"S/Z" is a nearly unreadable book about reading, a two-hundred-page crawl through a thirty-page story by Balzac…. The reader emerges, as from that machine of Kafka's which engraved commandments upon the transgressor's skin, lexically enriched but lacerated; I have no recollection of any other book ostensibly in the English language which gave me such pains to peruse. Barthes says elsewhere, of good prose, that "it grates, it cuts," and his own is notably abrasive, his vocabulary a gnashing, flashing compound of Greek [and terms lifted from modern linguistics and common words] … recoined with a specific and not easily grasped meaning. His style is dense, terse, nervous, parenthetical, sometimes arch, and faintly insolent. He seems often to be recapitulating something we should have read elsewhere but haven't. He appropriates to the language of literary criticism a certain pseudo-mathematical sharpness. His method, in "S/Z," of moving by crabbed jerks through an after all rather melodramatic and romantic tale produced in this reviewer sensations of forestallment and obstruction so oppressive that relief manifested itself in the chronic form of an irresistible doze and, once, of an absolving dyspepsia.

Such a confession of readerly discomfort is appropriate here, for Barthes insists, in these two books, on the supremacy of "readerly" (lisible) over "writerly" (scriptible) literature…. The interaction between the never ideal reader and the infinitely various text is more concretely, and playfully, elaborated in "The Pleasure of the Text."… Traditional explicative criticism assumes a text from which all blemishes of inattention or miscomprehension have been removed by close study; pure text is left. Barthes, contrariwise, rejoices in the irregularities of the reading process…. Amusingly but not frivolously, he personifies the text; it seduces, yearns. (pp. 189-90)

Where other critics probe for the symbolical or ideological secrets of a work, Barthes, as businesslike as an editor, demonstrates an intimate concern with the verbal manipulation of suspense and such workaday details as the fiction's chronology…. Barthes's critical approach seems specifically manly—insisting on readerly activity rather than passivity and ever reminding itself (in this Barthes remains, as he began, a Marxist critic) that reading is a transaction, an economic exchange. (p. 191)

[Barthes] asserts, "Replete Literature, readerly literature, can no longer be written." Why not? Why must there be a nouveau roman, and nouveaux critiques? This question, the end product of Barthes's ingenious critical discourse upon Balzac's narrative discourse, is raised in "S/Z" but not answered. Replete Literature, which ends, in his view, with Flaubert, is "mortally stalked by the army of stereotypes it contains." Why a crisis irreversibly arose at a specific time in history is sketched by Barthes in his first book, "Writing Degree Zero" (1953). Classical writing began in France with the ascendency of bourgeois ideals over the doctrines of the ancien régime in the middle of the seventeenth century and survived the apparent disruptions of Romanticism and the Revolution…. By the eighteen-fifties, however, according to Barthes, the rise in Europe of modern industrial capitalism had created another social class—the proletariat. The bourgeois writer, until then "sole judge of other people's woes and without anyone else to gaze on him," thenceforth is "torn between his social condition and his intellectual vocation" and "falls a prey to ambiguity, since his consciousness no longer accounts for the whole of his condition." Now, in "Mythologies" (1957; reprinted in 1970), Barthes is hard pressed to explain why, at this late date, bourgeois myths, odious and stale as they are, seem to be the only ones around; myths of the left, he admits, are "poverty-stricken," "barren," "meagre," "clumsy"—the Stalin myth, for instance. As a critic dissecting from the standpoint of the left the "well-fed, sleek, expansive, garrulous" myths of the bourgeois right, he detects in his role an emptiness, a mere destructiveness…. The same intelligence that permits Barthes to see through—as a psychologist sees through neuroses, an anthropologist through taboos—the bourgeois myths or codes, whether in the advertisements of Elle or in the sentences of Balzac, exposes to his vision the mysterious negativity, the terrible thinness, of the revolutionary alternative. (pp. 191-92)

["The Pleasure of the Text"] affords slight, as well as brief, pleasure. Paragraphs … are arranged in alphabetical order of topic (Affirmation, Babel, Babil, Bords, Brio, Clivage, etc.)—a tour de force that does not absolutely undermine but does not much encourage, either, any sense of developing flow or over-all theme. Barthes's subtlety seems to please itself in a vacuum; there are not enough concrete instances of textual pleasure. When one is cited, it is often an author's lapse, a "gap."… One cannot help but feel that the authors … whimsically cherished are being condescended to and impudently pillaged. Barthes licenses himself, and us, to roam among the classics as an atheist roams in nature, free to be amused where he will, without any thought of a Creator's intention.

But this last sentence, of course, holds a number of deliberately offended presumptions—"great books are a serious business," "a work of art has a single intention," etc. Barthes's scattered, playful aperçus in search of "pleasure" are, like the rigorous analysis of "S/Z," a way of combatting the "deceptively univocal reading" that castrates, "The Pleasure of the Text" is a little flirt of a text, but she ends splayed by a hearty assault of sexual imagery from Barthes …, who defines his critical lust as the wish to admit "the anonymous body of the actor into my ear." Such is his bliss; such is the strenuous relationship he proposes between the literate and literature. Strenuous, but scarcely admitting of qualitative distinctions. The muzzle that his own prose presses at our ear smiles a little curiously, even smirks, like the author's photograph on the back of these two jackets. Barthes compels our respect more by what he demands than by what he delivers; his criticism lacks only the quality of inspiring trust. It is never relaxed. He teaches us to see multiple layers of reader-writer interaction hovering above every page; above his own pages there is, faint but obscuring, a frosted layer of irony that blurs opus and commentary into a single plane. (pp. 193-94)