Reference and the Reader

Abstract

In 1966, Roland Barthes, in talking about the structural analysis of narrative, made the following categorical statement: goes on ill a narrative is, from the referential (real) point of view, strictly What does 'happen' is language per se, the adventures of language, whose advent never ceases to be celebrated (Barthes 1975:271). The problem with Barthes's statement is that while dcenying a mimetic of literature, he seems to imply that there arc kinds of discourse whose is unproblematic. My 1)oint is that language in general does not so much imitate the world as constitute it. Since words, whether used in fictional or factual discourse shape our world, I cannot agree with Barthes that this is simply nothing. Nor can we just study the referent on the level of words. We need to locate it on the level of discourse, since takes place in a situation or context. What I have called a crude mimetic model of language arises from the notion that there is an unchanging, unambiguous Reality there, antecedent to our attempts to put it into words, simply waiting for language to identify and name it. This has, of course, been tried now for some time and has proven unworkable. Men collectively and individually construct their world out of the symbol-systems that they use to define and relate phenomena. An individual word or verbal proposition is not true or false, real or fictional, absolutely, but always relative to the rules of the system of discourse in which it is embedded, or by which we decide to interpret it. Though words do not directly put us in touch with worlds, they offer us frames of reference for speaking about and viewing the world. Conversely, how we see things depends largely, as Nelson Goodman has shown, on the system of description or world-version in question (1978:2-3). Though the different versions have a refer-