Signifying Nothing
I woke up thinking of Faulkner. I have been reading The Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes’ exploration of Japan as a useful fiction. My first thought upon encountering it was that Delacour really needs to read it; my second, that modernism ultimately leads to Zen. Barthes postulates that the perfect language is a language free of its slavery to meaning. In the irresolvable koans, language is liberated to merely be. For some reason, in my sleep this thought came full circle to The Sound and The Fury.
The novel commences with a scene unfolding before the eyes of an idiot. I remember how I struggled with the book, finally resulting in taking my instructors advice: “Read it straight through in one sitting. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense.” After reading it the first time, he suggested that I read it again more slowly to reconstruct things. It makes no sense until you can see the world of this novel, told in multiple perspectives from multiple time frames. The Sound and The Fury is a magisterial pile of historical debris, piled in layers upon memory. But this morning, I could only think of the fuller Shakespearean quote:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
It occurs to me that the paradox of Barthe’s writing degree zero rests in those last two words: signifying nothing. Degree zero is the fulfillment of the indexical function of language—pure denotation. It points without meaning.
But the freedom from meaning seems to contradict the political impulse to use communication to do something. If the goal of language is personal, rather than political, transformation then this model of a “degree zero” is worthwhile. I don’t think this is ever the case. We want to sort through the debris and use it somehow, to shape our world in a new way, not just ourselves. The freedom from striving preached by Zen is antithetical to political consciousness.
Perhaps the Tutor is right. Faulkner is the model of modernism closest to the American soul: a series of grotesque discontinuities that frustrates us while we try to make sense of it. Faulkner is forced to leave off the “signifying nothing” part, because it is incompatible with our desire to build worlds, and ultimately, make sense.
Pointing without meaning, that’s excellent, thanks. Now I really need to read some Faulkner, but probably not soon.
I think you’re getting to something deep here. All the richness of life ultimately is a zero sum activity, dust to dust. But we each live a personal story, and the meaning is purely self-referential; signifying nothing, which is really everything.
Strange. A few weeks ago I went through a dozen boxes of books that have been piled up in my hallway for three years or more, selected the few I wanted to keep, and took the rest to a secondhard bookstore. I had eight or ten books by Barthes, whom I’ve never enjoyed reading, and I kept just one: Empire of Signs. I must have felt I needed to read it too. On your recommendation, I shall. Thanks.