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In a 1971 interview, Roland Barthes complained that his irony has been ignored:
[I]n Critique et Verite, I did speak of a science of literature, but it was in general overlooked--to my dismay, because I formulated my sentence so that this would be seen by those who pay attention to ambiguities and ellipses--that in speaking of a science of literature I had put in parentheses: "if it exists one day"; which meant that I did not in fact believe that discourse on literature could ever become "scientific." ("Interview: A Conversation..." 131)
Those who share my sense of the implausibility of these words might decide that Barthes was being ironic in this interview. In any event, the possibility of irony is indispensable, despite Barthes's own reservations. Two essays from the mid-1970s capture his plight. In 1975, Barthes compared Brillat-Savarin to "a writer who puts quotation marks around the truths he utters, not out of scientific prudence, but for fear of appearing naive (whereby we can see that irony is always timid)" ("Reading" 266). In a contemporary essay, Barthes praised Leon Bloy's writing for "the infinite recession of the questions it raised, or in still another word: its irony" ("Bloy" 193). Perhaps Barthes's relation to irony can be summarized in the words he used to describe his relation to psychoanalysis: "not scrupulous (though without his being able to pride himself on any contestation, any rejection). It is an undecided relation" (Roland Barthes 150). In this paper, I will consider the implications of Barthes "Textual Analysis of Poe's 'Valdemar'" for an ironic reading of that story, despite Barthes's insistence that his analysis is not even interpretive, let alone ironic. My premise is that no account of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" can ignore Barthes or irony.
Using the method of S/Z, Barthes arbitrarily divides the text into convenient segments or "lexias," with the title forming the first and the opening two sentences the second. As in S/Z, Barthes's analyses are often much longer than his lexias. His remarks on how the opening looks ahead to the enigma of the plot and whets "the reader's appetite" (140) are straightforward, but his discussion of the story's "cultural code" is important:
The word "extraordinary" is ambiguous: it refers...