. . . myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semeological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concep and an image) in the fidrst system, becomes a mere signifier in the second. We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth . . . . Whether it deals with alphabetical or pictorial writing, myth wants to see in the only a sum of signs, a global sign, the final term of a first semiological chain. And it is precisely this final term which will become the first term of the greater system which it builds and of which it is only a part" (81).
Barthes gives a diagram that joins signfier and signfied as the sign, then joins that composite sign with MYTH as SIGN, to form a simplest instance of a hierarchy of nested signification.
Barthes describes with fair success the general weave of symbolic reasoning. For instance, if we substitute the signs of formal logic for the saussurian labels above, the overall shape of the argument becomes a + b --> c; c + d ---> e. If we think about this in terms of someone reading a paragraph in well-wrought freshman essay, the procedure follows our reading through Barthes' chart as easily:
Reader courses through the signs suspending judgment; comes to a period; "stops;" combines the predicative unit "sentence," "making sense;" largely jettisons the short-term memory of sentence elements for the assembled meaning.- Reader continues to the next sentence.
- Of course, the reader retains in memory some elements of the now-read sentence. (The identity of subject and sometimes object nouns is retained, for instance, so that an author designates a previously named subject with a simple pronoun: in the sentences, "Jim awoke. He went to the beach," no one would ask to whom the pronoun He refers. There is some tendency that nouns, or "thingy" entities, remain more durably whereas verbs or actions pass. We retain this distinction profoundly in human thought even though no such noun|verb or thing|event distinction works rigorously in physics. To follow Yeats, one separates the dancer from the dance only as a convenience -- or inconvenience -- of predication.)
- However, whereas the reader suspended the meanings of these in judgment in reading the first sentence, the meanings are fixed in the second sentence by the necessity to maintain consistency.
One might assume that corresponding actions of recombination happen between various subdivisions of the assembled synthesis one calls "a thought," however variously a thought might be described. In this, I would cross-reference Barthes with Jacques Lacan in "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious," in which he goes through a long discussion of parallelism not only of linguistic units but of images, not only of images but of non-imagined ideas. I'm reminded of the concept of "subject-rhyme" that I came across somewhere in relation to Pound's Cantos.
Meanwhile, in Barthes' discussion, he limits language to sentence-level interchange, and reserves a neologism metalanguage for the larger interactions which presumably include syntagmatic actions. One suspects that he wrote Mythologies before being influenced by Derrida's explosion in 1967. He rests quite content on the discrete nature of ante and post-defined objects within linguistic operations. He dismisses the kind of recursive interactions fundamental to Derridean analysis from "Structure, Sign, and Play" in a way that he will not do by the time he writes S/Z:
"When he [sic] reflects on a metalanguage, the semiologist no longer needs to ask himself questions about the composition of the language-object, he no longer has to take into account the details of the linguistic schema; he will only need to know its total term, or global sign, and only inasmuch as this term lends itself to myth" 82).
Here he's precisely wrong and precisely along the lines that Derrida pointed out in "Structure, Sign, and Play." The action of literature precisely uses what he's calling metalanguage to revise elements of what he's calling language-objects. Most particularly, what people like Pound called "new" and Bernstein calls "open" or "active" language revises elements of the formal relationships of semantic and category. We've had, by this point, various descriptions of this -- Kristeva's is notable, though I'm not sure at the moment in which work I noted it.
Yet there's something that remains to describe. For one may take it as clear that humans repeatedly reform semantic meaning by context throughout daily use without usually experiencing the unsettling that we associate with literature. For instance, I can easily suspend judgment about whether the sounds "greenhouse" in a friend's sentence refer to Missus Greene's residence, that building on the edge of the nursery, or a dangerous accumulation of gases, and do so without substantially re-arranging my ideas of any of the above. The fact that I may do so implies that I retain some conceptual categorization that is not identical to or coterminous with linguistic functions. The fact that language creates may at times create the havoc it does with such ideas suggests strongly that whatever these conceptual operations are, they are not discrete from language. but that the operations are somehow articulated in the greater conceptual-perceptive-neural process.
While neurological investigations have just begun to reflect on the nature of such things, their beginnings are already suggestive. Apparently, nervecell firing triggers nervecell firing as creatures associate. A certain mean concentration of neural firing is requisite to pass the impulse from so-called "lower," or more sensory consciousness or distal neural activity, to the so-called "higher," or more abstract, synthesized, cerebral processing. While much of cognitive neuroscience remais unexplored, researchers state quite clearly that what a literary critic might take as "directly sensed," or what Williams or even Robert Lowell might take as "things" are neurally synthized and composite structures even when they're sensory and not specifically linguistic. Adamic naming and Platonic or Aristotelian archetypes
One might confirm that this nears very closely to Barthes' concept of myth by his application of the idea to maps of The Blue Guide. Here he most specifically discusses the reduction of the complex and nuanced interlaced sets of visual constructs that constitute one's recall of a landscape to the glyphic marks of a map.
It would appear, then, that the actions of literature rake across this preverbal, averbal, or quasiverbal semantics, necessitating a reassemblage, restructuring, renegotiation of the relationships. When one takes this to create a more harmonious structure, "everything seems to just fall into place," so that one has "a sense of the sublime."
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