The Evolution of a Writerly Text: Appropriating a Poststructuralist Application of Roland Barthes’ S/Z in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Abstract

Post-structuralism is a literary movement that developed from the structuralism of Roland Barthes, and it is on this basis that the article chooses the spectrum of poststructuralist theory as its scope, and Roland Barthes’ theoretical approach as its benchmark. This article, inspired by the same revisionist spirit and empirical analysis implemented by Barthes’ poststructuralist reading of Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), aims to contribute to this new reading by approaching F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1926). Reading The Great Gatsby is a zeitgeist quasimanifesto for living in the twenty-first century; as we live in a majoritarian capitalist society with a continual stratospheric rise in materialistic egoism that it becomes a conduit for not falling into the ambits of capitalism. It gathers some of the poststructuralist aspects, and it is by utilizing Barthes’ six codes that it unveils a complex system of textual codes. Hence; in this paper, six codes of Barthes’ S/Z, (i.e.) the hermeneutic, the symbolic, semic, proairetic, referential and the cultural code will be applied and appropriated to the novel. Approaching from this point, the article next takes the analysis of the codes which will be discussed in tandem and regarded as profoundly significant to approaching a text; for Barthes foregrounds the codes as the raison d’etre for a text to writerly exist. By applying Barthes’ codes, it can be thereby corroborated that in poststructuralism, the reader deconstructs and decodes the paradigmatic and discursive kaleidoscopes that emulates a text, unearthing the inchoate mass of ideas.