In a fascinating book, The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton examines the story of Red Riding Hood. As a cultural historian of 17th and 18th century France, Darnton is keen to strip away the accretions to the story that have become part of the tale, and to get back to the story that French rural peasants told to each other in the 17th and 18th centuries. For Darnton, the story of Red Riding Hood is a culturally and historically specific story, dealing with the dangers to children of wolves. The first order meaning is very straightforward. It is ‘Beware Wolves!’. Darnton sees the ascription of mythic status to ‘Red Riding Hood’ as a culturally specific product of recent times. To French peasants, Red Riding Hood was not a myth. It was a story with a strong warning message about the dangers of wolves.
A first order reading of the title story of The Bloody Chamber, similar to the one offered by Darnton of Red Riding Hood is also both possible and plausible. In this story, a much older, sexually experienced man marries a young woman, barely an adult, who is sexually inexperienced and perhaps naïve. He turns out to have rather predatory designs upon her. The meaning of the story, at the first level would then be quite simply, for inexperienced 18 year old women to be sceptical about the intentions of sexually experienced men old enough to be their fathers. Their intentions are probably not centred around companionate marriage and romantic love. This is a perfectly legitimate way in which to read the story, as a warning. Read this way it is precisely the sort of warning that the 18 year old Dianna Spencer could well have profited from before marrying the 40 year old, sexually experienced and emotionally jaded Charles Windsor and embarking upon her preordained role as a symbol of emotional victimhood.
This leads nicely into the second level of semiological analysis, the mythic. For Darnton, at the first level of semiological analysis, a wolf is just a wolf, and a key is just a key. At the mythic level, the SIGNIFIERS incorporate that first level of meaning, and go beyond it. So, at the mythic level a wolf is more than a wolf and a key is more than a key. Just as Darnton claimed that the ‘real’ meaning of Red Riding Hood is to be found, not at the mythic level, but at the first level, proponents of the mythic claim that the ‘real’ meaning is to be found at the second level. Keys are not simply keys nor are wolves simply wolves.
The most widely accepted mythic second level structure is Freudianism. And, of course, what Freud claimed to be doing was precisely the uncovering the real meaning behind certain phenomena. The title story in The Bloody Chamber is littered with Freudian symbolism. A young woman has her first sexual encounter with a man old enough to be her father and is presented with a key which when fitted in to a lock becomes covered in blood. Long corridors lead to dark secrets and so on.
It quite possible to give a Freudian reading of The Bloody Chamber. However, there are other possible second level mythic readings, and it is equally possible to read The Bloody Chamber as being about how a certain kind of meaning and significance can be bestowed upon a character.
Two worlds seem to coexist in the story. A rational world of Railway stations, telephones that work, cities which have a name like Paris and a more opaque world, a castle somewhere in Brittany, neither landlocked nor an island but connected by a path covered by the tides according to the rhythms of the waxing and waning moon, filled with paintings by Ensor and Gaugin, ‘Out of the night we come, into the night we go’. A world where desires are taken for granted, but left unexplained. It is not the world of a serial killer whose motives can be unlocked by psychology. It is a gothic world, rich in symbolism and short on rational motivation.
It is the second world that bestows significance upon the woman. She steps, ‘like Eve’ into her preordained role, behaving exactly as the man knew she would. The woman is defined in her role by the structures of desire of the man. This passive quality in the woman, the way her role requires her to be defined by someone else’s desires has provoked a degree of discontent from feminist critics. Whilst there is no particular endorsement of it, neither is the passive nature of female sexual desire in the story a contested concept.
Part of the problem is that a process occurs, according to Bathes, in which what is mythical becomes naturalised. At the second level, the mythic level, the relationship between signifier and signified is what Barthes calls non-arbitrary. At the first level, the relationship between the word ‘dog’ and the concept dog is arbitrary. Any sound would do just as well as any other to express the concept. At the second level, the SIGNIFIER is already a bearer of meaning. It carries as its meaning its first level signified. A bloodstained key being withdrawn from a lock does not arbitrarily have as its SIGNIFIED a Freudian phallic concept. A volume of Debretts falling from a shelf would not work equally well.
There is a plausible second level reading of The Bloody Chamber which sees the final coda, the return to bourgeois life as a diminution. The mark on the forehead is a reminder that having a kind of mythic significance in ones life is bought at a cost. And that the alternative to this kind of significance is the life of a petit bourgeois. When the mythic fails, there is nothing left but the mundane.
The third level of semiological analysis can I think, defuse the feminist concerns about the picture of female sexuality that is presented in The Bloody Chamber.
In the representation below, the bold underlined italic typeface represents the third level of semiological analysis. In it, the sign at the second mythic level, is the signifier at the third level. I will attempt to clarify quite what this means in terms of understanding Angela Carter’s book.
Part of the problem with a third level semiological analysis is that we find it very hard to give any clear picture of what the signified could be at the third level. The signifier is the mythic content, for example a ‘freudianised’ bloody key. When at the second level, the signifier is a key, the signified is a ‘freudianised’ key. In order to have a second level understanding, one must assimilate the first order signified. The second order signified is an assimilated first order signified. Understanding at the third level must presuppose a grasp of the second order signified.So, we can fairly safely assume that the third order signified is something along the lines of an assimilated second order signified. That is to say the third order signified will be of the form:
(third order understaning) of second order signified
for example:
(third order understanding) of a ‘freudianised’ key
In order to have a third order understanding one must have a second order understanding, a symbolic or mythic interpretation, and one then goes beyond it, taking that interpretation at a signifier itself, for which there is a signified, which represents the new understanding of the text.
What I want to suggest is that this third order understanding is best described as irony and the kind of understanding is yields a post-modern understanding of the text.
The sort of understanding that is required of the reader is one in which both the first and second order readings are presupposed and gone beyond. It therefore requires a certain knowing ness on the part of the reader. A recognition that a mythic or a Freudian interpretation is not only possible, but that the text draws attention to its own mythic nature. It presents itself as being composed of mythic elements. That is to rather than simply telling a story which assumes the status of a myth, or retelling a myth or telling a new myth, the text presents itself as being, from the very beginning, something in which its basic elements are already mythic.
Red Riding Hood starts off as a simple story about a girl going for a work, and then assumes a mythic status in the course of the telling. A third level understanding already knows that the elements of the story have mythic status. We are not understanding the story as a myth, but understanding that it presupposes that we already have mythic understanding which is the basis for a further interpretation.
Umbeto Eco characterises the post-modern the following way:
“I think of a post-modern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say, ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will none the less have said what he wanted to say, that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence.” (Umberto Eco. 1992)
Postmodern understanding presupposes that a certain level of understanding is shared, between speaker and listener or between writer and reader. And it seems that the kind of understanding that Angela Carter requires is of this order. Angela Carter is not simply retelling myths or writing new myths. She demands of us that in order to understand them that we already recognise their mythic quality, and distance ourselves from it in a certain way. We don’t read these myths ‘innocently’ as Umberto Eco would put it. We read them with a knowing distance. If to read them merely as myths, to read them innocently, is to read them at the second semiological level, then by reading them at a third level of semiological analysis, we read them knowingly, ‘ironically’. To cite Umberto Eco again, the post-modern requires not a negation of the already said, but its ironic rethinking.
Furthermore, first and second level semiological analysis turns up, as signifieds, something like a concept or a meaning. The signified is an interpretation of the signifier. If a third level semiological analysis is to provide an interpretation, it is in terms of ironic correlatives of second level concepts and meanings. But I don’t think it can. I can not begin to imagine what an ‘ironic’ concept would be. It seems that rather than offering a conceptual understanding of a text, in the way that a first or second order reading does, a third order reading involves a way of reading rather than an interpretation. It offers an ‘ironic’ or ‘knowing’ way of reading a text, which takes as its basis an interpretation, the second order interpretation, but which distances itself from that interpretation, without supplanting it with a further interpretation. A post-modern reading is a way of reading a text which relies upon an interpretation but does not itself supply an interpretation.
This helps us defuse certain feminist reservations about the story The Bloody Chamber. A post-modern reading achieves a certain ‘ironic’ distance from the sort of interpretation that feminist find problematic, without supplanting that interpretation. It is as though the writer and reader acknowledge that there is something problematic and a knowing look passes between us, neither endorsing nor contesting that problematic interpretation, but acknowledging the ‘distance’ that our inability to accept, even at the mythic level, that the signifiers of problematic female passivity can stand simply and innocently for that very thing, female passivity.
In that respect, since there is no definitive ironic stance, the reader is the determinant of the meaning of the story. Irony of this kind is a negative stance it isn’t an endorsement of any particular reading, rather a rejection of the simple and innocent one. What the reader then makes of it is left up to them.
