Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.29162/ANAFORA.v12i1.4
From Informant to Cultural Code: Some Comments on Roland Barthes's Theory of Literary Reference
Maša Grdešić
orcid.org/0009-0007-3023-7753
; University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Starting from the seemingly secondary problem of informants, the article describes and comments on the way in which the French literary and cultural theorist Roland Barthes approaches the relationship between literature and reality. In his “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1966), Barthes defines the narrative unit of informants as providing pure data,” but already in the same text he shows that informants can be further interpreted, which leads him to raise the question of the functionality of all elements in a narrative text. This tension between the notion of a narrative text in which each element has a meaning that can be interpreted at a higher descriptive level and the search for elements that are “meaningless” and cannot be further interpreted is present in Barthes's work from the beginning, and the author returns to it in numerous later texts. The problem of informants thus finds its redefined place in the concept of “notation” in the article “Reality Effect”(1968), in which Barthes presents his theory of realism, and in his book S/Z (1970), in which he devotes considerable space to the question of “insignificant” details, this time using the concept of the cultural code or codes that contain “accumulated cultural knowledge.” Finally, the article “Textual Analysis: Poe’s Valdemar” (1973) presents a possible synthesis and coexistence of the two contradictory concepts of meaning and insignificance, whereby “banal notations” can be understood as part of the cultural code, or rather as cultural and literary conventions. The aim of this article is primarily to bring to mind the category of informants which, although seemingly insignificant, contains within itself one of the key questions that continued to preoccupy Barthes in various ways: does everything in a narrative text have meaning or are there signs without meaning? The category of informants can therefore be useful for contemporary research on the problem of meaning in Barthes because it shows that the balancing act between meaning and meaninglessness, that is, between the struggle against the naturalization of the sign within bourgeois ideology and the utopian desire for liberation from meaning, was a permanent feature of his work.
Keywords
Roland Barthes, informant, notation, cultural code, realism
Hrčak ID:
332998
URI
Publication date:
26.6.2025.
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