by Kate Briggs
Yes, but lots of people read. Many, many people read. It’s true that countless people read, and take great pleasure in reading. There’s even, Barthes notes, a bookshop in Paris called the Joy of Reading (or there used to be). Clearly not all readers are aspiring writers. And so the question asked in the lectures then becomes: Why not? Why aren’t they? Why, asks Barthes, if reading is the prompt, the source, the wellspring for writing, are there not ‘more would-be writers’? Why do the majority of readers appear to be contented with reading, to stop at reading (as I seem to be content to stop at looking or at listening – at painting, at video, at photography)? In other words: why doesn’t every reader experience something like this impulse to do it themselves? Perhaps there are two kinds of reading and reader, says Barthes. In the introduction to her edited collection of his writings, Susan Sontag is excellent on Barthes’s passion for typologies: notice how many of his arguments are launched by announcing ‘that there are … two ways in which myth might lend 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’. Here, two types of reader based on two types of pleasure in reading:
The first is the reading of childhood and especially adolescence. ‘The absolute pleasure of adolescent reading, immersed in a classic novel, the absolute satisfaction of reading, in exactly this sense that we read without wanting to do likewise.’
The second is ‘the pleasure of reading that is already tormented by the desire to do the same, in other words by a lack’. From this second kind of reading, emerges what for Barthes is a broad, simple truth: I write because I have read.
Yes, but if reading is somehow and very often the cause of writing, Barthes goes on, arguing with the position he has just affirmed, it is not (it can’t be) reading in general. It is not everyday, forgettable reading: the reading that passes us by, as William Gass puts it, like scenery seen from a train. He makes this clear: ‘my Desire to write doesn’t stem from reading as such but from certain readings in particular, local readings’. A handful of authors; and even then, just one or two of their books. For Barthes, it is Proust, but In Search of Lost Time, not the earlier Jean Santeuil. It is Tolstoy, absolutely. But War and Peace and not Anna Karenina. And even then, not the book in its entirety. Perhaps it’s just one paragraph, just one resonant paragraph that sounds across a lifetime while the rest of the book falls quietly away. For Barthes, it is Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave – but not all of it. A passage about heliotrope, a plant that turns its flowers and leaves to the sun, that is also quoted in Time Regained, vol. 6 of In Search of Lost Time. As part of the lecture delivered on 1 December 1979 he read it aloud. I quote it here in Andreas Mayor’s and Terence Kilmartin’s translation:
‘I dined two or three times at the Governor’s house, an officer full of kindness and good manners. He grew a few European vegetables on the hillside. After dinner, he showed me what he called his garden. A sweet and subtle scent of heliotrope was exhaled by a little patch of beans that were in flower; it was brought to us not by a breeze from our own country but by a wild Newfoundland wind, unrelated to that exiled plant, without sympathy of shared memory or pleasure. In this perfume, not breathed by beauty, not cleansed in her bosom, not scattered where she had walked, in this perfume of a changed sky and tillage and world there was all the diverse melancholy of regret and absence and youth.’
That’s it, says Barthes. Just a short passage of text. I have no desire to explain it, he adds. There will be no explication de texte, no unpacking or explanatory unfolding of how and why it moves me. I didn’t read it aloud because it contains some intellectual content that I will now try and make sense of. No, that’s not it at all. If I chose to read it, it is because the text produces, in me, a sudden dazzle of language, it moves me in pleasure. I could say that it caresses me, and its caress produces its effects each time I read it. Even just now, when I read it out loud to you, I felt it again. We could call this beauty if you wanted to give it an objective name: this deep pleasure, this joy that Chateaubriand’s language, his speech procures in me, that I receive like a kind of luminosity that is eternal and mysterious (in the sense that explaining it would never exhaust it). Like falling in love, like the joy of falling in love with one person in particular, among the thousand other possibilities, the thousand other possible texts, the thousand other possible faces. I’m well aware that the object of my desire, Chateaubriand’s text, has come to adapt itself to my desire. There’s no possibility of anyone else desiring it as I desire it. And there’s the tragedy: I am, in all likelihood, the only one here to desire it with such intensity. In the same way as our loving desires get distributed. What I mean by this is: to fall in love is to choose among a thousand other possibilities – to choose someone who has adapted to my wholly individual desire, but in such a way that I have no knowledge of it until I meet the person who confirms that it has happened. And so it’s a good thing, really, that desire should be shared out so very differently among different people. Because this is what gives us all a chance. Imagine: if we were all to fall in love with the same person! Likewise, with literature: some of us will fall in love with some texts and others with others… If we were all to only ever desire the same book, then what would be written would always be the same book, which is not the case.
The point is: we are not all moved by the same poetry or prose. We do not all feel with the same spurring intensity about the same poetry or prose.
‘I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan … roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions … realistic novels,’ writes Barthes, famously, in a paragraph of a book titled Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard. ‘I don’t like: women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord…’
‘Who cares?’ he asks, after writing this list of likes and dislikes out like a poem. None of this is of any consequence to anyone whatsoever. It is all apparently meaningless. And yet all this means – or, more literally – all that it wants to say is: my body is not the same as yours.
For me, for what it is worth –
the for what it is worth hoping somehow to temper the presumption that comes always underlying the for me, because: who cares, who really cares? And yet, all it wants to say is: I read with my body, I read and move to translate with my body, and my body is not the same as yours
– it’s not Chateaubriand on melancholy, on adolescence, on this small patch of garden with its blue fragrant exiled flowers. Not really, not at all. For me, it’s Anna Karenina, not War and Peace. It’s Barthes’s late work, the lectures especially. My Roland Barthes is not the early work, the mid-period structuralist, nor even the author of the three late, beautiful books – the experiment in autobiography, on the lover’s discourse, on photography. It’s the writer of lecture and seminar notes, telegrammatic, elliptical notes, interspersed with stretches made from full sentences, small expanses of story and argument. Where there is this investment in the note as a distinct and provisional, rapid, mobile form; the bit of writing set down for the record even as it is invested in becoming-speech, intending its moment of public delivery, its circulation among the present bodies. And even then: it’s really the last course on the novel, the slow preparation for and projection of a novel-to-come. It’s this passage, for example, on these unique encounters that can happen in reading, once in a while in the lifetime of reading, like a face in a crowd, like a face to fall in love with in the crowd, like a line about an arm reaching into the night and summoning the dawn.
I know that not everyone feels the same way.
The theorist and Barthes scholar Jonathan Culler, who attended the Collège de France lectures in 1979-1980, has written of how disappointing he found them, how tiresome. ‘Sufficiently so,’ he writes, ‘that I was very irregular in my attendance, preferring other Parisian intellectual activities of greater substance or theoretical interest – a choice which I of course
deeply regretted after Barthes’s tragic death cut short the course.’
‘Translators are never, and should never be forced to be (or to think of themselves as), neutral, impersonal transferring devices. Translators’ personal experiences – emotions, motivations, attitudes, associations – are not only allowable in the formation of a working [translation], they are indispensable,’ wrote the Finnish to English translator and translation theorist Douglas Robinson in the early 1990s, one of eight precepts he sets forth as part of what he calls the translator’s turn. Who would argue with this, he wonders? And yet it seems it is worth restating again and again. Not an impersonal transferring device, but a person – ‘a holistic, gendered, literary being’, as Michelle Woods recently put it in her brilliant study of Kafka’s English language translators and translations – located in time and space, and always to a great degree determined, therefore, by her time and place, pressured and feeling.
‘As for me, I should hardly dare call the feeling that I have for you profound,’ wrote Dorothy Bussy to André Gide, in a letter dated 8 October 1919. Thinking back to their first meeting a year or so ago, the beginning of it all: ‘How could it be, with no roots in the past and no hopes for the future? And faithful? Oh! That’s a word I gave up using long years ago. But it’s acute – it’s sometimes even agonising … And I have probably by all this forever destroyed what was pleasant between us – the “camaraderie” of the Cambridge days. Oh! happy Cambridge days, when I was just your dictionary and your grammar, convenient and helpful. And you had the same kind of friendly feeling for me that one has for a dictionary. I understood that perfectly. And you didn’t notice – you were too much engrossed by other things – that your dictionary had eyes and a heart, was watching and wondering at you, was charmed and thrilled and shaken by you.’
An impersonal, impervious dictionary. Only in Bussy’s image which now has (or had always had?) eyes and a heart, watching and wondering: charmed and thrilled and shaken (I can’t read this without my own heart burning). She goes on:
‘I couldn’t help it Gide, I couldn’t help it really. Aren’t you the strangest and the loveliest and the most disturbing thing I have ever come across in my life?’
I have always wanted to.
I have always experienced the desire, the impulse to.
To find arguments for.
To argue around, out from, on the basis of.
My moods, my feelings, my impulses, my humours.
‘J’ai toujours eu envie d’argumenter mes humeurs,’ writes Barthes in La Chambre claire. A sentence-part translated by Richard Howard in Camera Lucida as: ‘I have always wanted to remonstrate with my moods.’ I want to argue with Howard here, conscious that my own translations would find such local scrutiny hard to bear. I am not sure that the thought invites the with, as if humours, moods were something Barthes wanted to talk himself out of or object to. I have always wanted – or felt? – to argue my moods, is what I’d venture he wrote, making the verb do all the work of disserting and elaborating out from. And then, continuing the sentence in Howard’s translation: ‘not to justify them; still less to fill the scene of the text with my individuality; but on the contrary to extend this individuality to a science of the subject, a science whose name is of little importance to me, provided it attains (as has not yet occurred) to a generality which neither reduces nor crushes me.’
This proposition: to start out from how things are for him, to speak out from his own subject position, of interest if only for the reason that we are, each of us, so wholly unrepresentative (Barthes, in his standing, his popularity by the mid-1970s, but also, by the time of the last lecture course, in his grief, as he mourned the death of his mother); not in order to remain there, on the small stage he may have now flooded with his own individual concerns, his list of likes and dislikes, but as a way of reaching toward our shared questions – all of this might be one way of getting at the broader project of Barthes’s three lecture courses. I will lecture from here, Barthes tells us from the very beginning. I will induce outward from my own fantasies (‘I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy, which can vary from year to year’): the fantasy of a small-scale community offering the ideal negotiation of inter-personal distance, of companionship and solitude; the fantasy of the neutral as a non-conflictual way of being in the world; and, in the last years, the fantasy of writing a novel that would finally speak of and for the ones you love. Let me tell you something, then. Let me tell you something that has happened to, or how things are, for me. Let me offer some sliver from life, from my fantasy life, as a place to start thinking together from. And in the telling it will become apparent – the hope, the risk, the wager is that it will become apparent – that just as there will be something to extrapolate, and so also to research, something to identify and investigate as being of likely concern and consequence to others as well as to me, there will also be a remainder: a leftover part, a residue in the circumstance or the detail or the phrasing or the something that is unglossable.
The effort to reach for the general in such a way as to neither reduce nor crush, in the hope that no one will feel reduced nor crushed, and so in such a way as to make no promise of a final theory, no totalizing claim with respect to the shared questions that the lecture courses were, nevertheless, deeply invested in asking was, for Barthes, a way of trying, ‘in one’s teaching, to attenuate the power and the arrogance of language; to analyse dogmatism, and to try not to practise it oneself,’ which is how scholar and theoretician Lucy O’Meara puts it. In her discussion of this project, O’Meara points to a moment in the course on the Neutral, translated by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier, where Barthes considers a range of strategies for offering what he calls ‘beside-the-point’ answers. Consider the formats of the roundtable, or the interview, he asks, and the kind of impossibly vast and grandiose questions that get asked there – the kinds of questions from which ‘our social and political life is excessively woven’. Questions like:
‘Is there a writing specific to women and a writing specific to men?’
‘Do you think that the writer seeks the truth?’
The big universalizing question with its expectation of a big, universalizing answer.
Questions like: What is a translation?
And how to translate well?
What is a good translation?
I don’t know. Actually, I don’t know. If nothing else, I know that I can’t answer for everyone. How to get out of it? (Gilles Deleuze on the interview, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam: ‘Most of the time, when someone asks me a question, even one which relates to me, I see that, strictly, I don’t have anything to say … Objections are even worse. Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: OK, OK, let’s go on to something else. It’s the same when I’m asked a general question. The aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it.’)
Imagine now, says Barthes, to questions such as these, big impossible questions demanding some generalizing authoritative response (a form of questioning which, in his grief, he experienced as a sequence of small attacks, a form of ongoing aggression), offering an answer that is entirely beside the point:
‘The sky is blue like an orange.’
Or, ‘I bought this shirt at Lanvin’s.’
Or, let’s say, if the question is put to you in public, standing up, taking off a shoe, putting it on your head, and leaving the room.
Writing from the first person is its own different – perhaps more moderate? more likely? – strategy of being always somewhere beside the point, of indirection. As Barthes will come to assert in the last course, ‘I’ is a method: part of a general effort to change what he calls ‘the rhetorical conditions of the intellectual’, to expand and vary of what it is possible to speak, and in what manner, in the hope of neither reducing nor crushing. I’d say, Barthes says, in the first lecture of the last lecture course, ‘that I’m of a
generation that has suffered too much from the censuring of the subject in the intellectual field … And I would say’ – insist? – ‘better the illusions’ – les leurres – the traps and illusions, ‘of subjectivity than the impostures of objectivity’. So let me presume to tell you how things are for me.
The desire to write comes (is the feeling you get) from certain readings: the kind of reading that agitates you into making a trace of itself. Or to put it another way, and reaching a little further for an answer to his outrageous, unanswerable question, Barthes arrives at the following claim: ‘to want to write is to want to rewrite’, he says. And then: ‘Every beautiful work, or even every work to make an impression, every impressive work, functions as a desired work, but I would say, and it’s here that it starts to get interesting, that every work I read as desirable, even as I am desiring it, I experience as incomplete and somehow lost, because I didn’t do it myself, and I have to in some way retrieve it by redoing it; in this way, to write is to want to rewrite: I want to add myself actively to that which is beautiful and that I lack; as we might put it with an old verb: that I require.’
There are sentences, half-lines, parts of pages that I happen across and find myself holding on and returning to because they produce in me something like a flash, a stun-gun of language, or what Barthes also calls, unapologetically, a moment of truth. ‘The coming morning reaches its long arm into the night.’ Yes. That’s it. Here’s the dawn. Yes. That’s exactly it. Here’s the truth of it as I have experienced it in life or: as life is now reconfigured to accommodate its truth. Here is life, as Barthes also puts it, but the point is: here is life ‘phrased’. Here is life ‘in the form of a sentence’. Yes. But that’s not the end of it. There’s also my hand. Or, I don’t know, my legs. One of them beating fast time against the other. Already, my hand has moved. It’s folding the corner of the page, reaching for a pencil to underline the line. I’m no longer looking at the page. I’m no longer even holding the book. I’ve raised my head now and my hand to my head and both hands clasped behind my up-tilted head and yet somehow I am still very much reading. ‘Has it never happened, as you were reading a book,’ asks Barthes, in an essay from 1970, which I quote in Howard’s translation, ‘that you kept stopping as you read, not because you weren’t interested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli, associations? In a word, haven’t you ever happened to read while looking up from your book?’ The dance of readerly excitement: the smack of an open hand on a desk, abrupt shifts in position, breath quickening or slowing down. In these scenes of extraordinary encounter I recognize what Barthes describes as a lack. I am up out of my chair, or I’m not: I’m still seated, I’m folding down the corner of the page, underlining, typing the passage out, capturing it on my phone because even in its plenitude, even as it is right now filling me up, there is, I feel, something missing.
