The Hermeneutic Code: Pocket Edition

This was originally a post for Small Gold Objects, the Office of Modern Composition’s newsletter. Even though this newsletter, The Last Stop on the Late Train, is about Information Saturation, I share this in the hope that my readers will enjoy it, too.

It is your misfortune to be stuck in an Alpine funicular with me. You want to bask in the sublime vistas of snow capped peaks, but I speak over your protests and insist that you must hear my pocket lecture on the French semiotician Roland Barthes’ hermeneutic code.

Roland Barthes

In Fiction, according to Barthes’, the text is a “stereographic terrain” i.e. it is a landscape, a ‘topos’, created by sound.

The text is not the story itself, rather it is the “fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network, the movements and inflections of a vast ‘dissolve’.”

The ‘vast dissolve’ of the world of the story is created by the interweaving of five codes: the proairetic, the semantic, the hermeneutic, the cultural, and the symbolic.

An interlude from me: these codes are categories, and while Barthes says there are five, one could just as easily argue for slightly different categories and end up with four, or six, or seven but the idea is the same — several different ‘voices’ interweave in a text to produce that text.

Here are the codes en bref:

a) The Proairetic: the code of ‘praxis’ or action and here we can think, “Jack and Jill went up the hill”— now that’s action — and then Jack falls down and Jill tumbles after. Lots of verbs following subjects so we know that things are being instantiated in the world — that’s praxis.

b) The Semantic: words and their associations…choose wisely!

c) The Hermeneutic: BY FAR the most important for our purposes, the code of Enigma and Resolution. More to follow on this.

d) The Cultural: the code that works based on a shared cultural understanding of meaning

e) The Symbolic: the code of substitution where one thing can stand for another

It is at this point that I pause the lecture and mention that Barthes was killed by a laundry van, and that whenever I see a laundry van on the road I shake my first at it. Now let’s continue.

5) A note for practitioners regarding the symbolic code: I urge you to stay away from it. Focus on telling good stories controlled by characters and actions, and let the symbols organically arise rather than try and over-orchestrate with symbols (sorry, I can’t write without giving advice).

6) The hermeneutic code is the most important! Because it’s what drives a story. Early on, a text generates enigmas. What happens next? Who killed Roger Rabbit? Who is the man in the iron mask? The middle of a story consists of the delays that we are faced with as we proceed to the inevitable resolution of the enigma.

7) And this is where Barthes gives us gold-dust when he says that there are five types of delays to an enigma’s eventual resolution and these are: jammings, snares, equivocations, partial answers, suspended answers. You can use these categories to beef up your middles.

8) So know we have a new model for stories — Enigma — Delays — Resolution, partial or full.

9) You may ask — do all enigmas always require closure and resolution? And the answer is this is art not chemistry, people! Of course not all enigmas must be resolved, but some must be, and finding which ones you can leave open and which must be closed is artfulness.

“And now you know the Hermeneutic Code!” I declare. “You may go down the mountain!”

“Gosh, wow, was that really only five minutes?”

No. We’ve ridden the funicular three times. You descend the mountain. In the train station you buy a notebook and proceed to write a cracking good story!

The original post on Small Gold Objects was accompanied by this illustration by Sophie and I thought it should remain partnered with the text.

Illustrated by Sophie Lucido Johnson

In addition to me, The Office of Modern Composition consists of Jill Riddell and Sophie Lucido Johnson. Jill is the host of The Shape of the World podcast and Sophie is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of three wonderful books! If you want craft posts to your inbox, I would definitely recommend subscribing to our OMC Newsletter - Small Gold Objects.

Word-for-Word Re-Typing of Great Expectations

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