Titian's sexual imagery, or rape in art, or the history of attitudes to rape, or the

cultural history of sixteenth-century Venice ....

To clear the ground slightly, then, I am assuming that there is a distinction
between research and other forms of study. Research is expected to make a con-
tribution to knowledge; it uncovers something new. Research is expected to be
'original' in the sense that it is independent: the contribution, whatever it is,
originates, in that fairly modest sense, with the researcher. It does not have to
be 'original' in the much more daunting sense that it springs fully armed from
the head of the researcher without reference to any previous account. On the
contrary, in fact: it is much more likely to involve assembling ideas that have
not been brought together in quite that way before. And it does not have to shift
the paradigm: the contribution can be quite small, a piece of the jigsaw. But
research is expected to make a difference to the standard account of a topic,
whatever that topic might be.

~
So far, my research on this painting has consisted of analysing the image fairly
closely, in the light of something I bring to it from elsewhere. There is no such
thing as 'pure' reading: interpretation always involves extra-textual knowledge.
Some of this is general, part of the repertoire of knowledges that constitutes a
culture; some of it is personal, a matter of one's own interests or biography-
and some of it is derived from secondary sources. The first impulse of many
researchers, confronted by an unfamiliar text, is to look up what others have
said about it on the internet, in the library, in bibliographies provided for the
purpose.
Secondary sources have their uses. They will soon make clear that the story
of Lucretia is told by Livy and Ovid, and discussed by Saint Augustine. They
will indicate the place of this painting in Titian's work, and provoke compar-
isons of his manner of painting with his contemporaries and his master.
Giovanni Bellini. All this is valuable, if it leads to further textual analysis.
Always read the sources and consider the analogues. Never take other people
word for it. This is the key to saying something new: what is distinctive about
this text emerges as its difference from all the others.
Secondary material can be unduly seductive too, however. Textual analysis
is hard - and, if it isn't, it ought to be. It is always much easier to do a literature
search, or read an anthology of essays. It is easier, but less productive. What
secondary sources usually provide is well informed, coherent and rhetorically
persuasive arguments, which can leave the researcher convinced that whatever
can be said has been said already. The way to use secondary sources is very spar-
ingly indeed. I prefer to make a list of the questions posed by the text and arrive
 TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AS A RESEARCH METHOD 161

at my own tentative, provisional answers, and only then to read other people's
interpretations.
But what prevents my account from being pure subjectivism, just my
opinion? Suppose I put forward an outlandish idea? Suppose, say,instead of the
convictions of 1970S feminism (which are, of course, impeccable!), I bring my
own private preoccupations, and decide that the two figures represented are
'really' brother and sister, or that Tarquin is a woman in drag. What is to stop
me calling that 'research' on the same basis? Or, how does textual analysis differ
from free association?
It differs, I suggest, in terms of the way we conceptualise the role of a third
party, a reader or, in this instance, the spectator. Take the uncertainty about the
response the painting invites. I proposed that Tarquin and Lucretia invited the
viewer to be more shocked than titillated, but also that this was open to dis-
cussion. How would we go about resolving the question - if, indeed, we can?
My inclination would be to appeal to a supposed addressee: the lighting is there
for a viewer; the composition lines are there to be interpreted. This is repre-
sentation, not an event, and representation is made for someone, addressed to
someone, even if the work never sees the light of day, or never reaches a spec-
tator other than the artist.
How does this invocation of a third party advance the argument? Traditional
forms of cultural criticism often have difficulty with this issue. The viewer is
an individual, so the story goes, and brings individual expectations and values
to the picture. Doesn't that just confirm that the text can mean anything we
choose, whatever happens to strike us? That all readings are equal?
I do not think so. Roland Barthes notoriously champions the rights of the
reader in his essay on 'The Death of the Author'." The reader who is to be
liberated by the proposed execution of the Author is no more, he maintains,
than the 'destination' of the text. This polemic first appeared in 1967, only a
year before workers and students took to the streets of Paris side by side. A
product of its moment, the essay reads like a manifesto, and in it Barthes
unmasks the Author as the alibi of the critical institution. Critics, he says, hug
the text to themselves, claim a superior access (based on their research, of
course) to the Author's intentions, and then explain the work in those terms,
excluding all other possible interpretations. Criticism allots itself 'the impor-
tant task of discovering the Author ... beneath the work: when the Author has
been found, the text is "explained" - victory to the critic'. 5
The real tyranny, in other words, is exercised by the critical institution,
which secures its authority by exerting a stranglehold on what is admissible as
an interpretation. Scholarship - hunting down diaries, letters, autobiogra-
phies, recorded conversations, attributed remarks and general gossip -
produces a conjectural author, and on the basis of this figure's equally
onjectural character and views, it isolates an even more conjectural intention,
162 CATHERINE BELSEY

which can then be invoked to fend off new readings of the texts themselves. 'To
give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final
signified, to close the writing,' Barthes insists." In a follow-up essay, 'What i
an Author?', Michel Foucault calls this same restrictive construct of the insti-
tution 'the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning'. 7
Barthes's call-to-arms is perfectly perspicuous up to this point, though it i
sometimes hard to tell that from some of the extraordinary commentaries and
counter-attacks it seems to have generated. It concludes, still in the spirit of its
time, by siding with the people: 'the birth of the reader must be at cost of the
death of the Author'. In this final paragraph, however, it appears that the reader
is not simply a person, not you or me, not, indeed, an individual at all. Here i
what Barthes says:

a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and

entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but
there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the
reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on
which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without
any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its
destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the
reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that
someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the
written text is constituted.f

This utopian figure, without biography or psychology, does not exist in any
material sense. To sustain the analogy with the French Revolution on which it
depends, Barthes's manifesto has to locate the reader in the place of the people.
The people in this context are not individuals, however, but an ideal type, the
oppressed, who will rise up and seize control of.their collective destiny. In the
same way, Barthes's reader is the ideal addressee of the work, the representa-
tive of all those whose interpretations the institution has excluded. What is at
stake, then, is not a person at all, but a position in relation to the text. To avoid
the restrictive practices of the institution, to escape its 'thrift' and proliferate
meanings, to uncover, in other words, something new, interpretation attends to
all the quotations that make up the text, the traces by which it is constituted.
We are still absorbing the implications of that challenge, in my view. Barthes
is certainly not proposing that we simply shift the authority from the head of
the author to the head of the reader. The main problem for us now is that, while
most people are very willing to surrender the authority of the author, along
with intimidation by 'intention', they often want to replace it with the author-
ity of the reader as individual. This was not Barthes's point at all. His reader is
no more than the destination of the multiple writings and inter textual relations
 TEXTUAL Al ALYSIS AS A RESEARCH METHOD 163

that make up the text itself. In other words, the essay does not support a vague
subjectivism, in which the text means whatever it means to me, and there is
nothing to discuss. On the contrary: 'to read' is a transitive verb. We read some-
thing, and that something exists in its difference. If Tarquin and Lucretia were no
more than a blank space for the reader's fantasies, it would be indistinguishable
from The Venus of Urbino or Tracey Emin's Bed. Barthes urges us to be more
rigorous, not less.