Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD

THE FIRST SECOND TIME. Until I turned fifteen and could go downtown on my own, I had almost no chance to see a film more than once. Rerun opportunities were rare in the 1950s, and though there must have been someone who went back on Sunday after a Friday opening, it was never anyone in my family. Why on earth would you want to see a movie that you had already seen? The question would be posed as though no answer were possible; the sheer idea bespoke the indulgence of those, unlike us, with nothing better to do. It never occurred to my parents, or other relatives who took me to the movies, that if they liked a film, they might simply—with no tax on their frugality!—remain in their seats and see it again; even when, having arrived late, they were obliged to stay into the second show to see what they’d missed, they would pop up like dolls on a spring at the precise point we had come in.

But their abstemious ethic of “once and no more” may have testified to the very strength of the temptation to linger under the image’s spell. Certainly, what I say didn’t occur to them occurred to me all the time, and in my desire to prolong the stimulation a movie had given me, I’d often turn back to the screen to catch a few second seconds as I was being taken out of the theater. Being impossible, however, my desire for “a second time” could never have entered that ordinary living room in which I often put a favorite song on the record player or reread a familiar story; being impossible, it had to be relegated to the psychic subbasement—small, cramped, depressing to visit—where all my more or less shamed quixotisms lay drugged like abducted children. In this captivity, a grandiose desire to win a newspaper contest and a desperate hankering to be Ronnie Thornton’s best friend kept company with (the first example I remember) an aching desire to rewatch Pinocchio.

For one of my generation, television might have been an easy means to see movies twice—at least the old Hollywood ones—had not a similar domestic repression prevailed here too, daytime TV being laid under the same embargo as late-night programming. I sometimes attempted to set up a sort of Pleasure Island at my grandmother’s house, where the TV, always on but never watched, was mine to do with as I liked. Planting myself in front of the set, the better to see (already a four-eyes!) and be near the dials, I would sample the forbidden fruit of daytime TV: soaps, game shows, Garry Moore, and Hollywood movies from the thirties and forties. My truancy was disappointing, not at all like smoking, playing pool, or suddenly sprouting a donkey tail (excitements to come later in life), and the movies on offer (I remember Comrade X and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) bored me fully as much as Queen for a Day and Bert Parks.

But one memorable late afternoon I found myself watching a movie, a thriller, that grabbed me at the start and held me all the way through. I watched it so raptly that if there had been a thought of seeing it again, that thought was already keeping Ronnie company in the fruit cellar. The next day, at the same time, I returned to the TV in the modest hope that I might see something in a similar vein to the film of the day before. What I found was not in the same vein; it was the same film, unfolding on the screen as in the simplest species of dream. And while my eyes were absorbing the visual evidence, my ears took in, during a commercial break, the no less astonishing information that, by the same miracle of programming, I could watch this film again on the following afternoon, which I did, and on every afternoon until the end of my visit to Nonna’s, which I did as well.¹

I make two observations about this, my first “second time.” The first is that I experienced no difference between my successive afternoon viewings; the breaks between them were as negligible as the commercials within them. I was the same David Albert Miller on Thursday as on Monday, and Dial M for Murder, still trochaically scanning his name, was the same film, shown on the same TV at the same hour; it felt, each time, as if I were simply reentering, with no change in, much less diminution of, intensity, a single mystical ecstasy. And the second observation bears on the kind of knowledge I did and didn’t acquire in this paranormal state. Nonna’s mingy black-and-white TV set—not even a console!—would have obscured the film’s structure had I been curious or competent enough to analyze it. But I was not seeking illumination or a film education, only a perpetuation of the enchantment I was under. In any case, far from assisting my understanding of the film, these repeated viewings succeeded only in permanently disabling it, in the way that repeating a mantra empties its words of meaning. In most people’s judgment, Dial M is an ordinary murder mystery, a “thin” Hitchcock, but to me, it remains so hypnotic and (probably on that account) so incomprehensible that it might as well be Last Year at Marienbad. If anything, these repeated viewings only tightened the coils of its spell, eliminated any shred of my resistance to it.

Yet as is well known, one does strange things under a spell—performs prodigious feats that one could never achieve, would never attempt, in waking life. Though I understood Dial M no better on Thursday than I had on Monday, by the end of the week, with the memorization skills of youth but no conscious intention of exercising them, I knew its dialogue by heart. Faute de mieux, I had seized upon the almost unbroken talkiness of the film as an expedient whereby I could reconjure everything else about it as well. This odd source of intimacy, long ago supplemented by a DVD, has not been supplanted. Let a psychiatrist ask me who Margot is or Tony, or why I am so invested in having her murdered and him move out of their bedroom; all I know is that, simply by reciting certain lines then learned by heart, I once again go into my old enamored trance. Even as I write this, I hear Tony saying to Swann, with particular aptness to my case, “You used to go to the dog-racing, Mondays and Thursdays; I even took it up myself just to be near you.” That is all my first second time did for me: it got me nearer the love object. But that is all I seemed to want.

Thirty-Five Years. Roughly speaking, my first viewing of these films occurred soon after their original U.S. release, while my second took place thirty-five years later. The first time around, the films were coeval with my youth; even my excursions into the cinematic past (Ophuls, early Chabrol) were then as fully “happening” as the cinephilia whose dictates I followed in making them. By the second time, however, these movies had long ceased to lay claim to the new and now, and even if they had reemerged looking unbelievably well-preserved, the benefit of digital deaging was not extended to the surviving cinephiles who had watched them during the 1960s and 1970s and who, like myself, had now entered sixties and seventies of their own.

It’s a long, steep flight of years that takes you from the twenty-fifth station of, say, Young Man to the sixtieth station of Older Gentleman; by the end of the ascent, your breath is short, your knees wobble, and your soul seems to be bearing as many spots as your skin. But the climb, however injurious, is said to be character building, and when you turn around to look back on all you’ve risen above, you are promised a prospect superior to anything you’ve seen before: the view from Maturity. What’s more, lest your failing sight tempt you to equate this ascent with its antithesis—with sheer decline—waiting to assist you with their incomparably powerful lenses are those classic works of art you had long promised yourself to put into service at just such a moment. The fact of the matter is that I do attain this mature perspective every time I am recovering from an accident or surgery and pick up some great novel I haven’t read in decades. The author’s understanding of human nature seems more profound than ever as I corroborate it from the augmented store of my own. And in confirming the novel’s truth, my existence (normally wanting in any obvious principle of organization) acquires the shapely coherence of fiction and even some of its appealing pathos. The back-and-forth persuades me that, in growing old, I have grown up. I tell myself with confidence that I have lived a full life or, more simply, that what I have sustained for so many years is life, the real rich ripe thing known to Tolstoy, to Proust, to Murasaki, and now at last to me!

But something quite different—more irritating, and therefore perhaps actually more like life—befell me when after a similar long intermission I returned to the art films of my youth. Even if I had foreseen this return, of course, I would no more have expected such works to reconcile me to later life than to return me to youth; they are about the dissonances of experience, not the harmonics, and you’d hardly revisit them to take the waters, reparative or nostalgic. But neither did I expect that—in their brand-new look, too!—they would oblige me to suffer afresh, with no abatement of distress, the oppressions I felt on first watching them. For devoted as I was to the art film, it used to scare me; as soon as one began, I’d feel my stomach knot up as if, by means of Persona, Blow-Up, Teorema, Contempt, or In the Realm of the Senses, I had got into a kind of trouble there was no getting out of. And now, in defiance of the long passage of time—as though it were a vacuum in which I had done, seen, learned nothing—the antique anxiety had returned not only with all its old bite but further magnified by this evidence that, as a spectator, I hadn’t passed beyond it. In the brand-new home theater, no twilight performance of maturity was likely to take place; the principal was indisposed. Contrary to the assumption in the song from which this book takes its title, I still did not have “both feet on the ground.”²

Not Getting It I. In youth, my torment was of two orders. The first was cognitive: I never could understand what I was looking at. Had I been a philistine, it wouldn’t have mattered that I was also an ignoramus; but though I couldn’t comprehend, I desperately wanted to and sat through film after film, intent on their images but failing to receive the illumination I sought and others seemed to find in them. In contrast to Hollywood movies, whose ingratiating air of spontaneity masked a rigorously structured legibility, the art film, though flaunting the deliberativeness of every shot and image, insisted on its fundamental opacity. I had to get by in a country where urgent information was being conveyed to me in a language impossible to understand. Meaningfulness abounded, but meanings were in short supply.

I obviously do not mean by this that I took no account of the copious critical discourse—reviews, essays, interviews—that any art film spawned then as now. On the contrary, just as someone might ask an astrologer to predict the future, I would pore over that discourse beforehand to learn what I should see, understand, or admire when in the presence of the film itself. Out of it, I fashioned—three decades, mind you, before the DVD supplement—a sort of commentary that I would mentally play over the film much as English subtitles were run over the dialogue. But of all the ideas crammed into my head when I entered the auditorium, not one could I repeat as my conviction on leaving it. For when I attempted to apply these ideas to the images passing before me, either of two things happened. If I held the ideas uppermost in my mind, the images grew silent, noncommittal, and uncooperative, while if I concentrated on the images, the ideas felt glib, remote, and obtuse. On the one hand, the images seemed ill-suited to embodying the ideas, which, on the other hand, seemed all but useless in expounding the images. Never did the thing to say and the thing to see join in the disclosure of “meaning” or “importance” that I was seeking. Insecure even of my confusion, I often felt that the fault lay not in the too-taciturn images or the overabstract ideas but in myself who, looking too intently or in too literal-minded a fashion, was doomed to miss the connection that others, going with both kinds of flow, ideational as well as visual, had no trouble in establishing. All this made the art film a trial to watch, and if I regularly took part in the postfilm conversation with my fellow cinephiles, cravenly pretending that the astrologer’s predictions had truly come to pass—if I carried such imposture to the point of writing a student column in which I pronounced with authority on new releases by Antonioni, Bergman, and other famous auteurs—this was all done to dissimulate my embarrassment at having nothing to say.

Not Getting It II. This was not the only realm in which I was not at home. Roland Barthes once sarcastically compared the desire for textual revelation to a schoolboy’s dream of “seeing the sexual organ.”³ I am not sure these are quite the same thing or are experienced in the same psychic register, but it is certain that, as a Ruskinianly repressed schoolboy, I came to art cinema, then synonymous with “the foreign film,” pursuing two kinds of education. I hoped to be inducted into avant-garde artistic practices, and I hoped to behold orgies worthy of Tiberius on Capri. Knowing this cinema largely through our family newspaper (the one that sponsored the contests), I’d gathered that the most acclaimed foreign films were also those that incurred, somewhere in Italy or Ohio, prosecution for obscenity; if they were not actually seized or cut, the projector lamp would be ordered dimmed for modesty’s sake. And more often than not, these masterpieces would turn up, in between And God Created Woman and Viridiana, on the Legion of Decency’s condemned list, radiating what the Legion liked to call “unmitigated license.”

Too excited by this perennial scandalousness to doubt the claims on which it was based, I was convinced that “filth” was as intrinsic to the art film as foreignness; it was dirty and difficult in equal parts. As such, the form promised to be a useful hybrid of high culture (my aspirations) and pornography (my dreams). And as if to bear me out, not long after I began my attendance at the old cinematheque—at no less significant an initiation than a viewing of Persona (Surf Theatre, 1966)—my schoolboy’s dream almost immediately came true in the shot of a tumescent cock. It was the first erection not my own I had ever seen, and like those, it had come without warning. But I’d been banking on it for years! Combined with the cryptic montage in which it was embedded, it set before my eyes, in all its obscene but unintelligible reality, the bona fide art cinema I’d been imagining since the dawn of puberty.

The shot, though, was a prick-tease. It lasted just long enough for me to identify the hard-on but not long enough for me to look at it. It barely met porn prerequisites, let alone the needs of the story, in which it never recurred or got explained. That, no doubt, left only symbolism. At the Ciné Café afterward, my best friend, Billy, suggested that Bergman had proposed the cock as a phallus—sign of all that the film’s two female protagonists would form their relation around and against. But his hypothesis irritated me as much as the shot. This furtively exposed cock made a sad excuse for the paraded phallus, and the very evocation of “the phallus” made an even sadder excuse for the uncushionable shock of an erect sexual organ. In a word (but oh! this word I was too timid to utter), the elision of desire made our whole conversation the saddest excuse of all for an experiment we never conducted.

I only appear to digress. The art film didn’t disappoint me as a sexual being so much as draw out the already absurdly long delay in my becoming one. Those films à scandale I used to read about—once in addition to motive, I finally had means and opportunity to see them—did not liberate, clarify, or goad to action. On the contrary, they were mere reverberators of my own sexual confusion, partners in the inhibitedness from which I had gone to them hoping for release. Certainly, sex was one of the art film’s favorite themes and pushing the frontier of sexual representation its frequent project, but the expression of these commitments was invariably entrusted to a far more insistent aesthetic of tact, a discretion whose key formal constituents were fragmentation, cutaways, high-speed montage, slow pacing, static frames, long shots, extreme close-ups, off angles, and distracting music. It was as if a barker had promised me a naughty sideshow of “interpretive dance” and I then spent two hours behind the curtain watching—stripped of nothing but its quotation marks—interpretive dance. Or as if the ultrasophisticated art film had set out to mimic the diffident, gap-ridden sexual imaginary of a Catholic schoolboy with nothing yet to confess.

Sex in the art film might well be idyllic, incoherent, stately, tense, modern, pensive, or perverse—might boast a dozen other serious attributes of sexual experience. But it was never clear, precise, blunt, gross, intractable, straightforward, or any of the other lowdown things also proper to that experience. Time and again, just when a film seemed about to arouse or educate me, it would retreat into beauty: the beauty of a face, a landscape, a composition. The naked bodies would become silhouettes, the breasts sand dunes. That was the art film’s routine legerdemain: on the brink of being sexy, it turned itself into something lovely to look at, a liquid cleared of all sediment. In this, too, I suppose, it was like me, who, in lieu of being sexual, became an aesthete fond of art films. In running against the Hollywood norm, my strange connoisseurship was the only minoritization I admitted. And yet, at the moments when the contrast between my ugly desire and its radiant replacement was most extreme—for instance, when Persona’s head-rearing cock gave precedence, in the same opening montage, to the beautiful faces of Bibi Anderson and Liv Ullman being sinlessly caressed on a movie screen by a bookish boy in spectacles—my aestheticism felt as painful as my chastity.

There Are Those Who Bet: The Wager. These were the two aspects of the anguish that broke out again whenever I opened a jewel case with certain European or Japanese “gems” inside. It was as if I’d simultaneously unlocked a strongbox in which I had formerly stored that old feeling and now found it as good as new. Worse: nothing else was in the box! It hardly mattered that I now knew French, Italian, and some broken Japanese or that I had advanced in cinema literacy and was better versed in the masters of modern thought; the film image still seemed obdurately opaque in relation to the word or the idea; I would never understand how it worked. And despite decades of valiant promiscuity elsewhere, so long as I was in front of a screen rewatching Les Amants or La dolce vita, I continued my life as a curious but frustrated virgin, equally sensitive to sexual intimations and exasperated by their lack of follow-through; how that worked, too, I would always remain too young to know. And yet the sheer insistence of this anguish, as enduring as the films themselves, made it impossible to regard either the emotion or its source as “childish things” to be consigned to a strongbox once more or to a garbage bin for good; I now knew that, if I didn’t stay with these things—as, after all, the DVDéothèque was practically begging me to do—they would abide in me nonetheless.

At this juncture, I made myself a wager. Recalling Proust’s hypothesis that “adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything,” I determined to rewatch the digitized old art films as if my renewed frustrations were not obstacles to my understanding of them, to be cleared away with time and effort, but rather no more or less than that very understanding. No purpose, then, could be served in continuing to mask (be embarrassed by) my “nothing to say” until something came along. Instead, I needed to draw from that nothing its exegetical value, to elucidate the ways in which it was telling the truth, not simply about me but also about that other hermeneutic and erotic disappointment which was the art film. I would have to elaborate my anguish, in other words, beyond the subjective mode I have been adopting here (a mode I regard as less narcissistic than just plain skittish, fearful of realization in the world). If my anguish carried a point, I had to find that point in the objective tensions of the films themselves, and the autobiography of a spectator needed to change into an act of film criticism.

(1) I had become a critic (academic, literary, mainly of the nineteenth-century novel), and my criticism consisted in close engagement with texts. Though I’d certainly gone to the right addresses for literary study that way inclined—the Jesuits, Yale, Cambridge, Yale again—any other institutional trajectory would likely have produced the same outcome, since in those days close reading was the master technique of literary studies everywhere, the idiom in which even one’s most comprehensive or abstract ideas would be rendered.

(2) But with the passage of time—an uneven passage that made the change feel as gradual as thinning hair and as abrupt as a heart attack—there arose other schools of criticism that, protesting against the authority of the Text, claimed the rival patronage of linguistics, history, theory, sociology, the digital, identity, and so on. In the resultant sectarianism, the lingua franca became a dead language, its former universality surviving only in the general fondness for writing (again and again) its obituary, or unmasking (one last time) its ideological obscurantism, or recycling it (“not your grandfather’s close reading”) as a mandatory new fad that poor, pushed-around graduate students had to acknowledge or abandon all hope of entering the profession. But, of course, I just misspoke: the lingua franca did not become a dead language; it became an undead one, as universal as ever but now, to use a quaint locution of the interregnum, under erasure.

(3) Not that I had any lamentation to make over the departed glory years; on looking back, the close readings of the New Critics struck me as mere motif studies in disguise and those of the deconstructionists as hardly more than the well-wrought urns of high theory. Close textual engagement had certainly brought forth prodigies (Barthes, Booth, Derrida, Empson, Johnson), but in its garden varieties, it looked as automated as the critical machines that replaced it and that a rear guard was condemning in its name. But there was another, more fundamental reason that I regarded this as a world well lost. The clerical utility of close reading had blunted my sense of the lay function it fulfilled in my life. Now that the practice was no longer wanted on the job, I could appreciate it as having been, off the job, my most resorted-to spiritual exercise. I still found myself turning to it daily, as others might turn to prayer or an Ignatian examen: it was basic to my existential getting-by. By way of quick explanation, let me recall a diligent, but utterly indifferent, student who thought that a minute attention to the text of Madame Bovary was good for nothing but my assignments until the difficulty of another kind of text, sent by a lover to his phone, immediately turned him into a rabid adept at reading between the lines. For it is on such occasions that close reading comes into its own, as a technology for enunciating—for contemplating, expressing, advancing, enhancing, suffering, mourning, surviving—the relation of intimacy. Unlike those spiritual exercises that attempt to free the soul from worldly enmeshments, close reading was my habitual resource for engaging the terms of my stickiest psychic attachments—to works of art, other people, daily life, affairs of the heart, anything that, for good or ill, got and stayed under my skin.

(4) With this sense of close reading as a professionally shaky but personally unshakable enterprise, there came a change in my critical practice. Was I still doing close reading, lighting the lights in an empty motel? No, I was doing it again, this second time with a will, an insistence greater than any rationale I could have invented to justify it then or now. In its new phase, my practice, growing wild and perhaps morbid, owned its compulsiveness, like a tree whose roots had come to the surface. Having lost its former commonality, it embraced its fate as an idiosyncratic too-closeness, preoccupied with details at the expense of the whole. I just couldn’t look hard enough. I say “look” because I’d also moved away from literary study with its bibliocentric injunction to produce holistic readings. My so-called close reading no longer deserved the name; it deserved a better one, more fitting for the extraordinarily congenial object that, with perfect timing, the world had just put under my eyes. This new object was not film, which always went by too fast for me, but film on DVD, which I was able to scrutinize to the limit.

(5) Thus, by the end of this twisty history, the close reader had become a too-close viewer, and the professional had become, for all his critical training, an amateur.

Amateur. “No footnotes, no jargon,” my editor at Film Quarterly insisted at the outset: no academism. Now and then I chafed and cheated, but on the whole, these were congenial strictures. Naturally, some debatable assumptions were holing up behind my apparently self-standing detail work, and a certain type of highly intelligent academic would discern and dispute them. But I was willing to be exposed in that way: it was the cost—and perhaps the proof—of espousing, within criticism, any species of unguardedness. In my student column, I did my best to be a know-it-all; in “Second Time Around,” I tried to be a do-it-yourselfer, to match my home entertainment with a sort of house-made criticism. I do not belong to the field of film studies—indeed, I am what the less generous in that field might call a poacher, someone with no legitimate claim on the subject except hunger and want. But n’exagérons pas: my amateur project is not much of a threat now that film studies has taken the close analysis of individual films off the table; this poacher is catching only game that its lawful proprietors no longer care about. As a kind of viewing that everyone can do, it has ceased to interest, much less to be of use in consolidating, a guild of specialists, which has changed its entry requirements accordingly.

But it is precisely as “what everyone can do”—as the province of the laity—that I advocate its practice. Obviously, it would be better to have the Lafayette analyzer, print archive, and screening room that the great film scholars still command, but the minimal new tool kit into which such luxuries have been shrunk has the advantage that everyone may use it. My readers have access to the same down-market technology as myself; the column’s regular injunction to “watch with me,” accompanied by a DVD chapter reference, lets them find every image I point out and use their own eyes to verify or disprove what mine have found in it.

More: fellow close viewers may watch with me, but even in doing so, they are bound to follow their own initiative. Watching on DVD or via streaming is a case in which everybody likes to go their own way, and everybody does, willy-nilly. The new technology did not call into being the infinity of things there are to see in a film, but thanks to the slow, pauseful, nonlinear, and often randomized viewing that it facilitates, it lets us see more such things. And there is something radical in the individuality that this boosted responsiveness can’t help expressing. For out of all the little things you have noticed, as if they were magic beans in a fairy tale, there unexpectedly springs up a giant landscape, with spectacular ridges, folds, canyons, monoliths, mesas, and pathways broad as boulevards or faint as lost trails. Though it’s like nothing else you’ve ever seen, this landscape has the archaic, familiar feel of a dream. But of course it does: it is the topography of your singularity as a viewer. Though any given detail you single out may have been seen by countless others, a sufficient number of such details single out you as their observer: they configure the system (or an image of the system) of what you alone can see. Hence, like landscapes in a Western, this one is essentially desolate: the mirror of your solitude. But hence, too, like those same landscapes, it is essentially aesthetic: the mirror of your particular “way,” your psyche’s art. I said earlier that I sometimes see my face reflected in the monitor while I am close-watching a movie. But it is not my face, or even my personhood, that I find refracted in these amassed details of my attention; it is an object more intimate and more opaque, hard to recognize and so much harder to talk about that I must simply conclude by naming it for my readers’ consideration: I glimpse my style, that obscure other means by which I continue to write autobiography, even when I am just seeing things.

1. How this recurrent programming came to be remains mysterious, abiding in my psyche as pure wish fulfilment. Some who grew up in New York recall a program called Million Dollar Movie, which would repeat the same film for a week; did I see a provincial knockoff?

2. Sinatra as ego ideal? “The Second Time Around” (Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen) was recorded by every self-respecting sixties vocalist, but Frank Sinatra put the memorable stamp on it. He recorded it in 1960 as the first 45 for his own label, Reprise, whose apt motto was “to play and play again.” Then, as if taking a cue from the lyric, he recorded it a couple of years later for the album Sinatra’s Sinatra. Growing up in a family of fans (Italians on my mother’s side, musicians on my father’s), I learned to fuss over the minor differences between the two versions. Which had the better phrasing, the 45 or the LP? Did Nelson Riddle significantly enhance his original arrangement when he conducted it himself? Was “what led us to this miracle” more euphonious than the original “what brought us”? But, most basically, what about the first version, which I loved, required doing over?

Around this time, it so happened, I saw Sinatra perform the song at Cal Neva. This rendition, hard to focus on in the noisy and unpleasantly adult atmosphere of the casino, was certainly not lovelier; next to the purity of the studio recordings I’d enjoyed, “Sinatra live” was, in more ways than one, a corrupt text. And yet with his unparalleled expressive gifts, that exquisite hypersensitivity that would also, when he couldn’t bear it any longer, turn him into a complete brute, Sinatra channeled the dissolute circumambience—after all, “those who bet” were everywhere around him—as the lyric’s new context; highball in hand, he gave the words a gruff, coarse, “stupid” utterance, as though he were ventriloquizing someone in his audience who hadn’t known love, loveliness, or middle-aged wisdom as anything but convenient self-deceptions he was marshaling to launch yet another. Its mystique thus darkly laid bare, this “Second Time Around” acquired an irony worthy of Flaubert; I hated it.

I saw Sinatra only once after this, at Radio City at the end of his career and near the end of his life. The rickety old man in front of me, roughly his age, was uncontrollably thrilled when the singer came on stage: “He looks great, just great!” he announced to those of us around him. I wouldn’t have said so, but what I did think amounted to my own ecstatic identification: the voice had gone, the style was intact. He still had a way!

3. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 10.