Discussion: Barthes & Smart

Yesterday we discussed two very different books about love.  One was the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart's prose-poetry book, By Grand Central Station I sat down and Wept.  The second was French intellectual Roland Barthes' treatise on love, A Lover's Discourse.

For Smart's book, the discussion ranged through many areas:

• Is your reading or enjoyment of a text affected by the character/morals of the author ?  Some people felt that Smart's affair with a married man did tarnish the brightness of her prose.  Stephen proposed that Smart wanted to be a poet and realized that to write stirring poetry she needed life experiences much removed from her conventional upbringing and remote location in pre-War Ottawa.  He felt this could have been an impetus for her actions in bringing George Barker to North America and in carrying on the affair.

• Someone asked whether we would think differently had Elizabeth Smart been a man.  Laura mentioned than she read this book right after reading Werther and initially thought that the author WAS a man until quite far along in the book, when Smart returns to Ottawa.

There were so many unknown quantities in this book - from Smart's deliberate style which is not based on a chronology of facts to the 1st person style which tells us nothing about George Barker nor about his wife.  We see it all from Smart's perspective.  We had much the same situation in Werther where everyone was seen through his lens.

Most of the class liked Smart's poetic style.

We discussed the fact that, though Smart's book took place during WWII, she barely mentions the war and is only concerned with her love affair.  Apparently she was criticized for this when the book came out.  I didn't agree with this criticism.  I thought she referred to the war in a way that showed she had strong feelings about the reality and the horrors of war.  Much of the book takes place in North America and especially in California.  I would imagine at the time (early 40s) that the war did not resonate to the same degree as it would have in Great Britain or Europe.  I would guess from her comments that Smart was anti-war and as such, could not be expected to be all rah-rah-rah about it.  She was also young and in love.

Stephen mentioned some elements I hadn't picked up on: her use of water or fluid imagery.  Her references to nature and her social commentary were some of my favourite parts.  Her comments on youth and aging were also very pithy - though being middle-aged, somewhat hard to receive.

The 2nd book was Barthes' discourse on love.  Most of the class enjoyed the book.  Joni put together a couple of pages of quotations from the text and posed some questions arising from these, which we discussed.  The majority of the class enjoyed the structure.

We spoke about whether Barthes or Smart were gendered.  I felt that both novels were somewhat gendered - Smart's possibly less than Barthes to me.  I did find Barthes very gendered.  Some of his observations were applicable to both make and female but several of them were from a perspective I could not relate to.

It has been a good experience to read Werther, Smart and Barthes within 1-2 weeks of each other.  Now on to the terror of the French Revolution and Anatole France.