Where the Stress Falls (8 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
That every generation fears, misunderstands, and condescends to its successor—this, too, is a function of the equivalence of history and memory (history being what it is agreed on, collectively, to remember). Each generation has its distinctive memories, and the elapsing of time, which brings with it a steady accumulation of loss, confers on those memories a normativeness which cannot possibly be honored by the young, who are busy compiling their memories, their benchmarks. One of Zagajewski’s most moving portraits of elders is of Stefan Szuman, an illustrious member of the interwar Polish intelligentsia (he had known Stanislaw Witkiewicz and Bruno Schulz) and now a retired professor at the university living in isolation and penury. Its point is Zagajewski’s realization, thinking back, that he and his literary friends could only have seemed like fools and savages, “shaped by a postwar education, by new schools, new papers, new radio, new TV,” to the defeated,
homely, embittered Szuman and his wife. The rule seems to be: each generation looks upon its successor generation as barbarians.
homely, embittered Szuman and his wife. The rule seems to be: each generation looks upon its successor generation as barbarians.
Zagajewski, himself no longer young and now a teacher of American students, is committed to not replicating, in his turn, that kind of despair and incomprehension. Nor is he content to write off an entire older Polish generation of intellectuals and artists, his generation’s “enemy”—the true believers and those who just sold out—for turpitude and cowardice: they weren’t simply devils, any more than he and his friends were angels. As for those “who began by serving Stalin’s civilization” but then changed, Zagajewski writes: “I don’t condemn them for their early, youthful intoxication. I’m more inclined to marvel at the generosity of human nature, which offers gifted young people a second chance, the opportunity for a moral comeback.”
At the heart of this assessment is the wisdom of the novelist, a professional of empathy, rather than that of a lyric poet. (Zagajewski has written four novels, none as yet translated into English.) The dramatic monologue “Betrayal” in
Two Cities
begins:
Two Cities
begins:
Why did I do that? Why did I do what? Why was I who I was? And who was I? I am already beginning to regret that I agreed to grant you this interview. For years I refused; you must have asked me at a weak moment or in a moment of anxiety … What did that world look like? The one you were too late to get to know. The same as this one. Completely different.
That everything is always different … and the same: a poet’s wisdom. Actually, wisdom
tout court.
tout court.
Of course, history should never be thought of with a capital
H.
The governing sense of Zagajewski’s memory-work is his awareness of having lived through several historical periods, in the course of which things eventually got better. Modestly, imperfectly—not utopianly—better. The young Zagajewski and his comrades in dissidence had assumed that communism would last another hundred, two hundred years, when, in fact, it had less than two decades to go. Lesson: evil is not immutable. The reality is, everyone outlives an old self, often more than one, in the course of a reasonably long life.
H.
The governing sense of Zagajewski’s memory-work is his awareness of having lived through several historical periods, in the course of which things eventually got better. Modestly, imperfectly—not utopianly—better. The young Zagajewski and his comrades in dissidence had assumed that communism would last another hundred, two hundred years, when, in fact, it had less than two decades to go. Lesson: evil is not immutable. The reality is, everyone outlives an old self, often more than one, in the course of a reasonably long life.
Another Beauty
is, in part, a meditation on easing the clamp of history: liberating the self from “the grimaces and caprices” of history. That should not be so hard in the less flagrantly evil public world that has come into being in Poland since 1989. But institutions may be more easily liquidated than a temperament. Zagajewski’s temperament (that is, the dialogue he conducts with himself) is rooted in an era when heroism was at least an option, and ethical rigor still something admired and consecrated by the genius of several national literatures. How to negotiate a soft landing onto the new lowland of diminished moral expectations and shabby artistic standards is the problem of all the Central European writers whose tenacities were forged in the bad old days.
is, in part, a meditation on easing the clamp of history: liberating the self from “the grimaces and caprices” of history. That should not be so hard in the less flagrantly evil public world that has come into being in Poland since 1989. But institutions may be more easily liquidated than a temperament. Zagajewski’s temperament (that is, the dialogue he conducts with himself) is rooted in an era when heroism was at least an option, and ethical rigor still something admired and consecrated by the genius of several national literatures. How to negotiate a soft landing onto the new lowland of diminished moral expectations and shabby artistic standards is the problem of all the Central European writers whose tenacities were forged in the bad old days.
The maturing that Zagajewski chronicles can be described as the relaxing of this temperament: the finding of the right openness, the right calmness, the right inwardness. (He says he can only write when he feels happy, peaceful.) Exaltation—and who can gainsay this judgment from a member of the generation of ’68?—is viewed with a skeptical eye. Hyperemphatic intensity holds no allure. His end of the religious spectrum does not include any notion of the sacred, which figures centrally in the work of the late Jerzy Grotowski and the theatre center in Gardzienice led by Wlodzimierz Staniewski. While the sacralecstatic tradition is still alive in Polish theatre—but then theatre, especially this kind of theatre, is compulsorily collective—it has no place in contemporary Polish literature.
Another Beauty
is suffused with the humility of a spiritual longing that precludes frenzy, and envisages no large gestures of sacrifice. As Zagajewski notes: “The week isn’t made up only of Sundays.”
Another Beauty
is suffused with the humility of a spiritual longing that precludes frenzy, and envisages no large gestures of sacrifice. As Zagajewski notes: “The week isn’t made up only of Sundays.”
Some of his keenest pages are descriptions of happiness, the everyday happiness of a connoisseur of solitary delights: strolling, reading, listening to Beethoven or Schumann. The “I” of
Another Beauty
is scrupulous, vulnerable, earnest—without a jot of self-protective irony. And neither Zagajewski nor this reader would wish it otherwise. Irony would come at the cost of so much pleasure. “Ecstasy and irony rarely meet in the world of art,” Zagajewski observes. “When they do it’s usually for the purposes of mutual sabotage; they struggle to diminish each other’s power.” And he is unabashedly on the side of ecstasy.
Another Beauty
is scrupulous, vulnerable, earnest—without a jot of self-protective irony. And neither Zagajewski nor this reader would wish it otherwise. Irony would come at the cost of so much pleasure. “Ecstasy and irony rarely meet in the world of art,” Zagajewski observes. “When they do it’s usually for the purposes of mutual sabotage; they struggle to diminish each other’s power.” And he is unabashedly on the side of ecstasy.
These descriptions are tributes to what produces happiness, not celebrations of the receptive self. He may simply describe something he loves, or quote a favorite poem: the book is a sampling of appreciations and sympathies. There are penetrating sketches of admired friends such as Adam Michnik, a beacon of resistance to the dictatorship (who while in jail wrote about the poet Zbigniew Herbert, among others, in a book he titled
From the History of Honor in Poland
); there is a reverential salute to the ancient doyen of Polish émigrés in Paris, the painter, writer, and heroic alumnus of Soviet prison camps Józef Czapski.
L’enfer, c’est les autres
. No, it is others who save us, Zagajewski declares in the poem that gives the book its title and serves as its epigraph.
From the History of Honor in Poland
); there is a reverential salute to the ancient doyen of Polish émigrés in Paris, the painter, writer, and heroic alumnus of Soviet prison camps Józef Czapski.
L’enfer, c’est les autres
. No, it is others who save us, Zagajewski declares in the poem that gives the book its title and serves as its epigraph.
Here is “Another Beauty” in the new version by the book’s translator, Clare Cavanagh:
We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
This is why I pause: which word
to use, you or he. Each he
betrays some you, but
calm conversation bides its time
in others’ poems.
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
This is why I pause: which word
to use, you or he. Each he
betrays some you, but
calm conversation bides its time
in others’ poems.
And here it is as it appeared in 1985 in
Tremor
:
Selected Poems
, Zagajewski’s first collection of poems in English, translated by Renata Gorczynski, where it is entitled “In the Beauty Created by Others”:
Tremor
:
Selected Poems
, Zagajewski’s first collection of poems in English, translated by Renata Gorczynski, where it is entitled “In the Beauty Created by Others”:
Only in the beauty created
by others is there consolation,
in the music of others and in others’ poems.
Only others save us,
even though solitude tastes like
opium. The others are not hell,
if you see them early, with their
foreheads pure, cleansed by dreams.
That is why I wonder what
word should be used, “he” or “you.” Every “he”
is a betrayal of a certain “you” but
in return someone else’s poem
offers the fidelity of a sober dialogue.
by others is there consolation,
in the music of others and in others’ poems.
Only others save us,
even though solitude tastes like
opium. The others are not hell,
if you see them early, with their
foreheads pure, cleansed by dreams.
That is why I wonder what
word should be used, “he” or “you.” Every “he”
is a betrayal of a certain “you” but
in return someone else’s poem
offers the fidelity of a sober dialogue.
A defense of poetry
and
a defense of goodness, or, more exactly, of good-naturedness.
and
a defense of goodness, or, more exactly, of good-naturedness.
Nothing could take the reader in a more contrary direction to today’s cult of the excitements of self than to follow Zagajewski as he unspools his seductive praise of serenity, sympathy, forbearance; of “the calm and courage of an ordinary life.” To declare “I believe in truth!” and, in another passage, “Goodness does exist!” (those exclamation points!) seems, if not Panglossian—one American reviewer detected a touch of Panglossian uplift in the book—then at least quixotic. This culture offers few current models of masculine sweetness, and those we already possess, from past literature, are associated with naïveté, childlikeness, social innocence: Joe Gargery in
Great Expectations
, Alyosha in
The Brothers Karamazov.
Zagajewski’s persona in
Another Beauty
is anything but innocent in that sense. But he has a special gift for conjuring up states of complex innocence, the innocence of genius, as in his heartrending portrait-poem “Franz Schubert: A Press Conference.”
Great Expectations
, Alyosha in
The Brothers Karamazov.
Zagajewski’s persona in
Another Beauty
is anything but innocent in that sense. But he has a special gift for conjuring up states of complex innocence, the innocence of genius, as in his heartrending portrait-poem “Franz Schubert: A Press Conference.”
THE TITLE MAY MISLEAD.
Another Beauty
makes clear at every turn that, worshipper of greatness in poetry and other arts that he is, Zagajewski is not an aesthete. Poetry is to be judged by standards still higher: “Woe to the writer who values beauty over truth.” Poetry must
be protected from the temptations to arrogance inherent in its own states of elation.
Another Beauty
makes clear at every turn that, worshipper of greatness in poetry and other arts that he is, Zagajewski is not an aesthete. Poetry is to be judged by standards still higher: “Woe to the writer who values beauty over truth.” Poetry must
be protected from the temptations to arrogance inherent in its own states of elation.
Of course, both beauty and truth seem like frail guideposts left over from a more innocent past. In the delicate negotiation with the present which Zagajewski conducts on behalf of the endangered verities, nostalgia would count as a deficit of argument. Still, even absent the old certainties and license to perorate, he is pledged to defending the idea of “sublime” or “noble” achievement in literature—assuming, as he does, that we still need the qualities in art that are praised by such now virtually unsayable words. Zagajewski’s most eloquent, summative defense is “The Shabby and the Sublime,” an address he delivered at a Dutch university in 1998 which posed the pseudo-naïve question: Is literary greatness still possible?
The belief in literary greatness implies that the capacity for admiration is still intact. When admiration is corrupted, that is, made cynical, the question as to whether greatness is possible simply vanishes. Nihilism and admiration compete with each other, sabotage each other, struggle to diminish each other’s power. (Like irony and ecstasy.)
Disheartened though he is by “the mutation downward of European literature,” Zagajewski declines to speculate about what has given the advantage to subjectivism and the revolt against “greatness.” Perhaps those brought up on the fierceness of state-administered mediocrity find it hard to be as indignant as they might be about the extent to which mercantilist values (often sporting the mask of “democratic” or populist values) have sapped the foundations of the sublime. “Soviet civilization,” a.k.a. communism, was a great conservative force. The cultural policies of communist regimes embalmed the old, hierarchical notions of achievement, seeking to confer a noble pedigree on propagandistic banalities. In contrast, capitalism has a truly radical relation to culture, dismantling the very notion of greatness in the arts, which is now most successfully dismissed by the ecumenical philistinism of both cultural progressives and cultural reactionaries as an “elitist” presumption.
Zagajewski’s protest against the collapse of standards has nothing
analytical about it. Yet surely he understands the futility (and indignity) of simply denouncing the collapse. Orphaned pieties overheat sometimes: “Without poetry, we’d hardly be better than the mammals.” And many passages assert a familiar dismay, especially when he succumbs to the temptation to see our era as uniquely degraded. What, he inquires rhetorically, would “the great, innocent artists of the past, Giotto or van Eyck, Proust or Apollinaire, have done if some spiteful demon had set them down in our flawed and tawdry world”? Don’t know about Giotto or van Eyck; but Proust (d. 1922) and Apollinaire (d. 1918)
innocent?
I should have thought the Europe in which that colossal, senseless slaughter called World War I took place was, if anything, a good deal worse than “flawed and tawdry.”
analytical about it. Yet surely he understands the futility (and indignity) of simply denouncing the collapse. Orphaned pieties overheat sometimes: “Without poetry, we’d hardly be better than the mammals.” And many passages assert a familiar dismay, especially when he succumbs to the temptation to see our era as uniquely degraded. What, he inquires rhetorically, would “the great, innocent artists of the past, Giotto or van Eyck, Proust or Apollinaire, have done if some spiteful demon had set them down in our flawed and tawdry world”? Don’t know about Giotto or van Eyck; but Proust (d. 1922) and Apollinaire (d. 1918)
innocent?
I should have thought the Europe in which that colossal, senseless slaughter called World War I took place was, if anything, a good deal worse than “flawed and tawdry.”
The idea of art as the beleaguered vehicle of spiritual value in a secular age should not have been left unexamined. Nevertheless, Zagajewski’s utter absence of rancor and vindictiveness, his generosity of spirit, his awareness of the vulgarity of unremitting complaint and of the self-righteous assumption of one’s own cultural superiority, mark off his stance from that of the usual professional mourners of the Death of High Culture, such as the ever portentous George Steiner. (Once in a while he slips into facile assertions of the superiority of the past over the present, but even then he is never grandiose or self-aggrandizing: call it Steinerism with a human face.)
Inveterately prescriptive, occasionally sententious, Zagajewski is too shrewd, too respectful of common or ordinary wisdom, not to see the limits of each of the positions that surround and make sense out of his abiding passions. One
can
be elevated, deepened, improved by works of art. But, Zagajewski cautions, the imagination can become one of its own enemies “if it loses sight of the solid world that cannot be dissolved in art.”
can
be elevated, deepened, improved by works of art. But, Zagajewski cautions, the imagination can become one of its own enemies “if it loses sight of the solid world that cannot be dissolved in art.”
Because the book is notational, juxtapositional, it is possible for Zagajewski to entertain quite contradictory assessments. What is valuable is how divided Zagajewski is, as he himself acknowledges. The reflections and the stories in
Another Beauty
show us a subtle, important mind divided between the public world and the claims of art, between solidarity and solitude; between the original “two cities”: the Human
City and the City of God. Divided, but not overthrown. There is anguish, but then serenity keeps breaking through. There is desolation and, as well, so many fortifying pleasures supplied by the genius of others. There was scorn, until
caritas
chimed in. There is despair, but there is, just as inexorably, consolation.
Another Beauty
show us a subtle, important mind divided between the public world and the claims of art, between solidarity and solitude; between the original “two cities”: the Human
City and the City of God. Divided, but not overthrown. There is anguish, but then serenity keeps breaking through. There is desolation and, as well, so many fortifying pleasures supplied by the genius of others. There was scorn, until
caritas
chimed in. There is despair, but there is, just as inexorably, consolation.
[2001]
On Roland Barthes
The best poetry will be rhetorical criticism …
—WALLACE STEVENS (in a journal of 1899)
I rarely lose sight of myself.
—PAUL VALÉRY,
Monsieur Teste
Monsieur Teste
T
EACHER, MAN OF LETTERS
, moralist, philosopher of culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean autobiographer … of all the intellectual notables who have emerged since World War II in France, Roland Barthes is the one whose work I am most certain will endure. Barthes was in full flow, incessantly productive, as he had been for over three decades, when he was struck by a van as he started across a street in Paris in early 1980—a death felt by friends and admirers to be excruciatingly untimely. But along with the backward look of grief comes the awareness that confers upon his large, chronically mutating body of writing, as on all major work, its retroactive completeness. The development of Barthes’s work now seems logical; more than that, exhaustive. It even begins and falls silent on the same subject—that exemplary instrument in the career of consciousness, the writer’s journal. As it happens, the first essay Barthes ever published celebrates the model consciousness he found in the
Journal
of André
Gide, and what turned out to be the last essay published before he died offers Barthes’s musings on his own journal-keeping. The symmetry, however adventitious, is an utterly appropriate one, for Barthes’s writing, with its prodigious variety of subjects, has finally one great subject: writing itself.
EACHER, MAN OF LETTERS
, moralist, philosopher of culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean autobiographer … of all the intellectual notables who have emerged since World War II in France, Roland Barthes is the one whose work I am most certain will endure. Barthes was in full flow, incessantly productive, as he had been for over three decades, when he was struck by a van as he started across a street in Paris in early 1980—a death felt by friends and admirers to be excruciatingly untimely. But along with the backward look of grief comes the awareness that confers upon his large, chronically mutating body of writing, as on all major work, its retroactive completeness. The development of Barthes’s work now seems logical; more than that, exhaustive. It even begins and falls silent on the same subject—that exemplary instrument in the career of consciousness, the writer’s journal. As it happens, the first essay Barthes ever published celebrates the model consciousness he found in the
Journal
of André
Gide, and what turned out to be the last essay published before he died offers Barthes’s musings on his own journal-keeping. The symmetry, however adventitious, is an utterly appropriate one, for Barthes’s writing, with its prodigious variety of subjects, has finally one great subject: writing itself.
His early themes were those of the freelance partisan of letters, on the occasions afforded by cultural journalism, literary debate, theatre and book reviews. To these were added topics that originated and were recycled in seminars and from the lecture platform, for Barthes’s literary career was run concurrently with a (very successful) academic one, and in part as an academic one. But the voice was always singular, and self-referring; the achievement is of another, larger order than can be had even by practicing, with thrilling virtuosity, the most lively and many-tracked of academic disciplines. For all his contributions to the would-be science of signs and structures, Barthes’s endeavor was the quintessentially literary one: the writer organizing, under a series of doctrinal auspices, the theory of his own mind. And when the current enclosure of his reputation by the labels of semiology and structuralism crumbles, as it must, Barthes will appear, I think, as a rather traditional
promeneur solitaire
, and a greater writer than even his more fervent admirers now claim.
promeneur solitaire
, and a greater writer than even his more fervent admirers now claim.
HE ALWAYS WROTE
full out, was always concentrated, keen, indefatigable. This dazzling inventiveness seems not just a function of Barthes’s extraordinary powers as a mind, as a writer. It seems to have almost the status of a position—as if this is what critical discourse
must
be. “Literature is like phosphorous,” he says in his first book, which came out in 1953,
Writing Degree Zero
; “it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die.” In Barthes’s view, literature is already a posthumous affair. His work affirms a standard of vehement brilliance that is indeed one ideal of a cultural moment which believes itself to be having, in several senses, the last word.
full out, was always concentrated, keen, indefatigable. This dazzling inventiveness seems not just a function of Barthes’s extraordinary powers as a mind, as a writer. It seems to have almost the status of a position—as if this is what critical discourse
must
be. “Literature is like phosphorous,” he says in his first book, which came out in 1953,
Writing Degree Zero
; “it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die.” In Barthes’s view, literature is already a posthumous affair. His work affirms a standard of vehement brilliance that is indeed one ideal of a cultural moment which believes itself to be having, in several senses, the last word.
Its brilliance aside, Barthes’s work has some of the specific traits associated with the style of a late moment in culture—one that presumes an endless discourse anterior to itself, that presumes intellectual sophistication:
it is work that, strenuously unwilling to be boring or obvious, favors compact assertion, writing that rapidly covers a great deal of ground. Barthes was an inspired, ingenious practitioner of the essay and the anti-essay—he had a resistance to long forms. Typically, his sentences are complex, comma-ridden and colon-prone, packed with densely worded entailments of ideas deployed as if these were the materials of a supple prose. It is a style of exposition, recognizably French, whose parent tradition is to be found in the tense, idiosyncratic essays published between the two world wars in the
Nouvelle Revue Française—
a perfected version of the
NRF
’s house style which can deliver more ideas per page while retaining the brio of that style, its acuteness of timbre. His vocabulary is large, fastidious, fearlessly mandarin. Even Barthes’s less fleet, more jargon-haunted writings—most of them from the 1960s—are full of flavor; he manages to make an exuberant use of neologisms. While exuding straight-ahead energy, his prose constantly reaches for the summative formulation; it is irrepressibly aphoristic. (Indeed, one could go through Barthes’s work extracting superb bits—epigrams, maxims—to make a small book, as has been done with Wilde and Proust.) Barthes’s strengths as an aphorist suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the perception of structure. A method of condensed assertion by means of symmetrically counterposed terms, the aphorism displays the symmetries and complementarities of situations or ideas—their design, their shape. Like a markedly greater feeling for drawings than for paintings, a talent for aphorism is one of the signs of what could be called the formalist temperament.
it is work that, strenuously unwilling to be boring or obvious, favors compact assertion, writing that rapidly covers a great deal of ground. Barthes was an inspired, ingenious practitioner of the essay and the anti-essay—he had a resistance to long forms. Typically, his sentences are complex, comma-ridden and colon-prone, packed with densely worded entailments of ideas deployed as if these were the materials of a supple prose. It is a style of exposition, recognizably French, whose parent tradition is to be found in the tense, idiosyncratic essays published between the two world wars in the
Nouvelle Revue Française—
a perfected version of the
NRF
’s house style which can deliver more ideas per page while retaining the brio of that style, its acuteness of timbre. His vocabulary is large, fastidious, fearlessly mandarin. Even Barthes’s less fleet, more jargon-haunted writings—most of them from the 1960s—are full of flavor; he manages to make an exuberant use of neologisms. While exuding straight-ahead energy, his prose constantly reaches for the summative formulation; it is irrepressibly aphoristic. (Indeed, one could go through Barthes’s work extracting superb bits—epigrams, maxims—to make a small book, as has been done with Wilde and Proust.) Barthes’s strengths as an aphorist suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the perception of structure. A method of condensed assertion by means of symmetrically counterposed terms, the aphorism displays the symmetries and complementarities of situations or ideas—their design, their shape. Like a markedly greater feeling for drawings than for paintings, a talent for aphorism is one of the signs of what could be called the formalist temperament.
The formalist temperament is just one variant of a sensibility shared by many who speculate in an era of hypersaturated awareness. What characterizes such a sensibility more generally is its reliance on the criterion of taste, and its proud refusal to propose anything that does not bear the stamp of subjectivity. Confidently assertive, it nevertheless insists that its assertions are no more than provisional. (To do otherwise would be bad taste.) Indeed, adepts of this sensibility usually make a point of claiming and reclaiming amateur status. “In linguistics I have never been anything but an amateur,” Barthes told an interviewer in 1975. Throughout his late writings Barthes repeatedly disavows the, as
it were, vulgar roles of system-builder, authority, mentor, expert, in order to reserve for himself the privileges and freedoms of delectation: the exercise of taste for Barthes means, usually, to praise. What makes the role a choice one is his unstated commitment to finding something new and unfamiliar to praise (which requires having the right dissonance with established taste); or to praising a familiar work differently.
it were, vulgar roles of system-builder, authority, mentor, expert, in order to reserve for himself the privileges and freedoms of delectation: the exercise of taste for Barthes means, usually, to praise. What makes the role a choice one is his unstated commitment to finding something new and unfamiliar to praise (which requires having the right dissonance with established taste); or to praising a familiar work differently.
An early example is his second book—it appeared in 1954—which is on Michelet. Through an inventory of the recurrent metaphors and themes in the great nineteenth-century historian’s epic narratives, Barthes discloses a more intimate narration: Michelet’s history of his own body and the “lyric resurrection of past bodies.” Barthes is always after another meaning, a more eccentric—often utopian—discourse. What pleased him was to show insipid and reactionary works to be quirky and implicitly subversive; to display in the most extravagant projects of the imagination an opposite extreme—in his essay on Sade, a sexual ideal that was really an exercise in delirious rationality; in his essay on Fourier, a rationalist ideal that was really an exercise in sensual delirium. Barthes did take on central figures of the literary canon when he had something polemical to offer: in 1960 he wrote a short book on Racine, which scandalized academic critics (the ensuing controversy ended with Barthes’s complete triumph over his detractors); he also wrote on Proust and Flaubert. But more often, armed with his essentially adversary notion of the “text,” he applied his ingenuity to the marginal literary subject: an unimportant “work”—say, Balzac’s
Sarrasine
, Chateaubriand’s
Life of Rancé
—could be a marvelous “text.” Considering something as a “text” means for Barthes precisely to suspend conventional evaluations (the difference between major and minor literature), to subvert established classifications (the separation of genres, the distinctions among the arts).
Sarrasine
, Chateaubriand’s
Life of Rancé
—could be a marvelous “text.” Considering something as a “text” means for Barthes precisely to suspend conventional evaluations (the difference between major and minor literature), to subvert established classifications (the separation of genres, the distinctions among the arts).
Though work of every form and worth qualifies for citizenship in the great democracy of “texts,” the critic will tend to avoid those that everyone has handled, the meaning that everyone knows. The formalist turn in modern criticism—from its pristine phase, as in Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarizing, onward—dictates just this. It charges the critic with the task of discarding worn-out meanings for fresh ones. It is a mandate to scout for new meanings.
Etonne-moi.
Etonne-moi.
The same mandate is supplied by Barthes’s notions of “text” and “textuality.” These translate into criticism the modernist ideal of an open-ended, polysemous literature; and thereby make the critic, just like the creators of that literature, the inventor of meaning. (The aim of literature, Barthes asserts, is to put “meaning” into the world but not “a meaning.”) To decide that the point of criticism is to alter and to relocate meaning—adding, subtracting, multiplying it—is in effect to base the critic’s exertions on an enterprise of avoidance, and thereby to recommit criticism (if it had ever left) to the dominion of taste. For it is, finally, the exercise of taste which identifies meanings that are familiar; a judgment of taste which discriminates against such meanings as too familiar; an ideology of taste which makes of the familiar something vulgar and facile. Barthes’s formalism at its most decisive, his ruling that the critic is called on to reconstitute not the “message” of a work but only its “system”—its form, its structure—is perhaps best understood thus, as the liberating avoidance of the obvious, as an immense gesture of good taste.
For the modernist—that is, formalist—critic, the work with its received valuations already exists. Now, what
else
can be said? The canon of great books has been fixed. What can we add or restore to it? The “message” is already understood, or is obsolete. Let’s ignore it.
else
can be said? The canon of great books has been fixed. What can we add or restore to it? The “message” is already understood, or is obsolete. Let’s ignore it.
OF A VARIETY
of means Barthes possessed for giving himself something to say—he had an exceptionally fluent, ingenious generalizing power—the most elementary was his aphorist’s ability to conjure up a vivacious duality: anything could be split either into itself and its opposite or into two versions of itself; and one term then fielded against the other to yield an unexpected relation. The point of Voltairean travel, he remarks, is “to manifest an immobility”; Baudelaire “had to protect theatricality from the theatre”; the Eiffel Tower “makes the city into a kind of Nature”—Barthes’s writing is seeded with such ostensibly paradoxical, epigrammatic formulas as these, whose point is to sum something up. It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
of means Barthes possessed for giving himself something to say—he had an exceptionally fluent, ingenious generalizing power—the most elementary was his aphorist’s ability to conjure up a vivacious duality: anything could be split either into itself and its opposite or into two versions of itself; and one term then fielded against the other to yield an unexpected relation. The point of Voltairean travel, he remarks, is “to manifest an immobility”; Baudelaire “had to protect theatricality from the theatre”; the Eiffel Tower “makes the city into a kind of Nature”—Barthes’s writing is seeded with such ostensibly paradoxical, epigrammatic formulas as these, whose point is to sum something up. It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
Less elegant, indeed making a point of dogged explicitness, and far more powerful as an instrument for giving himself something to say, are the classifications that Barthes lays out in order to topple himself into a piece of argument—dividing into two, three, even four parts the matter to be considered. Arguments are launched by announcing that there are two main classes and two subclasses of narrative units, two ways in which myth lends itself to history, two facets of Racinean eros, two musics, two ways to read La Rochefoucauld, two kinds of writers, two forms of his own interest in photographs. That there are three types of corrections a writer makes, three Mediterraneans and three tragic sites in Racine, three levels on which to read the plates of the
Encyclopedia
, three areas of spectacle and three types of gesture in Japanese puppet theatre, three attitudes toward speech and writing, equivalent to three vocations: writer, intellectual, and teacher. That there are four kinds of readers, four reasons for keeping a journal …
Encyclopedia
, three areas of spectacle and three types of gesture in Japanese puppet theatre, three attitudes toward speech and writing, equivalent to three vocations: writer, intellectual, and teacher. That there are four kinds of readers, four reasons for keeping a journal …
And so on. This is the codifying, frontal style of French intellectual discourse, a branch of the rhetorical tactics that the French call, not quite accurately, Cartesian. Although a few of the classifications Barthes employs are standard, such as semiology’s canonical triad of signified, signifier, and sign, many are inventions devised by Barthes in order to
make
an argument, such as his assertion in a late book,
The Pleasure of the Text,
that the modern artist seeks to destroy art, “this effort taking three forms.” The aim of this implacable categorizing is not just to map the intellectual territory: Barthes’s taxonomies are never static. Often the point is precisely for one category to subvert the other, as do the two forms, which he calls
punctum
and
studium
, of his interest in photographs. Barthes offers classifications to keep matters open—to reserve a place for the uncodified, the enchanted, the intractable, the histrionic. He was fond of bizarre classifications, of classificatory excess (Fourier’s, for example), and his boldly physical metaphors for mental life stress not topography but transformation. Drawn to hyperbole, as all aphorists are, Barthes enlists ideas in a drama, often a sensual melodrama or a faintly Gothic one. He speaks of the quiver, thrill, or shudder of meaning, of meanings that themselves vibrate, gather, loosen, disperse, quicken, shine, fold, mutate, delay, slide, separate, that exert pressure, crack, rupture, fissure, are
pulverized. Barthes offers something like a poetics of thinking, which identifies the meaning of subjects with the very mobility of meaning, with the kinetics of consciousness itself; and liberates the critic as artist. The uses that binary and triadic thinking had for Barthes’s imagination were always provisional, available to correction, destabilization, condensation.
make
an argument, such as his assertion in a late book,
The Pleasure of the Text,
that the modern artist seeks to destroy art, “this effort taking three forms.” The aim of this implacable categorizing is not just to map the intellectual territory: Barthes’s taxonomies are never static. Often the point is precisely for one category to subvert the other, as do the two forms, which he calls
punctum
and
studium
, of his interest in photographs. Barthes offers classifications to keep matters open—to reserve a place for the uncodified, the enchanted, the intractable, the histrionic. He was fond of bizarre classifications, of classificatory excess (Fourier’s, for example), and his boldly physical metaphors for mental life stress not topography but transformation. Drawn to hyperbole, as all aphorists are, Barthes enlists ideas in a drama, often a sensual melodrama or a faintly Gothic one. He speaks of the quiver, thrill, or shudder of meaning, of meanings that themselves vibrate, gather, loosen, disperse, quicken, shine, fold, mutate, delay, slide, separate, that exert pressure, crack, rupture, fissure, are
pulverized. Barthes offers something like a poetics of thinking, which identifies the meaning of subjects with the very mobility of meaning, with the kinetics of consciousness itself; and liberates the critic as artist. The uses that binary and triadic thinking had for Barthes’s imagination were always provisional, available to correction, destabilization, condensation.
As a writer, he preferred short forms, and had been planning to give a seminar on them; he was particularly drawn to miniature ones, like the haiku and the quotation; and, like all true writers, he was enthralled by “the detail” (his word)—experience’s model short form. Even as an essayist, Barthes mostly wrote short, and the books he did write tend to be multiples of short forms rather than “real” books, itineraries of topics rather than unified arguments. His
Michelet
, for example, keys its inventory of the historian’s themes to a large number of brief excerpts from Michelet’s prolific writings. The most rigorous example of the argument as an itinerary by means of quotation is
S/Z,
published in 1970, his model exegesis of Balzac’s
Sarrasine.
From staging the texts of others, he passed inevitably to the staging of his own ideas. And, in the same series on great writers (“Ecrivains de toujours”) to which he contributed the Michelet volume, he eventually did one on himself in 1975: that dazzling oddity in the series,
Roland Barthes
by Roland Barthes. The high-velocity arrangements of Barthes’s late books dramatize both his fecundity (insatiability
and
lightness) and his desire to subvert all tendencies to system-making.
Michelet
, for example, keys its inventory of the historian’s themes to a large number of brief excerpts from Michelet’s prolific writings. The most rigorous example of the argument as an itinerary by means of quotation is
S/Z,
published in 1970, his model exegesis of Balzac’s
Sarrasine.
From staging the texts of others, he passed inevitably to the staging of his own ideas. And, in the same series on great writers (“Ecrivains de toujours”) to which he contributed the Michelet volume, he eventually did one on himself in 1975: that dazzling oddity in the series,
Roland Barthes
by Roland Barthes. The high-velocity arrangements of Barthes’s late books dramatize both his fecundity (insatiability
and
lightness) and his desire to subvert all tendencies to system-making.
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