A telling instance of the narrowness of a North American science-based education is that I'd never heard of Roland Barthes before receiving the reading list for LS801, the 2013 edition. I found this a challenging book to get through. It took me quite a few chapters to get into the format, the structure of the book. Though Barthes is dissecting love into its various manifestations, I still found that I wanted to argue against many of his declarations and conclusions - or at least ask for more exposition. I really wanted to be sitting around a long dinner table, discussing his ideas and hearing him expound on his views. I needed more, to really understand what he was trying to say. I also didn't really feel that I had a good sense of Barthes as a man, what he would have been like in conversation with friends.
I've never had to look up so many words/jargon as while reading this book. Barthes is writing his discourse from a lengthy background of study, discussion and theorizing. I found the book was too referential for someone who has not been a student of philosophy. I very much liked the structure of the book because I am a person who likes collecting bits and pieces and later trying to make a whole of them. It's probably best a book to be dipped into in small doses with much time to ponder in between, not read straight through like a narrative. I felt I needed to read Barthes' source material (of which I have really only read Werther, and Plato's Symposium & Phaedrus so far) - and then go back and reread Barthes' discourse again.
Sentences such as the following gave me much grief in trying to understand what Barthes was trying to say:
On pg 103 THE GHOST SHIP,
"errantry does not align - it produces iridescence: what results is the nuance. Thus I move on, to the end of the tapestry, from one nuance to the next (the nuance is the last state of a colour which can be named; the nuance is the Intractable)."
or when speaking about amorous exuberance, on pg 86 about EXUBERANCE which
"can be interlaced with melancholy, with depressions and suicidal impulses, for the lover's discourse is not an average of states; but such a disequilibrium belongs to that black economy which marks me with its aberration and, so to speak, with its intolerable luxury."
Barthes provides several introductory pages about how the book is structured. Regarding the meaning of the "Lover's Discourse" on pg 94 NOVEL/DRAMA, Barthes writes:
"Enamoration is a drama, if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche gives it: 'Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes, which excluded action [...] 'Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse."Barthes goes to numerous sources, from the written realm but also from conversations with friends and acquaintances - and his marginalia is interesting.
Some random bits that I enjoyed or puzzled over:
Under JEALOUSY pg 145 he quotes Djeddi in La poesie amoureuse des Arabes Joseph yielded 'to the extent of a mosquito's wing.' He writes that his references are "not authoritative but amical".
After Baudelaire and Ruysbroek "the gentleness of the abyss"
He writes that a sigh is "an expression of the emotion of absence."
In WHAT IS TO BE DONE, pg 62, Barthes speaks of
"Ethics, the unpersuadable science of behaviour."
And on pg 71 THE OTHER'S BODY
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words. My language trembles with desire.
On pg 129 in IDENTIFICATIONS:
Identification [with other lost lovers] is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have.
In the section ATOPOS pg 34, defined as "unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality,"
Barthes describes the beloved in one of the most succinct and beautiful ways I have ever come across:
"the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the specialty of my desire."He goes on to say that:
"The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).This agrees with my perception that there is not "One" person, there are many possible people that may be potential lovers but it all depends on timing, circumstance, the many external as well as internal factors.
A potential lover's desirability is also affected by mass culture. In SHOW ME WHOM TO DESIRE
on pg 136, Barthes describes love as an "affective contagion,"
this induction, proceeds from others, from the language, from books, from friends: no love is original. (Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves.If this was true in the 70s, I can only begin to imagine how much more this applies to the 21st century.
"turn the faces of the divided Androgynes...toward the place where they had been cut apart...'so that the sight of their division might render them less insolent'."- like Adam & Eve and the citizens with the Tower of Babel in Genesis, we mortals sometimes presume.
In UNION pg 226
"En sa moytie, ma moytie je recolle - to her half, I rejoin my own half...desire is to lack what one has - and to give what one does not have: a matter of supplements, not complements."Barthe spends an afternoon trying to draw Aristophanes' conception of the original hermaphrodites (androgyne figure) and concludes it is a "farce figure" and "out of the mad couple is born the obscenity of the household (one cooks, for life, for the other)."
He was very perceptive in describing all the odd little facets of love relationships. On pg 92 THE WORLD THUNDERSTRUCK he is speaking of writing about one's own love (in journals, correspondence etc) and notes
"the events of an amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude.
He was also effective describing love relationship other than the romantic or sexual ones. In NO ANSWER pg 167
"The perfect [...] friend, is he not the one who constructs around you the greatest possible resonance? Cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?"
I had a hard time with much of Barthes mention of his mother and mothers and sons. He portrays his mother is such a 2-dimensional, childish way. She is discussed only in relation to her effect on her child, not as a person, a lover in her own right. I'm not sure if this is a mother-son thing or a gender thing (Barthes is less interested in women as individuals, especially insofar as love is concerned). In discussing Werther, Barthes refers to the famous blue coat which he was wearing when he met Lotte. On pg 128 in BLUE COAT AND YELLOW VEST, Barthes writes:
"This blue garment imprisons him so effectively that the world around him vanishes: nothing but the two of us: by this garment Werther forms for himself a child's body in which phallus and mother are united, with nothing left over. This perverse outfit was worn across Europe by the novel's enthusiasts, and it was known as a "costume a la Werther."
This isn't an analysis that resonates with me. Nor can I identify or agree with his statement on pg 133 in IMAGES
"I project myself there [into a romantic painting of a cold scene] as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever. "I'm cold." the lover says, "let's go back"; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked. There is a coldness particular to the lover, the chilliness of the child (or of any young animal) that needs maternal warmth.To me, a woman, Barthes seems to be condescending when he mentions women. He doesn't mention women often but when he does, it often has a negative cast. In DOMNEI pg 82
"I shall exasperate myself with the chatter of women in the drugstore who are delaying my return to the instrument to which I am subjugated"and in THE DEDICATION pg 76
"I have this fear: that the given object may not function properly because of some insidious defect...for example, the latch [of a box] doesn't work (the shop being run by society women)"In GRADIVA pg 126
"I want to possess fiercely, but I also know how to give actively. Then who can manage this dialectic successfully? Who, if not the woman, the one who does not make for any object but only for . . . giving? So if a lover manages to 'love', it is precisely insofar as he feminizes himself, joins the class of Grandes Amoureuses, of Woman Who Love Enough to Be Kind."
The section which really resonated with me was THE UNKNOWABLE, on pg 134:
"I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.
"To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion."This made me think of Elizabeth Smart who seems to have consecrated her life to orbiting around Barker. Someone in our discussion noted that one of her sons said that all her life she regarded George Barker as a Jesus-figure.
"To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god."
Barthes goes on to write, in this section, that
"all the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known." "I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know."
In THIS CAN'T GO ON, pg 141, Barthes describes suffering in love as pleasurable.
"Ever the 'artist', I make form itself into content" (echoes of McLuhan's 'the medium is the message'). It's not about what is causing the suffering, it's about the suffering itself.
Once the exaltation of suffering has dissipated, Barthes says he is "reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance." He quotes a folk poem that accompanies Japanese Daruma dolls:
Such is life Falling over seven times And getting up eight.In JEALOUSY, pg 144
"As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common."Barthes includes the etymology of the word jaloux which interestingly is borrowed from the troubadours.
He very accurately describes many of the progressions and devastating aspects of love, the events that wear away at the foundations. In NO ANSWER pg 167 he writes:
"When you were talking to him, discussing any subject at all, X frequently seemed to be looking away, listening to something else: you broke off, discouraged; after a long silence, X would say: 'Go on, I'm listening to you'; then you resumed as best you could the thread of a story in which you no longer believed."
Also in GRADIVA, pg 125 he describes much of the game-playing which drives me crazy within a relationship and which is supremely irritating to have to observe in other people's relationships. If only we could keep the resolve and clear-sightedness we can have when outside of our relationships, for when we are in the throes of relationships' dark sides.
I found less agreement with his statement in THE HEART pg 53, that "only the lover and the child have a heavy heart" but as with many of the areas where I initially found I disagreed with Barthes or even felt really irritated by something he wrote, when I thought about it more and tried to dissect or even refute it, eventually I could distill my ideas and examples down into his truth. The examples I could think of of non-love related angst and pain often could be reduced to a sense of isolation, of aloneness, of abandonment. Perhaps this is where he gets his repeated return to comparisons with mother-son bonds.
In one section, GOSSIP, he unexpectedly (for me) compares passion and reason, and writes on pg 184,
the gossip is light, cold, it thereby assumes the status of a kind of objectivity; its voice...seems to double the voice of knowledge (scientia)...When knowledge, when science speaks, I sometimes come to the point of hearing its discourse as the sound of a gossip which describes and disparages lightly, coldly, and objectively what I love: which speaks of what I love according to the truth.
In an echo of Neil Young "It's better to burn out than to fade away"in THE INTRACTABLE on pg 23 Barthes affirms love as a value regardless of how it all works out in the end; that he can be happy and wretched at the same time. When told "this kind of love is not viable" he asks:
"Why is the viable a "Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?"and states that he has "withdrawn from all finality."
SOBRIA EBRIETAS
Barthes ends his discourse with this section and defines this as abandoning the "will-to-possess". He quotes a zen saying:
"As I sit calmly, without doing anything, spring comes and the grass grows of its own accord."On pg 8 in HOW THIS BOOK IS CONSTRUCTED Barthes specifies that he is not trying to set down a philosophy of love but merely to affirm it. Such a philosophy would be a perversion of its elements, a monster, and he quotes from a mathematician that "we must not underestimate the power of chance to engender monsters," warning the reader not to draw conclusions from the order of the various sections. It's not a book to be read as a narrative and it's a book I will come back to, to read a section here and there and think about it, then come back to it again after I've done further reading and studying. I'll put it on the bookshelf near my bed with some of the other bits I want to re-read.
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