. Spinning .

I’m not convinced that there’s not the slightest possibility that Barthes is not simply full of ..it.

I have finally finished this.  What surprises me is that for a book about finding the pleasure–nay, not mere pleasure, but bliss–of reading, these words were the dryest, least inspiring I’ve read; a few steps short of  a psychology textbook.  Nor have I ever read a book so sexually-oriented with such big words.

I did manage to glean some ideas from it, but it will have to be picked up another time when I’m a bit more experienced, more open and Barthes is more accessible to me.  These closing words are ones that I do understand, and I consider them foreplay:

(…)to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes; that is bliss.

So back on the shelf Roland goes, to be pulled out and read again with a serious approach and intent to fully comprehend and absorb and attain bliss. 

A thought:  In Barthes’ likening reading to an orgasmic sensation, in his cajoling the reader to seek more from text, I wonder what his thoughts would be on the involvement of all the senses required by new media methods of presentation?

Slowly working my way through this, reading every word but not quite understanding it.  But long ago I realized that this is going to have to be read many times to get the benefit of Barthes’ words. 

They’re not bliss reading-wise, that’s for sure; yet that is exactly what he is trying to impart.  And I may be wrong, but I’m not taking his considerations as to reading style for just the classic literary books.  Personally, I would try to apply what he says to every word that’s written.  Yes, to a scientist, a formula can be utterly joyful in its revelation.  To please the reader is the goal, and what I’m looking for in this book is to seek that state of elevation of mind no matter the subject; it’s whatever turns you on. For Barthes’ is not considering the writer; the writer–for him–is dead.

In alleging that the same text does not bring pleasure to the same reader consistently, in taking into consideration it’s "surprise" value–which is something I can understand; that phrase that makes you stop below a mental Wow–there is also of course the proof that in re-readings, we find something that we merely read before. 

And sometimes even Barthes can prove the point:

The text is (should be) that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father. (p. 53)

Obviously I read this a few paragraphs at a time, with days in between readings.  Also obvious, I’m sure, is that I don’t fully understand all the meanings as Barthes is presenting them.  But there are some things that just stand right out and grab me:

To be with the one I love and to think of something else; this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work.  Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else.  (p. 24)

This I’ve done. This I’ve felt.  Marquez in particular has me stopping in the middle of a page, sometimes to lay the book aside and roll a phrase or idea around in my mind as a sourball on my tongue.  There is a pleasure in this, as foreplay; drawn out with little spikes of delight as comprehension as well as inspiration and imagination build.  Even once it’s understood–or not understood, but presented itself in all its possibilities–the taste remains after the candy has melted away.

Barthes claims that Pleasure is not the lesser, nor Bliss the greater form of the same thing. That instead, they run parallel, and may even be in conflict.  In an interesting argument he brings up the inability to speak of Bliss in words, while text that is labeled Pleasure, cannot be explained in words.  Sort of like the sexual "oh, Gaawwwd, yes, yes!" versus the final "aaaaargh…"

There is more that Barthes gives as illustration, something relative to history and possibility.  Trouble is, I don’t quite get everything that he presents here.  What I cannot grasp, I reread a few times.  Then I move on. 

This is where study in a class atmosphere is more conducive to learning; when the questions can be discussed, argued, answered in some sort of manner.  When you read alone, you either give up, or carry the rocks of information along instead of laying them along the path.  This book, in other words, will need to be read again, in a better time, a smarter time.  But I will get out of it for now what I can.

Does anyone understand Barthes?

You know, for a guy who is adamant that the reader writes the text, he uses an awful lot of words that I doubt many beyond him ever even heard before.  It’s sort of disassociating to have to keep putting my book down to run for the dictionary every few minutes. That fourth wall is hanging in shreds by now.

I think ol’ Roland likes to be controversial and annoying.  The whole book tells me to go beyond pleasure (contentment) to reach the mental orgasm of bliss (rapture).  Then why not name the book The Bliss of the Text?  Pleasure is fleeting, unsatisfying, pah.  What we are to aim for he (I?) claim, is that total loss of control, complete immersion in the moment that takes us out of the present and plunks us into that dizzying YAAARGH! moment of losing it.

Well I believe I can get a twinge from Faulkner, or Steinbeck or Marquez, and certainly from McCathy (and Edgar, of course, but that’s a twinge of another body part).  That’s why I don’t read in public–though of course being a girl makes it less evident.  Kerouac isn’t stroking the right erogenous zones for me (how else could I put it?).

I wonder now–now that I’m off on this sexual experiment of the mind–I wonder if it’s a gender thing; we ladies are still getting off on words rather than pictures. 

So then, what’s Barthes talking about?

I’ve plowed through about a third of this, and now and again a tad of it makes sense.  It’s slow going, stopping to check definitions which lead to a whole new theory that needs understanding before I can go back and get past one word. 

Basically, the pleasure is still a readerly function of the text.  It can still be the story, the language, the construction, the style, but as put forth by the writer and he/she is appreciated as such.  But we must remember that Barthes advocates the death of the author, maintaining the the text belongs to the reader, thus making it a living thing, constantly changing and evolving with each reader, each reading. 

What Barthes seeks in literature is bliss, proving the writerly function of the text.  What can grab the reader(slash writer) so completely as to become orgasmic (mentally at least!) and out of the control (as we become in sexual orgasm) of the reader.

One point that was interesting (and a bit clearer than most) was this:

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?  In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, that is erotic:  the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather, the staging of an appearance as disappearance.  (p. 14)

While I don’t claim to understand it completely, I believe what Barthes is pointing out here is that little is more.  The imagination can supply much more pleasurable and exciting fillers than bold display.

This, I think, is one of the best illustrations of Barthes’ writerly/readerly theory that I’ve read.

Listen to this, keeping in mind that Barthes, in speaking of pleasure, brings in the French jouissance encompassing the sensual, the orgiastic meaning.  He lists this thought under babel–the many different languages thought not separating but bringing people together:

If I read this sentence, this story, or this word with pleasure, it is because they were written in pleasure (such pleasure does not contradict the writer’s complaints).  But the opposite?  Does writing in pleasure guarantee–guarantee me, the writer–my reader’s pleasure?  Not at all.  I must seek out this reader (must cruise him) without knowing where he is.  A site of bliss is then created  it is not the reader’s "person" that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectic of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss:  the bets are not placed, there can still be a game. (p. 4)

To seek a state of ecstasy of language and understanding with a stranger?  One that is capable of simulating orgasm? 

Why not?  I’ve read phrases by Faulkner, Marquez, McCarthy, and others that have stirred my innards.  I’ve felt that building up of passion starting from recognition of importance in a slow read.  Knowing that the story is, in a few sentences, going somewhere that will culminate in satisfaction to the mind while keeping the senses twanging in anticipation.  I’ve stalled, held back until it was beyond my control, the big bang that didn’t disappoint.  And exhaled a long whew…as it drained away in a wonderful weariness.

I seek to write even one sentence that can do this to a reader.

While I haven’t given up on Barthes’ S/Z, I picked this second essay up to perhaps approach Barthes from a different angle.  Pleasure.

Of course, Topic of Cancer was also in this package.  Do you think that maybe I’m having a mid-life crisis?

Little by precious little I’m working through Barthes’ S/Z, but I still need to go back a few pages, consult some notes I’ve made to understand the code system he’s working with, and it’s very slow going.

Barthes breaks down every phrase into its value as symbol, action, or signifier, etc., and meticulously dissects the story of Sarrasine by teaching the reader to become aware of the words themselves and how they connect within our mind and within the story.

It’s tough reading.

The tree fell.

Not a but the.  So a particular tree.  What kind?  As I write, I am thinking of a birch.  Do they have birches in Australia?  What tree would my brother call up as an image?  How big is the tree?  I didn’t say.  Did the tree fall suddenly, beaten by a brutal storm that rendered it top-heavy with rain or struck by a flash of light?  Did it fall creaking and slowly, a giant tumbled by its own age.

This is oversimplification of a complicated theory, but Barthes is not easily read alone.  Though he likely would not mind my perception.  There needs to be a classroom discussion to hear all the voices and prove the point.

I’ve not taken on a new novel as yet, nor picked up another journal from my backlog.  I need to spend the time first learning to read.  Blunder again into Joyce’s Afternoon, A Story or Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl.  These too, I feel a need for companionship on the journey.  I am missing signposts and seem to race through to remain lost. 

Perhaps Barthes will help me find my way.

As opposed to my slowly waning inclination to tell Barthes to cut the crap, read for enjoyment and meaning instead of ruining a simple story through dissection.

Haven’t quite felt comfortable yet with the theory to argue it one way or another so I’m reading further into the book before I comment.  I did enjoy Sarrasine and Barthes hasn’t ruined it for me, but I am struggling a bit with his symbols and reasoning so that I cannot as yet smoothly and readily apply it to the story by Honore de Balzac.  Given unlimited rights as a reader by the gist of the theory, I’m making a list with notes on the points made since I’m not concentrating all my attention on this one book alone right now and tend to lose the trail of thought in between readings.  This is where more structured learning assists the comprehension and study. 

I should be back soon with some more confident perception and comments.

Honore de Balzac’s Sarrasine is quite the story.  A petulant, passionate young sculptor is taken with the beauty of the singer, La Zambinella only to find that she is a he, and he is killed by her/his protectors.  But this story is embedded within another, for it is told by one party guest to another to explain the presence of a very odd old man at the events held by a wealthy and worldly family who seem to protect him and keep him away from their guests.  There is a question as well–in the beginning–of exactly how this family came into their money and status–although status is easily explained by their money alone.

Overly dramatic (I can never understand the crying, moaning, pain of the lovers of this era) and flowery, it is of course, well written and intriguing and carries the reader along in its imagery and mystery.  It was a delight to read, and I did enjoy it, though not making too much more of the story than what it presented, and it’s telling of society and history and the nature of mankind.

It will be interesting now to see what Barthes makes of it.

Got through the first part of this essay by Roland Barthes, losing my way many times; but then, that’s what Barthes is saying, no?  It is reading in my own manner, my own (in)experience that brings out the meaning. 

But I certainly am willing to take his offer:

We must further accept one last freedom:  that of reading the text as if it had already been read.  Those who like a good story may certainly turn to the end of the book and read the tutor text first; it is given as an appendix in its purity and continuity, as it came from the printer, in short, as we habitually read it.  (ix. How many readings? p. 15)

And so I turn to Honore de Balzac’s short story, Sarrasine, which is what Barthes will be examining in S/Z.  It is, sizewise alone, much easier reading than what Barthes will guide me through, and I’ve already found it to be enjoyable.  Yes, I feel like an unadventurous clod by not jumping off the ledge hand in hand with Roland, but for me, the old teaches the new; the new, the old.

I was all set to spar with Barthes, prepared for this bible of interactive insight.  Even with the reluctant acceptance of readers’ rights to write and the understanding of readerly/writerly, I was up for the fight.  It is a self-defeating process of learning, this defiance and need to be challenged to change a well-defended position, but in the end, the conviction of one or the other is clear and embedded in the mind.

However, one needs to understand the other before one can change sides.  S/Z is a bit over my head, I think, and the battle is more a mental one of knowing thy enemy before strategy and logic is put to use.

But I’m not giving up, as this concept is at least one of the keys I need to open the doors.