Super-Woman
La Zambinella’s corporeal form qualifies her for model ‘Super-Womanhood.’ “From the symbolic point of view, it is now the subject’s (Sarrasine) turn to advance in avowal; he attempts to define that thing he loves in La Zambinella, and that thing is deficiency, non-being, castration. Nevertheless, however far Sarrasine goes in this kind of self-analysis, he persists in misleading himself by continuing to employ a language of double understanding: for if the extremity of weakness is the superlative term of a hierarchy, pusillanimity connotes a superlative woman, a reinforced essence, a Super-Woman; if, on the other hand, extremity is defined as the lowest depth, it designates, in the Zambinellian body, its center, which is absence.” La Zambinella’s body is the embodiment of femininity based on how it arouses Sarrasine’s eros. Her beauty obscures the repulsiveness which her castration exemplifies. Accordingly, the castration supplements La Zambinella’s body’ outstandingly.
Prospectus
Roland Barthes writes, “ Referring to what has been written i.e., to the Book (of culture, of life, of life as culture), it makes the text into a prospectus of this Book. Or again: each code is one of the forces that can take over the text (of which the text is the network), one of the voices out of which the text is woven. Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is '1ost" in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance.” The metaphorical prospectus restructures the repercussions of the codes which Roland Barthes employs in examining Sarrasine. The codes are completely based on the structure and plot of the text; thus, they are comparable to catalogues. Consequently, the codes guide Barthes presumptions concerning the effects of each of the contents of the text. Therefore, the codes are not invented theories but they are procedures for deconstructing the text.
Networking
Roland Barthes explicates, “The five codes create a kind of network, a tapas through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes text). Thus, if we make no effort to structure each code, or the five codes among themselves, we do so deliberately, in order to assume the multivalence of the text, its partial reversibility. We are, in fact, concerned not to manifest a structure but to produce a structuration.” The codes are not mutually exclusive; hence, they correspondingly contribute to the wholesome deconstruction of Sarrasina. The network eliminates the gaps that may not be categorically filled using the scrutiny of a lone code. Consequently, the overall clarification results in an amalgamated and wide-ranging inquiry.
Macedoine
The narrator in Sarrasine recounts, “On the borderline between these two so different scenes, which, a thousand times repeated in various guises, make Paris the world's most amusing and most philosophical city, I was making for myself a moral macedoine, half pleasant, half funeral. With my left foot I beat time, and I felt as though the other were in the grave. My leg was in fact chilled by one of those insidious drafts which freeze half our bodies while the other half feels the humid heat of rooms, an occurrence rather frequent at balls.” Macedoine is representative of a consolidation of amicability and unpleasantness. The two feelings transpire concurrently although they are converses. The narrator’s involvement is unquestionably transcendental for it rises above the binaries of hideousness versus pleasurableness.
