Caricature of a Barthes Reading

 

The five codes create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes.... The blanks and looseness of the analysis will be like footprints marking the escape of the text... it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network....Hence we use Code here not in the sense of a list, a paradigm that must be reconsistuted....Or again: each code is one of the forces that can take over the text..., one of the voices out of which the text is woven.

ACT: actions: (terms of the proairetic code) can fall into various sequences...whoever reads the text amasses certain data under some generic titles for actions (stroll, murder, rendezvous)
SYM: symbol

HER: hermeneutic: terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed

REF: cultural codes: references to a science or body of knowledge

SEM: semes: we merely indicate them—without, in other words, trying either to link them to a character (or a place or an object) or to arrange them in some order so that they form a single thematic grouping

 

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(William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell, V.1; WCW Reader 105).

 

Beautiful white corpse of night actually! So the northwest winds of death are mountain sweet after all! All the troubled stars are put to bed now : three bullets from wife’s hand   none kindlier :  in the crown, in the nape and one lower : three starlike holes among a million pocky pores and the moon of your mouth : Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and all stars melted forthwith into this one good white light over the inquest table,--the traditional moth beating its wings against it—except there are two here.  But sweetest are the caresses of the country physician, a little clumsy pehraps—mais--! and the Prosecuting Attorney, Peter Valuzzi and the others, waving green arms of maples to the tinkling of the earliest ragpicker’s bells.  Otherwise--: kindly stupid hands, kindly coarse voices, infintely soothing, infinitely detached, infinitely beside the question, restfully babbline of how, where, why    and    night is done and the green edge of yesterday has said all it could.

ACT: actions:

SYM: symbol

HER: hermeneutic: terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed

REF: cultural codes: references to a science or body of knowledge

SEM: semes: theme and character

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Lexes: divisions of the text into reading units

 

  1. Beautiful white corpse REF: science, palor of corpose, rigor mortis - HER: a death?- SEM: theme, mortality/immortality and beauty in death;
  2. [Beautiful white corpse]of night actually! SYM: night as a corpse – HER: deferral, no death but deathlike night -- REF: Eliot “spread out like a patient, etherized upon the table” – SEM: narrative voice, realism, “actual”
  3. So the northwest winds of death are mountain sweet after all! REF: myth, winds of death – SYM: sweetness of death – ACT: realization, “after all”
  4. All the troubled stars are put to bed now : ACT: time passing – REF: temporality, heavens and human experience--SYM: death as putting to bed – HER: human death?
  5. three bullets from wife’s hand   none kindlier :  in the crown, in the nape and one lower : HER: human death; who; wife, husband killed; motive? cause? mercy?-- REF: premeditation and the precision of the calculating killer; clinical crime-scene description; SYM: crown, metonym: patriarchal figure. ACT: killing discovered
  6. three starlike holes among a million pocky pores and the moon of your mouth : SYM: Bullet holes as constellations, face as cosmology; mouth: moon, gaping -  REF: physiology, deceptive smoothness of human skin; SEM: beauty in death, moon mouth;
  7. Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and all stars melted forthwith into this one good white light over the inquest table, REF: astronomy; clinical operations and criminal investigation; ACT: autopsy, SYM: white light of afterlife; irony, flatness of clinical light of science 
  8. --the traditional moth beating its wings against it—except there are two here.  REF: poetry of death,Dickinson; HER: encounter between who and whom? ACT: autopsy continues
  9. But sweetest are the caresses of the country physician, a little clumsy perhaps—mais--! and the Prosecuting Attorney, Peter Valuzzi and the others, HER: corpse and investigators present – SEM: devotion of investigators;  SYM: irony, sweet caresses --  HER: treatment, suffering of absent subject; REF: clumsiness, caresses: necrophilia – SEM: refined spectator narrating
  10. waving green arms of maples : SYM: arms to trees, life amidst fallen – REF: hospital garb; ACT: autopsy and dissection – SEM: uncanny, fear of life amongst corpses, the ghost
  11. to the tinkling of the earliest ragpicker’s bells.  REF: Dickens, ragpickers, 19th century; time of day, morning; Yeats, “foul rag and bone shop of the heart”; Donne, “for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” - SYM: bells, calling the dead
  12. Otherwise--: kindly stupid hands, kindly coarse voices, ACT: autopsy; - SEM: misapplication, incomprehension; SYM: paradoxes, kind/coarse
  13. infintely soothing, infinitely detached, infinitely beside the question, restfully babbling of how, where, why    REF: rituals of death, sacred and civic; rhetoric of redirection; SYM: irony, restful babble of the living;
  14. and    night is done and the green edge of yesterday has said all it could.: REF: time, morning – ACT: autopsy, complete; story told; HER: death circumstances left unanswered; SYM: green of life passed; body as speaking, SEM: ghost at rest