked with cliches and chattering away to itself. Behind this chatter, this cultural yammering, Barthes detects a terrible anxiety in Western society, an unarticulated fear that language itself means nothing, that it is merely an automaton's gesture flagging down the void.
- Edmund White
- Edmund White
