Between Meaning and Nonsense
SIMON, JOHN
Writers & Writing BETWEEN MEANING AND NONSENSE BY JOHN SIMON For the reader unmoved by the heady publicity that clings to the name of Roland Barthes like overinsistent perfume to a passing...
...Writers & Writing BETWEEN MEANING AND NONSENSE BY JOHN SIMON For the reader unmoved by the heady publicity that clings to the name of Roland Barthes like overinsistent perfume to a passing exhibitionist, three things become immediately clear upon reading him...
...but when these disciplines invade literary criticism, the effect is rather as if Monaco tried to switch the source of its income from roulette to agriculture...
...Yet merely by attending to the dense, almost impenetrable, pages of New Critical Essays (Hill and Wang, 120 pp., $10.95), Barthes' not so new book now posthumously published over here, one can begin to convey the limitations of this approach...
...He has just tracked down a certain bisexuality in this ostensibly straightforward piece of romantic exoticism, the story of a British officer and a Turkish odalisque who die for their clandestine love affair...
...There is no parallel between an eager husband looking back at his beloved wife returning from the dead and a structural critic worrying the problem of how to describe nonexistence...
...And to think that he has to drag poor blameless Orpheus into that shabby transaction...
...1) There is real intelligence at work here...
...The result, however, is the opposite: By making the critical method more important than the work it comments on, it reduces first literature, then criticism, to insignificance...
...Perhaps this yellow cat is literature itself, for if the notation doubtless refers to the idea that a yellow cat is an ill-favored, probably stray cat and thereby combines with other details of the Abbe's life, all attesting to his kindness and poverty, this yellow is also quite simply yellow, it leads not only to a sublime-in short, intellectual-meaning, it stubbornly remains on the level of colors (opposing, for example, the black of the old housekeeper and that of the crucifix): to say a yellow cat and not a stray cat is in a way the act which separates writer from mere scribe, not because the yellow 'creates an image,' but because it casts a certain enchantment on the intentional meaning, returns speech to a kind of asymptote of meaning...
...By assuming this Oriental disguise, moreover, the person becomes "a pictorial being" in an exotic tableau...
...Let me begin with a relatively simple example of what Barthes is up to, a passage from his essay on Loti's/Aziyade...
...But the myth does not necessarily define love, and certainly not in that way...
...in his Writing Degree Zero, he speculated about "that Orphean dream-A writer without Literature...
...Orpheus, incidentally, keeps getting it...
...Rather, it "returns speech to a kind of asymptote of meaning," and is remarkable because it says less...
...Barthes perceives in the espousal of Oriented clothes by the hero (named also Pierre Loti) a kind of transvestism-or, rather, a device that legitimizes the wearing of flowing, feminine attire...
...Barthes may interpret as he wishes, but he cannot claim that his interpretation is the old myth...
...But suppose that is what modern writing is doing...
...And how in God's name does "yellow cat" make you a writer rather than a mere scribe "because it casts a certain enchantment on the intentional meaning...
...2) The intelligence wastes itself on efforts to make the criticism more important than the thing criticized...
...The yellow is also quite simply yellow"-here we have the scandal, not of literary speech but of pseudoliterary criticism...
...The eight essays in the present volume were originally published in France as an appendage to Le Degri zero de I'ecriture (Writing Degree Zero) in 1972...
...Consider only the impossible second sentence that rambles on relentlessly with rudimentary punctuation and stretches well beyond syntactical cohesion and psychological endurance...
...Consider the following passage from the quasi-autobiography Roland Barthes...
...Again, Chateaubriand's Life of Rance, so far from being a pious pensum in response to priestly exhortation, is in fact "a work of sovereign irony...
...Philosophy triumphs readily over past evils and evils to come, but present evils triumph over it...
...To continue: "The consecration of the disguise (what belies it by dint of its success [can you follow this parenthetic remark?]) is pictorial integration, the passage from the body into a collective writing, in a word (if we are to take it literally), transcription: dressed exactly (i.e., in a garment from which the excess of exactitude is banished), the subject dissolves himself, not by intoxication, but by Apollinism, by participation in a proportion, in a combination system...
...in a sense, one could say that Barthes represents the vengeance of linguistics on literature and literary scholarship, which have long relegated linguistics to an ancillary position...
...Envious of the half-erased theorems-the prestigious signsof the physicists, [teachers of literature] now compete by chalking up theorems and theories of their own, words having failed them yet again...
...Where to begin...
...As I tried to show in a piece on Michel Foucault in these pages ("Paradox Lost," NL, December 4, 1978), there exists an affinity between homosexual writers and the paradox...
...Or perhaps it is not so much a matter of ushering in modern writing as destroying (or deconstructing) all accepted views on writing...
...3) The stuff is, finally, unreadable...
...Shouldn't everything logical be equally perspicuous...
...The need to close a parenthesis in fairly short order allows him to hurry on, like jesting Pilate, without staying for elucidation...
...Literature as the adventure of what is impossible to language, text as a figuring of language without intelligence, semiology as the only remaining option...
...Not so fast, please...
...What has invaded literary criticism here is not only science but also linguistics...
...True enough, and in New Critical Essays, Barthes demonstrates how "a sudden dissymmetry disturbs" a maxim by La Rochefoucauld "and consequently makes the entire series of surrounding symmetries signify" by "simply casting the maxim as an equation...
...And how is that a "combination system"-what, in fact, does that scientific-sounding term mean...
...to the tenacious will to suffer...
...Gore Vidal has observed in Matters of Fact and of Fiction: "Like so many of today's academic critics, Barthes resorts to formulas, diagrams...
...Then Barthes hits upon an idea of genius: a second, shorter wavelength (more science) that "transmits no information, if not literature itself...
...Perhaps Loti has not consciously done anything...
...Maybe it is not a wavelength at all, but an invisible papaya that transmits no taste if not fruitiness itself...
...Most revealing is the essay "Where to Begin...
...That "asymptote" is a good example of science dragged into criticism in order to make it more impenetrable and imposing-A way for the critic to say less and make it sound like more...
...In Barthes, paradox is everywhere, ranging from the clever epigram to flagrant, and quite unabashed, self-contradiction...
...he tells us merely, with Pythian opacity, that it "suspends speech between meaning and nonsense...
...It was doubtless useful for Claude Levi-Strauss to be structural about anthropology, and for Ferdinand de Saussure to be semiotic about sociology...
...How inept to use Orpheus and Eurydice to make a point about the difficulty of describing "nothing...
...That would make him pretty major, I should think...
...The intention seems to be to prove the importance of structural analysis by showing what wonders it can wrest even from works of negligible literary merit...
...Suppose some noble lady had given her worthy confessor an adorable calico kitten, the pride of the litter...
...One does not look back at nothing, in any case, and what is that parenthetic "set back," except a further setback for the reader...
...And yet a little further on in the same book we read: "What has attracted him [Barthes] is less the sign than the signal, the poster: the science he desired was not a semiology but a sig-naletics...
...rather, he wants to construct a mythic perspective...
...the result, no doubt, of teaching in classrooms equipped with blackboards and chalk...
...Not surprising from someone who, in The Pleasure of the Text, attempts to queer the essence of writing, the sentence, by dismissing the writer as "a Sentence-Thinker, i.e., not altogether a thinker...
...Proust is by no means attempting to record the shifting values of his era...
...has then Loti-this outdated, un-theoretical, minor writer—ushered in modern writing...
...Presently, however, things get hairier yet...
...From the frying pan into the fire: Even the only remaining choice is finally inadequate to so deep and far-reaching an intellect-condemned, moreover, to accept (however ungraciously) being a Sentence-Thinker...
...In the present volume, in the essay on Chateaubriand, Barthes writes, "We find ourselves dreaming of a pure writer who does not write...
...which proposes to demonstrate how to perform structural analysis, and uses for its subject Jules Verne's trashy The Mysterious Island...
...Barthes never explains how this short wavelength operates...
...throughout, Barthes uses parenthetic remarks to introduce grandiose, often irrelevant, very frequently incomprehensible asides that raise, or even pretend to answer, vast psychological or philosophical questions...
...And why is it Apollonian to disguise oneself as an old Arab...
...Thus the point of the La Rochefoucauld essay is that the Maxims are not, as generally believed, moral and psychological insights, but verbal games...
...the longer one is that of meaning (the Abb6 Seguin is a holy man, he lives in poverty accompanied by a stray cat...
...a b c'.Vc ! b a." And what is the maxim thus simplified...
...Later, we find him proclaiming that "The modern writer...
...The plates of the Encyclopedia are not sane, rational diagrams, but constant attempts at "impious fragmentation of the world...
...And now we read: "The goal of transvestism is finally (once the illusion of being is exhausted), to transform oneself into a describable object-And not into an intro-spectible subject...
...What would be left of that typical Barthesian strategy, elaborate superstructure erected on arrant supposition...
...as for criticism of this kind, far from being pure her-meneutics, it is pure mystification...
...Is it a way of mingling with the natives...
...But most important to Barthes is paradox: proving the truth of the opposite of what is traditionally and commonly held true...
...And how does one dissolve oneself in Apollonianism (the translator, Richard Howard, should know there is no such English word as "Apollinism"), in a proportion...
...Next, what is the meaning of "write only insofar as one is written...
...And how...
...They comprise structural analyses of works by or aspects of La Rochefoucauld, Chateaubriand, Proust, Flaubert, Eugene Fromen-tin, and Pierre Loti, as well as a structuralist interpretation of the illustrations for Diderot's Encyclopedic, and a propaedeutic essay on how "to undertake the structural analysis of a literary work," entitled "Where to Begin...
...For me, it is a curious combination of scientism (asymptotes, wavelengths) and some sort of Zen (transmitting no information, if not literature itself), and so perfectly otiose...
...Also the scandal of translatorese: Surely, "it is here that the scandal of literary speech appears" is called for.] This speech is somehow endowed with a double wavelength...
...The uniformed Westerner is a standard literary and pictorial feature of the Eastern scene...
...must be at once outside the ethical and within language, he must create the general with the irreducible, rediscover the amorality of his existence through the moral generality of language: it is this hazardous passage which is literature...
...Flaubert's exhausting stylistic efforts were directed to freeing the writer from the rhetorician (so far, so good), only to subject him to the "master of linguistics" (nonsense...
...This enchantment, mark it well, has nothing to do with creating an image-that would be too simple for a critic of Barthes' superhuman subtlety...
...the shorter one transmits no information, if not literature itself: this is the more mysterious one, for because of it we cannot reduce literature to an entirely decipherable system: reading, criticism are not pure hermeneutics...
...Let us look at another passage, this one from an examination of Chateaubriand's Life of Rance, a pious biography the old writer undertook at the behest of his confessor, the Abbe Seguin...
...Still less is it suitable for an all-out attack on structuralism and semiotics, imperative as such an enterprise may be...
...This is not the place for an overview of Barthes' triumphant career as one of several popes of structuralism (whose competing seats are not just in Rome and Avignon, but indeed in a number of institutions of higher learning from Paris to New Haven and beyond...
...Fromentin's Dominique is not a pioneer novel of psychological analysis but a subversive, "illegal" book that "invites us to idleness, to irresponsibility...
...The essential problem with structuralism and semiotics is that they don't belong in the arts...
...How does "literature itself get transmitted except by performance, by function, even if the means is suggestion, indirection, understatement...
...French critical thought, once more or less Cartesian, has become largely Barthesian regardless of its many brand names-the most picturesque being "deconstructionism," the brainchild of Jacques Derrida...
...At one point Barthes claims that Orpheus loves Eurydice only because she is lost, "in accordance with the old myth...
...How does "dressed exactly" get to be glossed as "from which excess of exactitude is banished...
...And who says that modern writing is seeking to discover itself in those categories...
...Literature will indeed not become decipherable by such an investigation...
...a certain 'detachment' applied by excess of words...
...First, how many "logics" does writing have, and how do they get to be more or less complex...
...Now, there are evidently people who find this sort of thing impressive, and there may even be some who can make sense of it...
...Note, by the way, that parenthesis...
...To go on: "Hence a minor author, outdated and evidently unconcerned with theory (though a contemporary of Mallarme, of Proust), brings to light the most complex of writing's logics: for wanting to be 'the one who belongs to the tableau' is to write only insofar as one is written: that abolition of passive and active, of expresser and expressed, of subject and statement, in which modern writing is seeking to discover itself...
...What illusion, exactly, has been exhausted...
...the yellow cat says the Abbe Seguin's kindness, but also it says less, and it is here that there appears the scandal of literary speech...
...Why is the protagonist-or, indeed, the writer, for Loti is manifestly playing at partial autobiography-Any more an object as a transvestite than as Lieutenant Loti in his British officer's uniform...
...Next, how can Barthes assume that just because the cat is yellow, it must also be ill-favored and probably a stray-later in the paragraph, the "probably" is dropped, and the cat becomes an apodictic stray...
...like Orpheus, who loses Eurydice by turning back to look at her, nothing loses a little of its meaning each time it is set forth (set back...
...or, more precisely, Barthes' analysis of his writing has ushered in modern writing...
...the world, as a literary object, escapes: knowledge deserts literature, which can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis [an order, a system] but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language: without knowledge, without rationale, without intelligence...
...Though there is usually some marginal insight in Barthes' lucubrations, they seem to me neither central nor lucid enough to be of major critical interest...
...which defines love...
...his writing has merely "brought to light" these things...
...How, if it transmits no information, do we know it is there...
...Already we are on shaky ground...
...Then why not say so...
...a nascent schizophrenia, prudently formed in a homeopathic quantity...
...How does this abolish the categories enumerated...
...Barthes writes: "The Abbe Seguin had a yellow cat...
Vol. 63 • August 1980 • No. 15
