The Imagery of ‘Faubourg Saint-Honore’
Roland Barthes writes, “Midnight had just sounded from the clock of the Elysee-Bourbon. * A metonymy leads from the Elysee-Bourbon to the same Wealth, since the Faubourg Saint-Honore is a wealthy neighborhood. This wealth is itself connoted: a neighborhood of nouveaux riches, the Faubourg Saint-Honore refers by synecdoche to the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, a mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect; where gold is produced without an origin, diabolically (the symbolic definition of speculation) (SEM. Wealth).” Roland’s portrayal of the vicinity represents it as a locale for affluent individuals. Roland Barthes’ deconstruction edifies a reader concerning the symbolic inference of Elysee-Bourbon. Restoration is a sponsor of Paris’ mystical abundance.
The Imagery of a Painting
Roland Barthes elucidates, “Every literary description is a view: It could be said that the speaker, before describing, stands at the window, not so much to see , but to establish what he sees by its frame: the window frame crates scene… Joseph Brideau has no scruple about painting a Raphael ( since the painter too must copy another code, an anterior code), any more than Balzac has in declaring this pastiche to be a masterpiece.” Literature and art are profoundly entwined; tackling literature from the perspective of art sustains realism in a literary composition. Accordingly, literature should assimilate objects to convert ideas into classic imagery. Realism is comparable to pastiche since it endeavors to portray the imagery as it would look in a factual setting.
The Masterpiece
La Zambillena’s form generates the imagery of an unqualified ‘masterpiece’: “The Zambinellan body is a real body; but this real body is total ( glorious , miraculous) only insofar as it descends from a body already written by statuary( Ancient Greece, Pygmalion); it too ( Like the other bodies in Sarrasine) is a replica ensuing from a code. Yet the duplicative chain may assert its origin and the Code declare itself grounded, stooped, jammed.” The Code’s reaction renders ‘the Zambinella Body’ an unreserved Masterpiece whose deconstruction is not forthright. The Codes cooperate in discerning the source of the exceptional body which transcends the conventional womanly physique.
