Unfinished Essay on Barthes’s The Pleasure of Text and William Gass
“So much of philosophy is fiction,” writes William Gass, and so much of Roland Barthes’s texts are fiction, and even though Gass roundly responded to Barthes’s seminal “Death of the Author” with an essay of his own (not really a rebuttal but more an amplification), on rereading Barthes’s The Pleasure of Text, written in 1973, I became a little happy because I found the two minds more than complimentary, though still distanced. Not that they’re on the same team, but their encounterings of texts are holy and sacred, yet, also profane. They seemed to understand that the enjoyment in the process of decryption by the reader carries the normal flights or fidgets one has in life (relations with people, food, or the weather) — Barthes: “[w]hat I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again.” The reader can makes a philter out of the text. Gass:
let us read a wine, since I promised I would talk about drinking. We have prepared for the occasion, of course. The bottle has been allowed to breathe. Books need to breathe, too. They should be opened properly, hefted, thumbed. The paper, print, layout, should be appreciated. But now we decant the text into our wide-open and welcoming eyes. We warm the wine in the bowl of the glass with our hand. We let its bouquet collect above it just as the red of red roses seems to stain the air. We wade — shoeless, to be sure — through the color it has liquified. We roll a bit of it about in our mouths. We sip. We savor.
There is a physicality going on in the reading encounter, just as the person who goes to work out in a gym sweats, strains, and tries to surmount, except the reader doesn’t move, but all around her everything moves — one doesn’t need physical strain when the drug, the potion can be made so metaphorically powerful. Working out, one often stops the brain, but in reading one feels the present moment with every word — and in another moment come other moments by reach of more words, the experience effortlessly reaching ever widening systems — and sometimes it calls forth our past with such acuity one must put the book down. Barthes, who I’d began with, wrote: “we boldly skip…descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations…yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives…”
To amplify this, Ricardo Piglia wrote:
The value of reading does not depend on the book in itself but on the emotions associated with the act of reading…What is fixed in memory is not the content of memory but rather its form. I am not interested in what can obscure the image, I am interested only in the visual intensity that persists in time like a scar.
All the way through Pleasure, Barthes continually highlights the body, saying how the text going into the mind creates a vortex but a human one: “The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas — for my body does not have the same ideas I do.” But instead of going further in this vein he goes into the territory of pleasure, then bounces past to constantly defining the pleasure of text, as a painter uses another coat of paint, but such is his jitterbug method.
Barthes is careful to delineate between first, the text of pleasure and, then, the text of bliss: “…the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading…bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language,” further adding, “Pleasure can be expressed in words, bliss cannot.”
Meanwhile, as I pushed through the start of Barthes’s minibook, I kept thinking of Gass, who, if there could have been a U.S. equivalent to Barthes, would be the obvious candidate. The hundreds of hours spent on Gass’s non-fiction seeped back into my thought cycles and I believed I could snatch something from Gass to make Barthes’s fast and loose tablet of mica sprout a more purposed glitter. What imbues both is reading the other, like two convicts swinging pick-axes at that mountain side containing form and the reversibilty of reading and writing. There are things that Barthes doesn’t explicate that Gass would, like “Language is speech before it is anything,” and Gass bypasses things Barthes might have thought worthy but duly concentrates on the rest of the sentence and makes his points through metaphors, letting Barthes parse, poke, and prod for meaning. They are both urging one on not only how they read but who to read (and what it’s done to them), though Gass does a bit more naming. In one curious passage Barthes braids together a kind of Gassian knot where he writes of reading Flaubert according to Proust: “I savor the sway of formulas, the reversal of origins, the ease which brings the anterior text out of the subsequent one. I recognize that Proust’s work, for myself at least, is the reference work, the general mathesis, the mandala of the entire literary cosmogony.” In a similar manner James, Stein, Rilke, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, and Lowry are Gass’s lodestars because they are in his language (he translated Rilke) and there are probably around a thousand published pages devoted to these writers and what they compelled.
After outlining the components of a text of bliss — Barthes doesn’t drive back into them, he scutters off into more categorizing, but this missed opportunity is one Gass takes up:
Language is born in the lungs and is shaped by the lips, palate, teeth, and tongue out of spent breath — that is, from carbon dioxide. Language is speech before it is anything. It is born of babble and shaped by imitating other sounds.
Why do we read and why do the books that disturb us turn out to be the objects we, in the end, can’t have imagined living without? This is the question they are forever answering. When they speak of their experience of reading and writing, one may feel that this is maybe what it was like to be around Plato — they’ve read enough and written enough lasting work to have earned their places on high.
When one clears away the scurf of Barthes, mainly in terminology like “punctum” etc., one is left with verbs, actions. Susan Sontag: “…his boldly physical metaphors for mental life stress not topography but transformation. He speaks of the quiver, thrill, or shudder of meaning, of meanings that themselves vibrate, gather, loosen, disperse, quicken…” Gass has a clearer line in the essays — of course, he had his fiction to take a true chaotic line, Barthes did not, though the latter moved closer to the cliff at the end with memoirs.
From the midpoint of Pleasure, the book bounces about erratically — splendourously at times and at others a little garbled; the political points, for someone who apparently had little interest in the subject, feel like dispassionate gestures compared to the vegetal grounding that occurs when he describes all the languages when half asleep on a banquette in a bar:
this so-called “interior” speech was very like the noise of the square, like that amassing of minor voices coming to me from the outside: I myself was a public square, a sook,·through me passed words, tiny syntagms, bits of formulae, and no sentence formed, as though that were the law of such a language. This speech, at once very cultural and very savage, was above all lexical, sporadic; it set up in me, through its apparent flow, a definitive discontinuity..
Finally, he ends the short book in a quasi-epiphany about the textual pleasure called writing aloud, defined as “…it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an art: the art of guiding one’s body.” This may have been the prolegomena or artist’s statement Barthes needed to write his final three memoirsh books — to realize his grain of voice, but in a differentiated medium. Barthes continues: “…writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of he tongue, not that of meaning, of language.” This then becomes an extended definition of bliss. “Language lined with flesh” — the keen clear clarion call.
Clearly, there is something in Barthes that entrances yet, at times, repels me — a good friend referred to him as a scapegrace. I’m a Gassian who doesn’t believe he needs to be a Barthesian — i.e. I don’t feel the need to fit him into the demimonde of so many. Sontag, who knew both well, characterized Barthes assiduously: “For Barthes, it is not the commitment that writing makes to something outside of itself (to a social or moral goal) that makes literature an instrument of opposition and subversion but a certain practice of writing itself: excessive, playful, intricate, subtle, sensuous — language which can never be that of power.” This could apply to Gass, less so to Sontag herself. Sontag’s definition is certainly out of vogue now, but it should be embraced.
What is hard to reconcile is that for all his “boldly psychical metaphors” Barthes still doesn’t fully come at me, body to body, a wrestler with spread-eagle arms, like Gass does, even if both are the product of appetites— finally, even in the most sublime work Camera Lucina a reliance on his created “terms” (just as in Deleuze) moors the vessel in the harbor. My quiver desires metaphors and sentences that feel sandpapery and porphory smooth at the same time, which is why though I enjoy Barthes and Deleuze and Baudrillard and love the concepts — a breed of the fictional, remembering Gass’s opening remark — I want the image and the metaphor which feigns breaking the window in my consciousness but still leaves it broken.
Gass is closer to the ineffable and uncanny, even in the essays, by striding the poetic line. His “Death of the Author” is much more an extension of authors’ rights in the face of a public who today cares too much about what is said, rather than how it is said. In his book, The Counterforce, J.M. Tyree writes “[t]he novel has become a branch of nonfiction, either biography or autobiography,” perhaps the all-encompassing indictment of our era. In a most indelicate reversal, Gass bastes some of Barthes’s least fleshed out ideas in the former’s “Death of the Author” with his own “Death of the Author” — four times as long as Barthes’s. Where Gass brings down the gavel is on the need to cross-check the reader, since, as Gaston Bachelard reminds us:
The image offered us by reading the poem now becomes really our own…It has been give us by another, but we begin to have the impression that we could have created it, that we should have created it. It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and becoming of our being. Here expression creates being.
Here is the main gist:
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