Postmodern Approaches to Literature 3: The Pleasure of the Text (Part I)

Marilyn being pleasured by James Joyce

The Pleasure of the Text, published two years after 'From Work to Text', clearly picks up from where the latter left off. It offers us not a poetics, but an erotics of reading. And, also, a challenge to all forms of moral asceticism and militancy which have no time for sensual pleasure and despise the body. Barthes explained to an interviewer at the time:

"I felt that today’s intellectual language was submitting too easily to moralizing imperatives that eliminated all notion of enjoyment, of bliss. In reaction, I wanted therefore to reintroduce this word [pleasure] within my personal range, to lift its censorship, to unblock it, to un-repress it." [1991]

This, actually, was quite a daring thing to do and it lost Barthes many friends and supporters (even as it won him a new, wider readership). I suspect that a lot of the continued hostility aimed towards postmodern approaches to literature and to life is that they don’t take themselves too seriously and concern themselves with pleasure. Nothing enrages the puritan more than this - unless it's logical inconsistency and The Pleasure of the Text opens by imagining a figure who "abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple disregard of that old spectre: logical contradiction" [1990].

Over the course of some 46 fragments spread over 67 pages and arranged alphabetically by title (i.e. arbitrarily), Barthes speaks in favour of such an anti-Socratic hero who mixes every language and endures the mockery of moral-rational society without shame. And he reveals him to be "the reader of the text at the moment he takes his pleasure" [1990].

But for Barthes there are two types of pleasure; the pleasure of the text, which he terms jouissance and the pleasure of the work, for which he uses the common word plaisir. Of course, there is no absolute distinction between them and Barthes freely admits that his use of such an opposition is here, as elsewhere, purely provisional and strategic:

"The opposition 'pleasure/bliss' is one of those voluntary artificial oppositions for which I’ve always had a certain predilection. ... These oppositions shouldn’t be taken literally; for example, by asking if such and such a text belongs to the order of pleasure or of bliss. These oppositions are intended above all to clear more ground, to make headway - just to talk and write." [1991]

But, having said that, Barthes does then qualify this statement by adding: "the difference between the two words is still quite real ..." [1991]. What, then, is this real difference?

In ‘From Work to Text’ Barthes puts it this way:

"Certainly there exists a pleasure of the work ... I can delight in reading and re-reading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac ... But this pleasure, no matter how keen and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part (unless by some exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of consumption; for if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot re-write them ... and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works ... As for the Text, it is bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation." [1977]

Throughout The Pleasure of the Text he expands upon and plays with this distinction, using a libidinally material and perverse language of gay desire; words such as cruise, for example, coming to prominence. The language used is also significantly informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, famously, the unconscious is structured like a language and the subject - thought of primarily as a desiring subject - is perpetually seeking out the lost object of their desire. As Mireille Ribière writes:

"The prime function of language, and hence literature, is to signify this fundamental sense of loss. Therefore, desire is the force that drives reader and writer endlessly to go from signifier to signifier in search of fulfilment and pleasure."

The most erotic aspect of a text, for Barthes, is not found in any sexual description or pornographic representation as such, but in the language deployed and the very structure of sentences. This is what he loves most about the writings of Sade for example; the pleasure of reading him clearly proceeds from the fact that not only does he bring together different types of writing and create many new words and concepts, but that "pornographic messages are embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models" [1990]. Emphasizing the erotic aspect of jouissance, Barthes concludes his fragment on Sade:

"The pleasure of the text is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished by Sade’s libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss."
[1990]

What Barthes is excited by then, is the thought of a limit or of an edge between two terms and the pathos of distance (or break) between them. He doesn’t want the destruction of culture or of narrative; he wants these things to be taken to the point at which they are lost and we too lose ourselves in some manner.

Can classic works promise us this experience of bliss or are they strictly tied to a form of pleasure which simply reaffirms cultural convention and our sense of self? Barthes, often thought of as a champion of the nouveaux roman, surprisingly still seems to have a lot of time for the works of the great 19thC authors. For he suggests that if we read them in a writerly manner - unconcerned with the integrity of the text - and at our own pace or rhythm - bypassing those passages or pages which we find boring - then we may yet find them newly pleasurable: "Thus what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again." [1990]

Of course, this has "nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself" [1990], but it does mean that we can develop an approach to literature which allows us still to read a work like War and Peace without nodding-off and having the book fall from our hands. Ironically, the only way to read the more avant-garde texts is to go slowly and carefully through them in a leisurely, aristocratic manner. Try to read a novel by Philippe Sollers or Maurice Blanchot quickly and it will become "inaccessible to your pleasure" [1990].

And so, to reiterate, we have two types of text: the text of pleasure that "comes from culture and does not break with it", linked to a "comfortable practice of reading" [1990]; and the text of bliss that "imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts ... unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language" [1990].

The reader can thus enjoy the satisfaction of plaisir which guarantees their subjective consistency, or the promise of its loss via jouissance.


Bibliography

Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', essay in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977).

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990).

Roland Barthes, ‘Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes’, interview in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991).

Mireille Ribière, Barthes: A Beginners Guide (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).

Note: this and the two related posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To read PAL 1 click here. To read PAL 2 click here. To go to part two of this post click here.

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 1: The Death of the Author

Just as Nietzsche's tragic proclamation concerning the death of God opened a new horizon for thought, so too does the death of the Author announced by Roland Barthes allow an experimental and joyous movement to be made from work to text and for the emergence of a new type of reading pleasure: jouissance.

Traditionally, the Author is seen as a central and all-important figure; in his person resides the very origin of the work and its ultimate truth. The Word belongs to him and he is the Word. Thus, as the Author, he can claim authorship of and authority over a text and its meaning. Readers who wish to give an authentic reading are obliged to know his intention and never allow their own interpretations to stray too far from this. The Author is the father of the text and readers, like children, should be seen to be obediently reading - not heard voicing their own opinions (which would be impertinent), or exposing their behinds in an act of comic defiance (which would be rebellious).

But for Barthes, to tie reading and criticism to the figure of the Author is not only lazy in its convenience, it's slavish in its wilful and passive surrender to authority. To assign an Author to a text is not only to impose a limit on the latter, but on ourselves. Thus to call for (and to celebrate) the death of Author is, like deicide or the beheading of the king, an act of political resistance to tyranny (although the naive belief that we might fully liberate the text and ourselves from power is one that Foucault makes us rightly suspicious of).

This death - and the subsequent move from work to text - allows for the birth of the reader as the source of meaning and the subject of desire. This really rather simple but very beautiful and important idea remains, almost fifty years on, very seductive. For writing (and reading in a writerly manner) cannot commence until this death has taken place. Writing is thus a posthumous activity.

And posthumous writing is also postmodern in the sense that the Author is very much a modern figure, developing, as Barthes argues, out of English empiricism, French rationalism and the unique value afforded the bourgeois individual. Within modern culture, the Author takes on greater and greater importance until, finally, he assumes total control over his work and we are no longer allowed to listen to language, but only to the monotonous voice of the Author confiding in us about "his person, his life, his tastes, his passions".

For Barthes, it was the poet Mallarmé who was one of the first to understand "the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner" and to restore to writing its impersonality - which is to restore also the status (and the pleasure) of the reader. This process of calling into question and ridiculing the authority of the Author continued in the work of Valéry, Proust, and the Surrealists.

However, it was linguistics which provided those interested in disposing of the Author "with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors". Barthes continues:

"Linguistically, the Author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it."

Acknowledging this, not only frees the reader and the text, but it also liberates the scriptor (Barthes's term for the writer who emerges after the death of the Author). The scriptor is not the father of the book, but a child of language; that is to say, he is not the past of his own work, but rather "born simultaneously with the text" in the immediacy of the present and is not "equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing".

Thus a postmodern approach to literature allows for a different understanding of time or temporality; one primarily concerned with the nowness of the moment and what Nietzsche designates as its eternal recurrence. And it means we have moved beyond the idea of literature as a form of representation. Instead, writing now designates a performative practice "in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered".

Emphasizing the material nature of writing as marks on a surface and the physical aspect of a hand that dances with a pen across a piece of paper, Barthes both echoes and anticipates Derrida. He writes:

"Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe ... that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently ... he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which calls into question all origins."

Barthes also echoes and anticipates the work of Julia Kristeva and her key concept of intertextuality, writing:

"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

This notion of the text as intertext, obviously helps to further erode the old idea of literature as either representative of a non-linguistic reality, or expressive of the author's original ideas or unique being. The scriptor understands that he or she can only play with and within the field of language and "only imitate a gesture" that is pre-given and pre-rehearsed. They ought also to realise that they essentially work with a "ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words".

Barthes concludes his crucial essay in a series of passages worth quoting at some length:

"Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred."

"Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author ... beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism ... is today undermined along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law."

"Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the text is constituted."

We see how Barthes disentangles a text and runs threads of meaning in his fetishistically detailed structural analysis of Balzac's novella Sarrasine. In S/Z, Barthes demonstrates how even what might appear to be a conventional readerly work written by a classical author can become a renewed source of perverse pleasure once it has been read in a writerly manner and transformed into a complex and ambiguous text.

I’ll say more about this movement from work to text (and the resulting pleasure of the text) in Part II of this post.


See: Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142-48. All lines and passages quoted are taken from this essay.
 
Note: this and the two following posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To go to PAL 2 click here. To go to PAL 3 (I) click here. To read PAL 3 (II) click here. 

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'     

Happy New Year

In wishing for a happy new year I am hoping like Barthes for the absolutely new which disturbs and brings bliss; not for the mere stereotype of novelty.

The new is an escape route from the present into the future and a necessary precondition of jouissance. 

The stereotype that reigns triumphant within contemporary culture, is simply a form of humiliated repetition in which superficial forms are varied, but their meaning remains fixed and ever the same. In this manner, we are denied any chance of escape; robbed even of the possibility of dying. 

For me, Auld Lang Syne, sung at the stroke of midnight each and every new year's eve without enthusiasm or joy, is a form of curse via which we are once more burdened with bad conscience and memory of the past thereby undermining our resolve, shattering our dreams, denying our orgasm.    

On the Joy of Text

Picasso: Two Girls Reading (1934)

Since I feel in a generously pedantic and somewhat indulgent mood today, let me try to clarify for a friend who seems puzzled by the concept how the term text is used by writers such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes.

Firstly - and crucially - it does not simply refer to words on a page containing some fixed and authoritative truth. In other words, the text is not simply a piece of writing that has been signed and sealed and which can be explained by a literary critic schooled in the art of hermeneutics. A book can be held in hand; but a text can only ever be held in language and experienced as a signifying practice which takes language to its paradoxical limit. 

Or, to put it another way, the text is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original and drawn from innumerable sources, promiscuously and pleasurably come together not to express an extra-linguistic reality or give birth to meaning, but, rather, to ensure the constant deferral and systematic exemption of the latter.

In the text, everything is to be disentangled and nothing deciphered. As a reader, one cruises the surface without ever imagining that one might delve beneath it, or step beyond it. For there is nothing beneath the text, nothing behind the text, and nothing outside of the text: signs point only to other signs and never towards a transcendental signified. To presuppose the category 'world' as existing prior to and as the origin of the text, is simply to fall back into onto-theology. 

Having said that, there are small holes (aporia) in the fabric of the text, no matter how tightly or carefully it has been woven together and, like Alice, we can conveniently disappear down these. The fact that the text is a tissue of lies and stereographic plurality is precisely what offends those who believe that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God, etc.

Finally, as I have already hinted, the text allows for an erotics of reading that is linked to jouissance rather than the dull pleasure of consumption. We don't discover ourselves in the text, we lose ourselves and find that our cultural and psychological assumptions are unsettled; i.e., the subjective consistency of our tastes, values, and memories is brought to a crisis of some kind.  

And so - as confessed in a recent post - I'm happy to declare myself a homotextual. That is to say, someone who affirms difference, contradiction, and ambiguity; but who sees no need for divine judgement and makes no demand for conformity with a categorical imperative determining universal good taste. 

Those who oppose the text and call for its foreclosure, either in the name of morality or rationalism, have effectively placed themselves outside of desire. And this not only means they lack a sense of intellectual playfulness, but that they're physically a bit dead and sexless too: you wouldn't want to think like them and you wouldn't want to sleep with them.