HOW TO SPEAK TO LITERATURE WITH ROLAND BARTHES
I would like to open this conference with a passage from Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost:1
To the Editor:
There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think. That time is coming to an end. During the decades of the Cold War, in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, it was the serious writers who were expelled from literature; now, in America, it is literature that has been expelled as a serious influence on how life is perceived. The predominant uses to which literature is not put in the culture pages of the enlightened newspapers and in university English departments are so destructively at odds with the aims of imaginative writing, as well as with the rewards that literature affords an open-minded reader, that it would be better if literature were no longer put to any public use.
Your paper’s cultural journalism—the more of it there is, the worse it gets. As soon as one enters into the ideological simplifications and biographical reductivism of cultural journalism, the essence of the artifact is lost. Your cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in “the arts,” and everything that it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet? Without the least idea of what is innately transgressive about the literary imagination, cultural journalism is ever mindful of phony ethical issues: “Does the writer have the right to blah-blah-blah?” … Everything the writer builds, meticulously, phase by phrase and detail by detail, is a ruse and a lie. The writer is without literary motive. Any interest in depicting reality is nil. The writer’s guiding motives are always personal and generally low.
And this knowledge comes as a comfort, for it turns out that not only are these writers not superior to the rest of us, as they pretend to be—they are worse than the rest of us. Those terrible geniuses!
The way in which serious fiction eludes paraphrase and description—hence requiring thought—is a nuisance to your cultural journalist. Only its imagined sources are to be taken seriously, only that faction, the lazy journalist’s fiction.…
If I had something like Stalin’s power, I would not squander it on silencing the imaginative writers. I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers. I’d forbid all public discussion of literature in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly periodicals. I’d forbid all instruction in literature in every grade school, high school, college, and university in the country. I’d outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to be certain that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book and that the customers did not dare to speak to one another. I’d leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own. I’d do this for as many centuries as are required to detoxify the society of your poisonous nonsense.
Amy Belette
I take this “To the Editor,” signed by one of the novel’s characters, Amy Belette, as far more than an outburst of anger from the author himself. When I suggested a conference on “What is the state of literary criticism today?” to the Centre Roland Barthes, I was close to thinking and sharing what Amy Belette tells us in this “letter to the editor.” But this time I was no longer a character of Philip Roth’s (as I happened to be once, for example, in his novel The Stain). On the contrary, it is in the real world and in my role as reader, literary theoretician, and (sometime) literary critic that I found myself at one with the writer.
In the course of these days, let us not to forget Amy Belette’s affects. So that our thinking might at least provide insight into them and become aware of the malaise and, who knows—let’s be optimistic—sketch out some necessary mutations.
THREE PATHS TO INTRODUCE THESE ISSUES
1. By its very structure as discourse of or on literature—as metalanguage, for example—whether it is interpretation (hermeneutics) or criticism, all commentary is bound to rigidify the literary experience as an “object.” Roland Barthes, on the contrary—whose work is the raison d’être for our Center and the focus of our debates—built on and renewed the wager that writers (from Diderot to Baudelaire or Georges Bataille) have taken up: it is possible to speak of literature if and only if we speak to literature.
This was my mind-set in 1971 when I attempted to think about Roland Barthes’s adventure of taking up in his inimitable style, in a “writing” (as in his meaning), the advances in linguistics, semiology, and more generally social sciences in relation to what he called the “literary competence” of speaking beings. Since no one is a prophet in his own country, you do not know this work, so allow me to review the main and updated ideas of this text called “How Does One Speak to Literature?”2 and to call my talk today “How Does One Speak to Literature, No. 2?”
2. Because—and this is my second theme—in forty years, the place of language and literature has changed in society, but also in the experience of many of us under the influence of the image and globalization. How does one speak to literature if language itself seems to be receding behind the glow of screens and in their shadows while the Word that used to be “in the beginning” has been reduced to clichés and the novel crumbles in text messages, in fallouts of autofiction? It is only by surprise that the novel dares a precious look inward, on the memory of a genre and, even more rarely, on the history of thought, to be read later or never.
3. Last, and throughout my reasoning, I will try not to lose sight (of Barthes’s body of work, in particular, The Pleasure of the Text and A Lover’s Discourse, Fragments), obviously, of Criticism and Truth (1966) to point out the timeliness of this book as much as the yet unthought present that he encourages us to address.
As does Barthes, I will draw attention to two discourses of/on literature:
• The discourse of the “scholar” (interpretive, hermeneutic, analytical) that unfolds the “anthropological” side of meaning—such as Barthes roots it in what Georges Bataille and Philippe Sollers call “experience.”3
• The discourse of the “critic,” who is not the literary columnist (contrary to conventional wisdom that attributes judgment and assessment to the critic) but who is defined as someone who “affirms” his/her “desire.”
Two discourses or rather two attitudes that very often crisscross and interweave, at least in Barthes’s ideal vision as opposed to that of Picard.4
For the interpretative discourse, I could refer to Kant’s “Third Critique,” the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, founded on taste, the most archaic of the senses that Hannah Arendt revisited in order to envisage another relationship to language and only then another politics.5
It can also be connected to Husserl’s phenomenology that opens up a material and sensorial sphere, the “prepredicative sphere,” in his “porous horizon” of the “predicative thesis,” with the challenge to think the sensible.
I prefer to deal with the Freudian unconscious, with the paradoxical regime of drives, affects, and desire as well as their preobjects and presubjects.
All these approaches of literary and more generally aesthetic experience—that jostle the metaphysical categories of sense and the sensible, of the psyche and soma, etc.—have been enhanced by including art and literature as objects of investigation. A really strange “object” when you think of it: because it is not about “commenting” (glossing, paraphrasing) the “substance” and the “form” of the work (descriptions that classic rhetoric and academic discourse excel in targeted by Roland Barthes), but of questioning the experience of a Sade, a Balzac, or an Artaud, to show its singularity. And thus how this singular experience, this enunciation of an utterance, this writing (the “concepts” and “notions” keep changing) jostles and innovates the theoretical codes themselves from which the interpreter attempted to approach it.
The “scholar’s” interpretive approach enables him to enhance and renew his theoretical framework faced with the discovery of the multiple dormant meanings that Barthes now addresses, not as “object of knowledge” but as “writer’s experience”—and I emphasize this—and in which the interpreter himself transfers himself. In the guise of the signification-message-information appears this “whirlwind of hilarity and horror” that Mallarmé spoke of and that has to be investigated by calling on its polysemic economy whose truth contains a general value. “The general discourse of the object is not the meaning but the very plurality of meanings in the work”;6 “science of the conditions of the content, i.e., of the forms; what will interest him will be the variations in engendered meanings, and one might say, engenderable by the works: it will not interpret the symbols but only their polyvalence; in a word, its object will no longer be the full meanings of the work but rather the empty meaning that supports them all.”7 “All the possible meanings will not be organized in an immutable order but as traces of an immense ‘operating’ arrangement … enlarged from the author to the society.”8
Take Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s text The Visible and the Invisible as an example of this “scholarly” discourse.9 What is he looking for in Proust’s work, alongside that of Cézanne, understood by the painter as “What I am trying to translate for you is more mysterious and is tangled up in the very roots of the Being, at the impalpable origin of feeling”? Is there a meditative thinking that does not yield to the concepts of its language? Is there a prereflexive state of thought that widens communication with the Being and yet keeps it opaque? Is there an infinite logos that organizes the world where, at the intersection of nature and mind, the germination of meaning and philosophy itself begins? Is it a crossroads or a dehiscence of thought that Proust and Cezanne transferred to Merleau-Ponty?10
There is an intertwining of man and the universe, a “hollow,” a “fold,” a “flesh,” as the philosopher would say. Like a barely visible framework, the flesh makes up for what one dares not think. Less than a desire that has an object, more than a jouissance that lost it in the fusion with the Being, flesh is this chiasma between sensing and the sensible that exists at the exquisite limits of what is felt. My flesh or that of the world? Both. Imbibed with meaning but stopping at the senseless. Never has consciousness been as ambitious, and for that very reason, as porous as in this hold of what, in becoming me, withdraws from me. In reading Proust, the world touches me and I touch it. You too, Proust and Cézanne, you see me and I see you, copresent and abandoned. Sensible flesh receives sensible time in the communion of the separated. Is it asking too much of a person to live each sensation, why not say it, as a Christian passion? As for Merleau-Ponty, he meditated sensation with Proust, with the effervescence of identities, from outside and inside, from the world and the self, until little Marcel’s In Search of Lost Time transforms the philosopher, transforms us into flesh; through the imagination fanned out in metaphors and in hyperbolic syntax. As did the writer himself in living his writing. Reading, then, lived as a passionate encounter is an unbearable rite. This is what Merleau-Ponty said in inventing “the flesh” of In Search of Lost Time. The concept of “flesh” contaminates us, we are part of it. Through the force of Merleau-Ponty’s writing.
In other words, the interpretation the philosopher suggested of the Proustian Search introduced in philosophy a new notion of “flesh” inherited from Greek philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. Proust’s text is not for him an “object” to judge, assess, or even less to promote. The Proustian imagination is experienced (I maintain the double meaning of the word from Erlebnis and Erfahrung) as a potentiality within the complex signifying polyphony that the interpreter locates while renewing his theoretical models: rather by re-creating them from this new desire of meaning that the passionate encounter of his reading of the Proustian experience of sensible time, of pure incorporated time, imposes on him.11
Let us take it one step further. The fascination of French theory in many universities and cultural institutions throughout the world also comes from this new desire for a new model of meaning that French literary and art theorists have brought to light.
When the poetry of Mallarmé led me to rethink the Chora by Plato,12 this space before the space in Timaeus, and to suggest thinking this more-than-meaning of music in letters by the term semiotic chora—listening to the drive-bases of phonation as a double for the explicit signification of “A throw of the dice will not abolish Chance” or of “Prose for des Esseintes”—I am not speaking of literature as “object.” I am speaking to literature as subjective experience since I am joining it in its labyrinth of “mystery in letters” (as Mallarmé liked to say). In truth, this “mystery” that I discern (and analyze) speaks to me: in our transference/countertransference (between the “A throw of the dice” and “me”), the text gives me the gift of a new interpretative tool that will refine my own perception and enable me to get other texts across differently; I get an analytical tool from it that unfolds the “polyvalence” (Roland Barthes) of this complex symbol which any work is.
Likewise, my reading of Céline13—whose anti-Semitism I do not condone nor do I explain or judge—from Journey to the End of the Night to Trifles for a Massacre alerted me to abjection in his novels and pamphlets that underlay the subject/object, child/parent, man/woman links as well as the narrator’s link to the other’s religion, ethnic group, or race. It called forth and stimulated thinking about psychoanalytic and phenomenological models that I wanted to revisit. I attempt to widen the intelligibility of a subjective experience (that of the author, but also of the reader he appeals to) that takes root in the borderlines of psychic life: fascination and/or repulsion between subject and object, neither one nor the other, ab-jects. I discover abjection that subtends the classic aesthetic categories such as “seduction”; from sociology: “racism,” and from psychoanalysis: “delirium.”
Is this approach of the interpreter “scholar” or the analyst so different from the one Barthes calls “the critic”? Certainly. And yet not absolutely. Writing and its subject, imposed on modern thinking from Maurice Blanchot through Hegel-Mallarmé-Kafka, gave up the speculative labyrinth of absolute mind in Barthes to reach political and mythical discourse, journalism, the nouveau roman, and Tel Quel with Sade, Fourier, Loyola, and Balzac. And thanks to an alliance between sociology, structuralism, and the literary avant-garde, a new light shone on them. I maintain that for Barthes writing had its apparently irreconcilable origins in, on one hand, the experience of the “fascination” that Blanchot contemplated in writing “given over to the absence of time,” “in a loss of the being when the being is missing,”14 and on the other hand, according to Sartre, in the dialectical conception of writing as objective praxis, “more complete, more total than life.”15 But then if the interpreter tries to identify with the writing experience thusly understood, does not the critic do it in his own way? What is that way? Or, on the contrary, do both of them (the interpreter and the critic) remain irremediably strangers to writing? Except if they become writers too … by intermittence? Are Blanchot and Sartre scholar interpreters or are they critics? Or maybe writers?16
Ambivalence and drama of the critic: was Barthes the first to bring them to light in a culture slipping into the throes of what was not yet called “the media”? On one hand, the critic speaks in his name to another: he introduces desire before expressing any “criticism” whatsoever, be it judgment or evaluation. “Going from reading to criticism means changing desire; it is no longer desiring the work, but its own language.”17 Let us be clear: the critic desires the language of which he is capable. Where the “scholar” interpreter innovates models to think the inexhaustible polysemic experience of works, the critic, said Barthes, is one who asserts the language of his desire: “The critic has to produce a certain “tone,” and this tone, all things considered, can only be affirmative.”18 The critic remains glued to his “I,” which monopolizes the multiple meanings and which appropriates the polyvalences and signs: “The critic cannot produce the “HE” of the novel but cannot either reject the “I” in pure private life, i.e., give up writing: he is an aphasic of the “I,” while the rest of his language remains intact, marked, however, by the infinite detours that the blockage concerning a certain sign imposes on speech (as in the case of the aphasic).”19 Starting from his opaque “I” toward another’s writing, the critic (aphasic of his own narrative experience, unable to tell himself) goes back to his “I” that has remained blocked in a language of affirmation—I mean, that the language of the critic is not a language of experience.
The irony of this going around in circles is not lost on Barthes: the critic has to coagulate an island of affirmative meaning just where writing as experience is constantly and infinitely decomposing and recomposing. Aphasic of the “I” and ironist unable to accept the death wish that triumphs in the act of writing not as a “biography” but as a “thanatography,” the critic attests but by his own handicap, however, to this strange singularity of the literary experience. He displays his heterogeneity in the social space of communication but without making it intelligible. With his “decision to say,” the critic can only distance himself definitively from the polyphonic logic of writing, from its nocturnal depth edged with senselessness and the sensible.20
Here we are at the fault line joining the interpreter and the critic, yet so different from each other: they keep their distance from writing; they are not writers. “A writer is one for whom language poses a problem, who feels its depth, but neither the instrumentality nor the beauty.”21 The writer desubstantializes the meaning of language at the same time as individual identity; his intention takes root outside of language; his secret is intimidating because he is against-communication,22 that is, plumbs experience.
Rarely and perhaps never has the proximity between interpreter-critic-and-writer, with their similarities-differences and through the mixing of these roles, been so present in consciousness, so minutely analyzed and passionately practiced as in France and in the French language in the latter part of the twentieth century. We should not be inhibited by the apparent technicity of this progress. In clarifying the various modalities of this relation, in calling for each person’s constant awareness, it is necessary for Barthes and for us, his friends and accomplices even in our very differences, to show our contemporaries, alienated in their language and without a historical future, that literature is the place where this alienation is specifically and each time thwarted. With a heightened consciousness for some, diffused for others, we must and can resist the ongoing trivialization of minds but also refuse the symmetrical and outdated cult of belles-lettres.
WHAT IS TODAY’S SITUATION?
The third millennium adds new difficulties to this scene. Does that mean that the primacy of the globalized image discredits the central role of language and thus literature, but also interpretive and critical discourse?
Many people think so, and the poverty of literary columns like the opacity of academic discourse, as Amy Belette denounced, would seem to prove it. I have been told that the French cultural message is no longer working, simply because it was based on French language and literature at the expense of cultural industries. How can one not have the ambition to develop these inescapable cultural industries (movies, visual and plastic arts, book, theater, etc.) but also the digital and to reinvent Francophony by the same token! I argue, however, that if we are not able to react to what I would describe as a real and all-encompassing denial of language—and literature—if this “consciousness of the word” that defines the writer, according to Barthes, before any “hierarchy of values” should weaken or even disappear, we would be at a turning point of the human condition that would lead to changes with unpredictable consequences, for better, perhaps, and for worse, as well.
I am not one of those who demonize the reign of images. Nor do I only fixate on language and literature as the major constituents of national identity: even if I am convinced that it is there, not in the cult of language and its literature but in their perpetual transvaluation by writing and interpretive, analytic, and critical discourse that elucidate it, that this mobile identity evolves: not at all a dogma but a constant questioning, a work in progress, an open work that is the identity of a living nation. I will limit myself to emphasizing the fact that—because language constitutes the subject in man and woman (as philosophy and the social sciences have shown for more than a century)—it is the literary imagination that provides the privileged space in which the liberty of the subject is acquired, in, with or without meaning. It is the literary experience—along with its interpretative elucidation that often integrates it in its very utterance—that transforms the man’s and the woman’s dependence concerning fantasy, that is, the image, but also any univocal idea or signifier. By allowing me to reach the limits of my self as well as the objective possibility of going beyond the sociohistorical, the literary experience is a uniquely complex test of freedom, unique in its complexity, at the very heart of social norms. Proust was saying the same thing when writing, “My imagination, which was my only organ to enjoy beauty,”23 or “Reality … a sort of waste product of experience.”24
I hear your question. Is it still possible to speak thus to literature as experience when literature itself withdraws, “inrockuptible,” in the echolalic poetry of Guyotat; when it focuses—rarely—in a dialogue with philosophy and history according to Sollers; or, more often, when it competes in vulgarity with Desperate Housewives?
Protected by the university, but clearly overprotected, only the interpretative “specialized” discourse continues to redeem, cultivate, and awaken this “consciousness of language” that one would wish as or more “sustainable” than the threatened ecosystem. This interpretative discourse should attain the quality of affirmation that Barthes diagnosed in the discourse of criticism: that it decides to be heard, that it chooses to talk in and against the generalized mediatization.
As for criticism itself, it should not orchestrate “celebrity culture.” It has to get out of the virtual to which the various screens reduce imaginary constructions and to try to give an anthropological depth to the work of language.
As far as analytical interpretation is concerned, one must reflect upon the place of the image in the complex architecture of meaning, without yielding to the facility of hyperconnectivity that in the fantasy of hypercommunicability promotes the denial of linguistic and literary polysemy and encourages the ideology of decline.
And as far as criticism is concerned, reading has to take precedence over the image, which means changing desire. It has to desire PR less and to desire more the consciousness of language as experience of speech marked out with non-sense, sensations, and infinite recompositions.
Faced with the “crisis of the commentary,” Barthes and others in 1966 attempted to join up critics and interpreters with writers. What is threatening in the “symbol that constitutes language”? he asked. And he answered: not the unicity of meaning but the infinite capacity of interpretation and criticism by which the psychic life lives and relives, revolts against dogmas and refounds its links, societies and democracy. The consciousness of language, by awakening the univocal and unidimensional man, would make possible, he hoped, a “social mutation as deep, perhaps, as that which marked the passage of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.”25
We are waiting today for an improbable exit from the financial, economic, and social crisis that is far deeper than the malaise prevailing in the pre-1968 civilization. It is no longer a “one-way,” hostile to “imagination in power,” that threatens us but a real “asymbolia” in which, under the guise of a belief in the image, it is not a “society of the spectacle” that is asserting itself but the space of the “consciousness of speech” as a whole that is closing in. Closing this space means condemning the person and his social links to an in-signifying virtuality, and this new sickness of the soul opens out onto two abysses: disillusioned nihilism, on one hand, and fundamentalist transcendentalism, on the other.
What can the interpretive, analytical, and critical discourse do in this unprecedented situation? We do not know, but we have the possibility of being aware that there is a mutation of the civilization of the word and the book to the benefit of a virtual “culture,” a playful metamorphosis of what Freud called a “death wish culture” that corresponds to the “superego culture” with its excessive controls and routine breakdowns. Psychoanalysis and criticism are on the front lines of those who can assess the risks and promises of this passage. We must not dodge this seriousness. Think about it and try to talk not of but to literature.