Barthes at 100

At the TLS, Neil Badmington on a spate of recent celebrations and biographical projects on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Roland Barthes. Lots of great stuff here (the intellectual milieu that totally absorbed my late teens!), but I especially wish I could get to this exhibit at the BnF:

The heart of the exhibition is in the adjoining Galerie des donateurs – a small, quiet, dimly lit room. Moving anti-clockwise around eighteen glass cases containing materials from the BnF’s Barthes archive, we follow the painstaking and painful development of A Lover’s Discourse, which was a bestseller in France when it was published in 1977. (Samoyault reveals that 70,000 copies were sold in the first year alone.) From an intimate “journal amoureux” whose pages record a series of personal incidents from the summer of 1974, through reading and teaching notes (Goethe, Plato), filing systems, diaries, pages from the book’s manuscript and eventually the corrected typescript, the final text unfurls. Its roots in a life and a love are laid bare, as is the physicality of Barthes’s method of working: ink colour changes often, as do writing instruments and materials; new passages are taped or stapled over existing text; different forms of index are sketched and re-sketched; a heavy blue marker pen strikes out unwanted phrases, such as five lines of commentary on Stéphane Mallarmé’s Pour un tombeau d’Anatole which did not appear in the published book. Punctuating these preparatory materials are artworks produced by Barthes during the period in question, while headphones at the far end of the gallery play music by Schubert, Brahms, Schumann and Fauré. (Barthes was an amateur pianist.)

Novelistic detail

I had a great time teaching this morning - students had read the introductory chapter of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel and Roland Barthes' "The Reality Effect." I am eternally preoccupied with both of these pieces, and I think the students were excited about them too.

The Barthes essay is quite abstract, definitely harder to follow than the Watt, but hard too in the sense that it is virtually impossible to find genuinely "insignificant" details of the sort he designates!

I put together these three passages on a handout so that we'd have something to look at; to state the obvious, "the reality effect" is never relevant for first-person narration, so that the Defoe passage is already out of the question; in the second passage, we briefly think the shoes might be a "look at me, I'm real" detail, but the narrator immediately moralizes and "meaningizes" them for the reader; the third passage is closest to what Barthes is talking about, but shows with exceptional clarity how hard it is for novelists and novel-readers not to fold insignificant details back into the world of meaning (the notation of the cost of the postage tells us something about the family's precarious finances; Mr. Garth's saving the red seal for his daughter speaks to his warmth as a family man).

I walk’d about on the Shore, lifting up my Hands, and my whole Being, as I may say, wrapt up in the Contemplation of my Deliverance, making a Thousand Gestures and Motions which I cannot describe, reflecting upon all my Comrades that were drown’d, and that there should not be one Soul sav’d but my self; for, as for them, I never saw them afterwards, or any Sign of them, except three of their Hats, one Cap, and two Shoes that were not Fellows.

- Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1719)

Her trip to La Vaubyessard had made a hole in her life, like those great chasms that a storm, in a single night, will sometimes open in the mountains. Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.

- Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways, trans. Lydia Davis (1859)

In watching effects, if only of an electric battery, it is often necessary to change our place and examine a particular mixture or group at some distance from the point where the movement we are interested in was set up. The group I am moving towards is at Caleb Garth’s breakfast-table in the large parlour where the maps and desk were: father, mother, and five of the children. Mary was just now at home waiting for a situation, while Christy, the boy next to her, was getting cheap learning and cheap fare in Scotland, having to his father’s disappointment taken to books instead of that sacred calling ‘business’.
The letters had come – nine costly letters, for which the postman had been paid three and twopence, and Mr Garth was forgetting his tea and toast while he read his letters and laid them open one above the other, sometimes swaying his head slowly, sometimes screwing up his mouth in inward debate, but not forgetting to cut off a large red seal unbroken, which Letty snatched up like an eager terrier.

-- Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72)

Three entries

from Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book. If Barthes and Perec were both reading this, it would explain certain similarities between their writing that I've always been curious about (probably not very deep delving into the question would get me a satisfactory answer - I will follow up on this when I am back in New York).

Refined and elegant things - A girl’s over-robe of white on white over pale violet-grey. The eggs of the spot-billed duck. Shaved ice with a sweet syrup, served in a shiny new metal bowl. A crystal rosary. Wisteria flowers. Snow on plum blossoms. An adorable little child eating strawberries.
...
Cats – Cats should be completely black except for the belly, which should be very white.
...
Endearingly lovely things . . . Things children use in doll play. A tiny lotus leaf that’s been picked froma pond. A tiny aoi leaf. In fact, absolutely anything that’s tiny is endearing.

Home again

Really I do not have much of an urge to eat at Per Se: multi-hour multi-course meals are not my cup of tea, it is too much money in any case. But - "the stray ends of exquisite donuts"!

I survived Ottawa, I survived yesterday's long teaching day, I survived today's also long day of miscellaneous meetings: really I am about to collapse with exhaustion, but barring a couple of small but important tasks that are pressing, I can now afford to take it easy for a day or so. I have a curiously huge accumulation of work-related stuff that I've been slightly in denial about (internal reviews of colleagues, external tenure letter sorts of thing), but it can probably be done in a day and a half of extended effort if I can get myself back up to normal levels of fatigue first. Tomorrow morning I will go to boot camp and gentle yoga and read a novel, I think - it will be beneficial.

I had a funny and incongruous pair of texts to teach yesterday: Roland Barthes's The Neutral (I am enchanted by this book) and Pope's "The Rape of the Lock". The master's seminar is a good deal of fun: I am enjoying it perhaps even more than I expected to.

Saw Helen DeWitt and Dale Peck's very good joint reading last night at (Le) Poisson Rouge, and will be back there on Thursday for Nico's gig (I had already planned to go with adopted grandfather G., but my brother M. is going to come also, he is working in Brooklyn again!); and my dad is coming up from Philadelphia on Saturday for dinner and a BAM show I found intriguing enough to buy tickets for without knowing anything in particular about it.

Light reading around the edges: Marisa de los Santos's Falling Together.

Post-vortex update

It is not quite true homecoming (no New York, no cat!), but it is a tranquil point of rest, something for which I am extremely grateful!

Ottawa was tough, but it was important to be there.

I read some great books in airports and airplanes en route there from Philadelphia last week (in particular I loved Doris Egan's Ivory books - a Jo Walton recommendation - extraordinarily good lucid storytelling and an immensely appealing voice t o boot, making me hope that she had published tons of other books I could now read too, only it seems that really she is [probably sensibly] writing for television mostly these days - her blog is full of interesting things that would be useful for novelists as well as writers of television episodes, though). A mediocre Tanya Huff novel, purchased in the Detroit airport, helped pass the time. Katherine Howell's Frantic is a pretty high-quality rendition of a genre I like very much (in this case, it's paramedics and cops in Sydney, with more of a thriller than police-procedural vibe), and I'm now near the end of the next one in the series: definitely recommended. Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse (Brent warned me!) is markedly inferior to Max Brooks's amazing World War Z: definitely read Brooks instead if you haven't already but are pondering the purchase of Wilson. (Wilson has some notable gifts as a storyteller but he is not truly curious about the more logistical elements of what would happen if robots took over the world, how resistance fighters actually organize their resources, etc., which makes him ill-suited to excel in this particular genre.)

After that we got sucked into the VORTEX, so there was pretty much no time whatsoever for reading or websurfing, thus the silence here. Did manage to read one really amazingly great novel, Megan Abbott's Bury Me Deep. What a book! There is an obvious comparison to James Ellroy, not just because of the nature of the subject matter (and the charge of the writerly investment in that sort of material) but also because it is so unusual to find propulsive storytelling in combination with such an amazingly distinctive writerly voice. For this book Abbott has come up with the most extraordinary idiom, lush and baroque and stylized yet also with the sort of concision and selectivity that one thinks more often of spare prose only possessing: anyway, I really loved it, and am eager to read more of hers, including the brand new one called The End of Everything, which I have pre-ordered for Kindle...

And so it was a great relief to be back in an airport yesterday and with all the time in the world to read books again! I could not resist purchasing a huge armful of real old-fashioned paper books at Chapters in Nepean, many of them on deep discount, and the travel time was honestly at that point just a great respite from what had gone before! Two very good crime novels, really exactly to my tastes: Mark Billingham's Bloodline and Denise Mina's The End of the Wasp Season. Two writers I can't get enough of...

Finally, a couple of links:

The real-world setting for the adventures of Thomas the Tank Engine.

My favorite bit of Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly

Nightwork

At the TLS, Mairéad Hanrahan on Columbia University Press's new edition of Roland Barthes' notes-cum-teaching script The Preparation of the Novel (mmmm, I have to get this one and read it):

The first paradox is the overwhelming focus in the 1978–9 classes on the haiku, which has exemplary status as a “Notation of the Present”: its extreme brevity enables it to approximate most closely and truthfully to the “instant” that, for Barthes, writing seeks to capture. But the haiku’s instantaneity is also a limit. With no room either for narrative or, especially, for the “interweaving” together of truth and falsehood in fiction, it throws the novel into relief.

Parlor games

From Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard:

The index of a text, then, is not only an instrument of reference; it is itself a text, a second text which is the relief (remainder and asperity) of the first: what is wandering (interrupted) in the rationality of the sentences.

The sequel

More Barthes:

. . . if you like words to the point of succumbing to them, you exclude yourself from the law of the signified. . . . My body itself (and not only my ideas) can make up to words, can be in some sense created by them: today, I discover on my tongue a red patch which appears to be an abrasion, or in medical terms an excoriation--painless, moreover, which fits in perfectly, I decide, with cancer! But examined closely, this sign is merely a faint desquamation of the whitish film which covers the tongue. I cannot swear that this whole little obsessive scenario has not been worked up in order to use that rare word, so attractive by dint of its exactitude: excoriation.

Effet bienfaisant d'une phrase ~ Beneficent effect of a phrase

From Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes:

X tells me that one day he decided "to exonerate his life from his unhappy loves," and that this phrase seemed so splendid to him that it almost managed to compensate for the failures which had provoked it; he then determined (and determined me) to take more advantage of this reservoir of irony in all (aesthetic) language.

Recap: "I like, I don't like"

From September 2007, the Dizzies challenge and my old response...

"Cockamamies"

Reading Roland Barthes is amazing for many reasons, but the latest one is that by looking up the word decalcomania ("Fiction: slight detachment, slight separation which forms a complete, colored scene, like a decalcomania") I have learned the origin of the term decal!

(And: the decal craze of the late 1800s!)

The final assignment

for the class I've been teaching this semester on style:

In “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag writes, “To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility.” Adopting the form or mode of “jottings” – other “jotters” we’ve read this semester include Barthes, Koestenbaum, Sante and to a lesser extent Sebald – write a piece called “Notes on Style.” The notes should be ordered by some principle – numbering, alphabetization by keyword – that is neither chronological nor obviously logic-or-argument-driven. You are welcome to use quotations from Austen, Flaubert, James, Proust, etc. as illustrations, but you are not obligated to do so; examples from other spheres are also welcome. Be as vivid and precise as possible, and include at least one original “maxim” or “aphorism” about style or one of style’s affiliates as a self-standing item in your list of jottings.

Slim memorials

Umberto Eco on lists (courtesy of Marginal Revolution).

Michael Wood on Roland Barthes (courtesy of Paperpools)

A structuralist's lament

This poem really made me laugh - so true!

The gesture of a dandy

From Roland Barthes' essay "Cy Twombly: Works on Paper," in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard:

Through TW's work, the germs of writing proceed from the greatest rarity to a swarming multiplicity: a kind of graphic pruritus. In its tendency, then, writing becomes culture. When writing bears down, explodes, pushes toward the margins, it rejoins the idea of the Book. The Book which is potentially present in TW's work is the old Book, the annotated Book: a super-added word invades the margins, the interlinea: this is the gloss. When TW writes and repeats this one word: Virgil, it is already a commentary on Virgil, for the name, inscribed by hand, not only calls up a whole idea (though an empty one) of ancient culture but also "operates" a kind of citation: that of an era of bygone, calm, leisurely, even decadent studies: English preparatory schools, Latin verses, desks, lamps, tiny pencil annotations. That is culture for TW: an ease, a memory, an irony, a posture, the gesture of a dandy.

"That is what I need to learn"

Rather belatedly, a bit that struck me in Laura Secor's New Yorker piece a few weeks ago on the dissident Iranian economist Mohammed Tabibian (not sure about the current situation vis-a-vis reading electronically, but I think the article is available online only to subscribers who have also registered at the site):

One day, on his way to school, Tabibian noticed in a bookstore window a thick new book for sale titled "Economics." It was a word he had never heard before. Tabibian asked his literature teacher what it meant. "He said it meant using your money wisely," Tabibian told me. "I thought the phrase he expressed was more often true by default. Everybody knows how to use their money wisely if they've got some." When he went home that night, Tabibian put the question to his father, who said he wasn't sure but he thought that economics had something to do with the creation of wealth.

The next day, Tabibian went to the bookstore and pulled the book from the shelf. "It was full of graphs, tables, formulas, and lengthy arguments," he said. "I noticed that the subject of creation and distribution of wealth is no simple matter. I thought, That is what I need to learn."

Tabibian later realized that the book was a translation of the 1948 introductory-economics textbook by the American neo-classical economist Paul Samuelson. By then, Tabibian was majoring in the subject at Shiraz University. He went into the field, he told me, "hoping that someday I would help find solutions for the misery and deprivation of many around me."

It is an interesting anecdote in itself, but I am especially intrigued by the clarity and intensity of the thought That is what I need to learn.

(It is like an Augustinian call - take up and read!)

I think it well recalls childhood moments experienced by anybody with a fundamentally analytic or academic orientation towards the world - it is in my experience quite different in kind from the feeling one has when encountering a magically transporting novel, or even a novel that gives indispensable insights into some particularly relevant aspect of human nature.

I would say I had glimpses of this as a quite young child (it was not the way I went eventually in terms of field, but books about mathematics and logic were favorites with me at that stage!), perhaps eleven or twelve, reading Martin Gardner's delightful Aha, Gotcha! - it showed me not so much how to do things as a way in which one might think about things, a way that was uniquely appealing to the point of being almost indispensable!

But certainly the reading experience that quite literally made me think That is what I need happened the summer after I'd graduated from high school. I was sixteen turning seventeen - I had read a huge amount of literature and quite a lot of older literary criticism (I had thoroughly immersed myself in the critical prose of Anthony Burgess and Ezra Pound!), and had been intrigued by the rather ambivalent New York Times-type coverage of work by Derrida and the deconstructionists and so forth - I had yet to encounter it directly, but I already had a very strong suspicion that this was exactly that I wanted to learn about.

I was spending the night at my friend Sara's, at her dad and stepmother's house, and her stepmother had done a master's degree in English - her books were on shelves in Sara's room. As if in a trance, I snagged Roland Barthes's S/Z and was subsequently deaf to the calls of ordinary social interactions...