Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

  What he wrote about Brecht, whom he discovered in 1954 (when the Berliner Ensemble visited Paris with their production of Mother Courage) and helped make known in France, says less about the theatrical than his treatment of many subjects as forms of the theatrical. In his frequent use of Brecht in seminars of the 1970s, he cited the prose writings, which he took as a model of critical acuity; it was not Brecht the maker of didactic spectacles but Brecht the didactic intellectual who finally mattered to Barthes. In contrast, with Bunraku what Barthes valued was the element of theatricality as such. In Barthes’s early work, the theatrical is the domain of liberty, the place where identities are only roles and one can change roles, a zone where meaning itself may be refused. (Barthes speaks of Bunraku’s privileged “exemption from meaning.”) Barthes’s talk about the theatrical, like his evangelism of pleasure, is a way of proselytizing for the attenuating, lightening, baffling of the Logos, of meaning itself.

  To affirm the notion of the spectacle is the triumph of the aesthete’s position: the promulgation of the ludic, the refusal of the tragic. All of Barthes’s intellectual moves have the effect of voiding work of its “content,” the tragic of its finality. That is the sense in which his work is genuinely subversive, liberating—playful. It is outlaw discourse in the great aesthete tradition, which often assumes the liberty of rejecting the “substance” of discourse in order better to appreciate its “form”: outlaw discourse turned respectable, as it were, with the help of various theories known as varieties of formalism. In numerous accounts of his intellectual evolution, Barthes describes himself as the perpetual disciple—but the point that he really wants to make is that he remains, finally, untouched. He spoke of his having worked under the aegis of a succession of theories and masters. In fact, Barthes’s work has altogether more coherence, and ambivalence. For all his connection with tutelary doctrines, Barthes’s submission to doctrine was superficial. In the end, it was necessary that all intellectual gadgetry be discarded. His last books are a kind of unraveling of his ideas. Roland Barthes, he says, is the book of his resistance to his ideas, the dismantling of his own power. And in the inaugural lecture that marked his acceding to a position of the highest eminence—the Chair of Literary Semiology at the College de France in 1977—Barthes chooses, characteristically enough, to argue for a soft intellectual authority. He praises teaching as a permissive, not a coercive, space where one can be relaxed, disarmed, floating.

  Language itself, which Barthes called a “utopia” in the euphoric formulation that ends Writing Degree Zero, now comes under attack, as another form of “power,” and his very effort to convey his sensitivity to the ways in which language is “power” gives rise to that instantly notorious hyperbole in his College de France lecture: the power of language is “quite simply fascist.” To assume that society is ruled by monolithic ideologies and repressive mystifications is necessary to Barthes’s advocacy of egoism, post-revolutionary but nevertheless antinomian: his notion that the affirmation of the unremittingly personal is a subversive act. This is a classic extension of the aesthete attitude, in which it becomes a politics: a politics of radical individuality. Pleasure is largely identified with unauthorized pleasure, and the right of individual assertion with the sanctity of the asocial self. In the late writings, the theme of protest against power takes the form of an increasingly private definition of experience (as fetishized involvement) and a ludic definition of thought. “The great problem,” Barthes says in a late interview, “is to outplay the signified, to outplay law, to outplay the father, to outplay the repressed—I do not say to explode it, but to outplay it.” The aesthete’s ideal of detachment, of the selfishness of detachment, allows for avowals of passionate, obsessed involvement: the selfishness of ardor, of fascination. (Wilde speaks of his “curious mixture of ardour and of indifference … I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last.”) Barthes has to keep affirming the aesthete’s detachment, and undermining it—with passions.

  Like all great aesthetes, Barthes was an expert at having it both ways. Thus, he identifies writing both with a generous relation to the world (writing as “perpetual production”) and with a defiant relation (writing as “a perpetual revolution of language,” outside the bounds of power). He wants a politics and an anti-politics, a critical relation to the world and one free of moral considerations. The aesthete’s radicalism is the radicalism of a privileged, even a replete, consciousness—but a genuine radicalism nonetheless. All genuine moral views are founded on a notion of refusal, and the aesthete’s view, which can be conformist, does provide certain potentially powerful, not just elegant, grounds for a great refusal.

  The aesthete’s radicalism: to be multiple, to make multiple identifications; to assume fully the privilege of the personal. Barthes’s work—he avows that he writes by obsessions—consists of continuities and detours; the accumulation of points of view; finally, their disburdenment: a mixture of progress and caprice. For Barthes, liberty is a state that consists in remaining plural, fluid, vibrating with doctrine; whose price is being indecisive, apprehensive, fearful of being taken for an impostor. The writer’s freedom that Barthes describes is, in part, flight. The writer is the deputy of his own ego—of that self in perpetual flight before what is fixed by writing, as the mind is in perpetual flight from doctrine. “Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.” Barthes wants to move on—that is one of the imperatives of the aesthete’s sensibility.

  THROUGHOUT HIS WORK Barthes projects himself into his subject. He is Fourier: unvexed by the sense of evil, aloof from politics, “that necessary purge”; he “vomits it up.” He is the Bunraku puppet: impersonal, subtle. He is Gide: the writer who is ageless (always young, always mature); the writer as egoist—a triumphant species of “simultaneous being” or plural desire. He is the subject of all the subjects that he praises. (That he must, characteristically, praise may be connected with his project of defining, creating standards for himself.) In this sense, much of what Barthes wrote now appears autobiographical.

  Eventually, it became autobiographical in the literal sense. A brave meditation on the personal, on the self, is at the center of his late writings and seminars. Much of Barthes’s work, especially the last three books with their poignant themes of loss, constitutes a candid defense of his sensuality (as well as his sexuality)—his flavor, his way of tasting the world. The books are also artfully anti-confessional. Camera Lucida is a meta-book: a meditation on the even more personal autobiographical book that he planned to write about photographs of his mother, who died in 1978, and then put aside. Barthes starts from the modernist model of writing that is superior to any idea of intention or mere expressiveness; a mask. “The work,” Valéry insists, “should not give the person it affects anything that can be reduced to an idea of the author’s person and thinking.”2 But this commitment to impersonality does not preclude the avowal of the self; it is only another variation on the project of self-examination: the noblest project of French literature. Valéry offers one ideal of self-absorption—impersonal, disinterested. Rousseau offers another ideal—passionate, avowing vulnerability. Many themes of Barthes’s work lie in the classic discourse of French literary culture: its taste for elegant abstraction, in particular for the formal analysis of the sentiments; its disdain for mere psychology; and its coquetry about the impersonal (Flaubert declaring “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” but also insisting in letters on his novel’s “impersonality,” its lack of connection with himself).

  Barthes is the latest major participant in the great national literary project, inaugurated by Montaigne: the self as vocation, life as a reading of the self. The enterprise construes the self as the locus of all possibilities, avid, unafraid of contradiction (nothing need be lost, everything may be gained), and the exercise of consciousness as a life’s highest aim, because only through becoming fully conscious may one be free. The distinctive French utopian tradition is this vision of reality redeemed, recove
red, transcended by consciousness; a vision of the life of the mind as a life of desire, of full intelligence and pleasure—so different from, say, the traditions of high moral seriousness of German and of Russian literature.

  Inevitably, Barthes’s work had to end in autobiography. “One must choose between being a terrorist and being an egoist,” he once observed in a seminar. The options seem very French. Intellectual terrorism is a central, respectable form of intellectual practice in France—tolerated, humored, rewarded: the “Jacobin” tradition of ruthless assertion and shameless ideological about-faces; the mandate of incessant judgment, opinion, anathematizing, overpraising; the taste for extreme positions, then casually reversed, and for deliberate provocation. Alongside this, how modest egoism is!

  Barthes’s voice became steadily more intimate, his subjects more inward. An affirmation of his own idiosyncrasy (which he does not “decipher”) is the main theme of Roland Barthes. He writes about the body, taste, love; solitude; erotic desolation; finally, death, or rather desire and death: the twin subjects of the book on photography. As in the Platonic dialogues, the thinker (writer, reader, teacher) and the lover—the two main figures of the Barthesian self—are joined. Barthes, of course, means his erotics of literature more literally, as literally as he can. (The text enters, fills, it grants euphoria.) But finally he seems fairly Platonic after all. The monologue of A Lover’s Discourse, which obviously draws on a story of disappointment in love, ends in a spiritual vision in the classic Platonic way, in which lower loves are transmuted into higher, more inclusive ones. Barthes avows that he “wants to unmask, no longer to interpret, but to make of consciousness itself a drug, and thus accede to a vision of irreducible reality, to the great drama of clarity, to prophetic love.”

  As he divested himself of theories, he gave less weight to the modernist standard of the intricate. He does not want, he says, to place any obstacles between himself and the reader. The last book is part memoir (of his mother), part meditation on eros, part treatise on the photographic image, part invocation of death—a book of piety, resignation, desire; a certain brilliance is being renounced, and the view itself is of the simplest. The subject of photography provided the great exemption, perhaps release, from the exactions of formalist taste. In choosing to write about photography, Barthes takes the occasion to adopt the warmest kind of realism: photographs fascinate because of what they are about. And they may awaken a desire for a further divestment of the self. (“Looking at certain photographs,” he writes in Camera Lucida, “I wanted to be a primitive, without culture.”) The Socratic sweetness and charm become more plaintive, more desperate: writing is an embrace, a being embraced; every idea is an idea reaching out. There is a sense of disaggregation of his ideas, and of himself—represented by his increasing fascination with what he calls “the detail.” In the preface to Sade/Fourier/Loyola, Barthes writes: “Were I a writer, and dead, how pleased I would be if my life, through the efforts of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to ‘biographemes’ whose distinction and mobility might travel beyond the limits of any fate, and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion.” The need to touch, even in the perspective of his own mortality.

  Barthes’s late work is filled with signals that he had come to the end of something—the enterprise of the critic as artist—and was seeking to become another kind of writer. (He announced his intention to write a novel.) There were exalted avowals of vulnerability, of being forlorn. Barthes more and more entertained an idea of writing which resembles the mystical idea of kenosis, emptying out. He acknowledged that not only systems—his ideas were in a state of melt—but the “I” as well had to be dismantled. (True knowledge, says Barthes, depends on the “unmasking of the ‘I.’”) The aesthetics of absence—the empty sign, the empty subject, the exemption from meaning—were all intimations of the great project of depersonalization which is the aesthete’s highest gesture of good taste. Toward the close of Barthes’s work, this ideal took on another inflection. A spiritual ideal of depersonalization—that is perhaps the characteristic terminus of every serious aesthete’s position. (Think of Wilde, of Valéry.) It is the point at which the aesthete’s view self-destructs: what follows is either silence—or transformation.

  Barthes harbored spiritual strivings that could not be supported by his aesthete’s position. It was inevitable that he pass beyond it, as he did in his very last work and teaching. At the end, he had done with the aesthetics of absence, and now spoke of literature as the embrace of subject and object. There was an emergence of a vision of “wisdom” of the Platonic sort—tempered, to be sure, by wisdom of a worldly kind: skeptical of dogmatisms, conscientious about gratification, wistfully attached to utopian ideals. Barthes’s temperament, style, sensibility, had run their course. And from this vantage point his work now appears to unfold, with more grace and poignancy and with far greater intellectual power than that of any of his contemporaries, the considerable truths vouchsafed to the aesthete’s sensibility, to a commitment to intellectual adventure, to the talent for contradiction and inversion—those “late” ways of experiencing, evaluating, reading the world; and surviving in it, drawing energy, finding consolation (but finally not), taking pleasure, expressing love.

  [1982]

  Walser’s Voice

  ROBERT WALSER IS one of the important German-language writers of the twentieth century—a major writer, both for his four novels that have survived (my favorite is the third, written in 1908, Jakob von Gunten) and for his short prose, where the musicality and free fall of his writing are less impeded by plot. Anyone seeking to bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has at hand a whole arsenal of glorious comparisons. A Paul Klee in prose—as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humored, sweet Beckett. And, as literature’s present inevitably remakes its past, so we cannot help but see Walser as the missing link between Kleist and Kafka, who admired him greatly. (At the time, it was more likely to be Kafka who was seen through the prism of Walser. Robert Musil, another admirer among Walser’s contemporaries, after first reading Kafka pronounced him “a peculiar case of the Walser type.”) I get a similar rush of pleasure from Walser’s single-voiced short prose as I do from Leopardi’s dialogues and playlets, that great writer’s triumphant short prose form. And the variety of mental weather in Walser’s stories and sketches, their elegance and their unpredictable lengths remind me of the free, first-person forms that abound in classical Japanese literature: pillow book, poetic diary, “essays in idleness.” But any true lover of Walser will want to disregard the net of comparisons that one can throw over his work.

  In long as in short prose Walser is a miniaturist, promulgating the claims of the anti-heroic, the limited, the humble, the small—as if in response to his acute feeling for the interminable. Walser’s life illustrates the restlessness of one kind of depressive temperament; he had the depressive’s fascination with stasis, and with the way time distends, is consumed, and spent much of his life obsessively turning time into space: his walks. His work plays with the depressive’s appalled vision of endlessness: it is all voice—musing, conversing, rambling, running on. The important is redeemed as a species of the unimportant, wisdom as a kind of shy, valiant loquacity.

  The moral core of Walser’s art is the refusal of power, of domination. I’m ordinary—that is, nobody—declares the characteristic Walser persona. In “Flower Days” (1911), Walser evokes the race of “odd people, who lack character,” who don’t want to do anything. The recurrent “I” of Walser’s prose is the opposite of the egotist’s: it is that of someone “drowning in obedience.” One knows about the repugnance Walser felt for success—the prodigious spread of failure that was his life. In “Kienast” (1917), Walser describes “a man who wanted nothing to do with anything.” This non-doer was, of course, a proud, stupendously productiv
e writer who secreted work, much of it written in his astonishing micro-script, without pause. What Walser says about inaction, renunciation of effort, effortlessness, is a program, an antiromantic one, of the artist’s activity. In “A Little Ramble” (1914), he observes: “We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”

  Walser often writes, from the point of view of a casualty, of the romantic visionary imagination. “Kleist in Thun” (1913), both self-portrait and authoritative tour of the mental landscape of suicide-destined romantic genius, depicts the precipice on the edge of which Walser lived. The last paragraph, with its excruciating modulations, seals an account of mental ruin as grand as anything I know in literature. But most of his stories and sketches bring consciousness back from the brink. He is just having his “gentle and courteous bit of fun,” Walser can assure us, in “Nervous” (1916), speaking in the first person. “Grouches, grouches, one must have them, and one must have the courage to live with them. That’s the nicest way to live. Nobody should be afraid of his little bit of weirdness.” The longest of the stories, “The Walk” (1917), identifies walking with a lyrical mobility and detachment of temperament, with the “raptures of freedom”; darkness arrives only at the end. Walser’s art assumes depression and terror, in order (mostly) to accept it—ironize over it, lighten it. These are gleeful as well as somber soliloquies about the relation to gravity, in both senses, physical and characterological: anti-gravity writing, in praise of movement and sloughing off, weightlessness; portraits of consciousness walking about in the world, enjoying its “morsel of life,” radiant with despair.