Photo of Albert Camus by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1944):
with his upturned collar, cigarette, and slicked back hair,
Camus embodied the essence of French cool in this period
with his upturned collar, cigarette, and slicked back hair,
Camus embodied the essence of French cool in this period
One of the (many) ideas I've absorbed from Roland Barthes is that of textual cruising as a key component of the art (and erotics) of reading.
To cruise the body of a text is both to slowly drift through it in an aimless but pleasurable manner and to make oneself sensitive to the play of signs and those few details, preferences, and inflections (what Barthes terms biographemes) that seem to reveal something of the author and "whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion".*
I mention this, because I do often wonder not only about the (intertextual) relationship between written works, but also about the (homotextual) relationship between myself and those authors for whom I feel a good deal of affection and which is absolutely not based on any intellectual appeal.
I mention this, because I do often wonder not only about the (intertextual) relationship between written works, but also about the (homotextual) relationship between myself and those authors for whom I feel a good deal of affection and which is absolutely not based on any intellectual appeal.
Take Camus, for example. He's by no means a favourite writer and I have only a very casual relationship with his work. But I'm fond of him nevertheless, in a way I never could be about Sartre - monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo - and it makes me wonder if it isn't simply due to the fact that Camus was so damn good-looking and his biographemes so seductive ...?**
* See: Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, (University of California Press, 1989), p. 9.
** I'm not simply trying to be funny here: one commentator recently described Camus as "the Don Draper of existentialism" and several others have remarked on his physical attractiveness and beautiful writing style. See Adam Gopnik, 'Facing History: Why We Love Camus' The New Yorker (April 2, 2012): click here to read online.
