Where to Begin?

Barthes's "Where to Begin?" is an essay obsessed with beginnings, in the first instance methodological. Originally published in 1970, as the opening article of the very first issue of Poétique, it sets out in pedagogical mode: a first-person Barthes conjures up an imaginary student wishing to undertake a structural analysis of a literary text, graced with all manner of appropriate and promising qualities, yet facing the inevitable problem of every beginning: where to begin? ¹ And yet, claims Barthes--with a ritual invocation of the founding myth of French structuralism--Saussure's own notorious difficulty in getting started was the very origin of modern linguistics. Overwhelmed by the disparate nature of language, Saussure opted for meaning as his guiding thread. Staging a parallel confrontation with the abundant, apparently natural riches of literary discourse, Barthes proposes, by way of identifying the first act to perform in the presence of the text--the first thread to be pulled, the first codes to unravel--"the first analysis" of a novel by Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island (80).

The apprentice structuralist, having served his purpose, has already ceded his place to the master, who devotes his second paragraph to a virtuoso demonstration of how to get started (80-82). Still on the terrain of linguistics, it is information theory, with its focus on the path of a message from the initial set of signals transmitted to that finally received, that inspires Barthes's first analytic move: to read the beginning and ending of Verne's novel against each other, and to explore the transformations effected in the text's passage from one equilibrium to another via the complex space of the cybernetic "black box." But even this cannot get under way until the extent of the opening "tableau" (the initial set of signals) has been determined, supposedly no easy task if, as in The Mysterious Island, there is not a literal, synchronic tableau (the reader is plunged into the narrative in medias res). However, Barthes's "dialectical" recourse to the final tableau of the novel, actually two synchronic "views"--the first of the six colonists stranded and starving on a bare rock (all that remains of their island), the second of the same six, now happily resettled in their new, flourishing colony in Iowa--leads him back to a clearer view of the opening tableau. Whereas the closing image of destitution has as its correlate the initial destitution of the castaways, cast up by their wrecked balloon, without food or resources of any sort, onto the island they must master in order to survive, the closing image of abundance (the Iowean colonization) has as its correlate the gradual colonization of the Pacific island that constitutes the main (diegetic) story line of the novel. Barthes therefore attributes to the first tableau all of the "data" assembled in the opening chapters of the novel. It is a tableau rhetorically sealed by the episode of the castaways' reunion with Cyrus Smith (the missing engineer), and the discovery that their fire (which had been lit with their only match) has gone out. Verne's heroes being thus brought face to face (in a pure, quasi "algebraic" manner) with their total lack of tools, the story proper can begin. The cybernetic model has uncovered a repeated paradigm destitution/colonization, but the repetition is "faulty": both destitutions are "tableaux," but the first colonization is a "story." Barthes merges the vocabulary of information theory with that of alchemy (if not of magic tricks) when, with a flourish, he treats this interference within the message [cette disturbance] as the key that unlocks the "black box" and opens up his reading. That is, the disturbance reveals the two foundational codes to be "roughly hewn" in the rest of his essay:

it is this disturbance which "opens" (like a first key) the process of analysis, by revealing two codes: one, which is static, refers to the Adamic situation of the colonists, exemplary in the initial tableau and...