Semiotics and Thick Description (Barthes and Geertz)

Abstract

Many years ago, I was a participant in a discussion group organized by Richard Sennett that met occasionally to discuss new work of a cultural analysis, “sciences of man” sort—work coming out of structuralism and the poststructuralism that, in the United States, came so closely on its heels. Cliff Geertz was part of the group. When it came my turn to lead a discussion—on Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom!—I was somewhat surprised and taken aback by Geertz’s resistance to what might seem to me today my excessively linguistic and narratological reading of the novel. I was deep in the ascetic pleasure, the kind of self-denying self-pleasuring, of semiological and narrative theory, finding a great deal of satisfaction in taking apart the clockwork mechanism of a text to show how it all worked, and, more than that, what its workings told you about clockworks overall, what they could do and could not do, and, by extension, how those clockworks were part not only of literary schemata but also of our very toolkits for understanding our places in time and history.