Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
Where the Stress Falls (9 page)
An animus against the systematizers has been a recurrent feature of intellectual good taste for more than a century; Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein are among the many voices that proclaim, from a superior if virtually unbearable burden of singularity, the absurdity of systems. In its strong modern form, scorn for systems is one aspect of the protest against Law, against Power itself. An older, milder refusal is lodged in the French skeptic tradition from Montaigne to Gide: writers who are epicures of their own consciousness can be counted on to decry “the sclerosis of systems,” a phrase Barthes used in his first essay, on Gide. And along with these refusals a distinctive modern stylistics has evolved, the prototypes of which go back at least to Sterne and the German Romantics—the invention of anti-linear forms of narration: in
fiction, the destruction of the “story”; in nonfiction, the abandonment of linear argument. The presumed impossibility (or irrelevance) of producing a continuous systematic argument has led to a remodeling of the standard long forms—the treatise, the long book—and a recasting of the genres of fiction, autobiography, and essay. Of this stylistics Barthes is a particularly inventive practitioner.
fiction, the destruction of the “story”; in nonfiction, the abandonment of linear argument. The presumed impossibility (or irrelevance) of producing a continuous systematic argument has led to a remodeling of the standard long forms—the treatise, the long book—and a recasting of the genres of fiction, autobiography, and essay. Of this stylistics Barthes is a particularly inventive practitioner.
The Romantic and post-Romantic sensibility discerns in every book a first-person performance: to write is a dramatic act, subject to dramatic elaboration. One strategy is to use multiple pseudonyms, as Kierkegaard did, concealing and multiplying the figure of the author. When autobiographical, the work invariably includes avowals of reluctance to speak in the first person. One of the conventions of
Roland Barthes
is for the autobiographer to refer to himself sometimes as “I,” sometimes as “he.” All this, Barthes announces on the first page of this book about himself, “must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.” Under the meta-category of performance, not only the line between autobiography and fiction is muted, but that between essay and fiction as well. “Let the essay avow itself almost a novel,” he says in
Roland Barthes
. Writing registers new forms of dramatic stress, of a self-referring kind: writing becomes the record of compulsions and of resistances to write. (In the further extension of this view, writing itself becomes the writer’s subject.)
Roland Barthes
is for the autobiographer to refer to himself sometimes as “I,” sometimes as “he.” All this, Barthes announces on the first page of this book about himself, “must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.” Under the meta-category of performance, not only the line between autobiography and fiction is muted, but that between essay and fiction as well. “Let the essay avow itself almost a novel,” he says in
Roland Barthes
. Writing registers new forms of dramatic stress, of a self-referring kind: writing becomes the record of compulsions and of resistances to write. (In the further extension of this view, writing itself becomes the writer’s subject.)
For the purpose of achieving an ideal digressiveness and an ideal intensity, two strategies have been widely adopted. One is to abolish some or all of the conventional demarcations or separations of discourse, such as chapters, paragraphing, even punctuation, whatever is regarded as impeding formally the continuous production of (the writer’s) voice—the run-on method favored by writers of philosophical fictions such as Hermann Broch, Joyce, Stein, Beckett. The other strategy is the opposite one: to multiply the ways in which discourse is segmented, to invent further ways of breaking it up. Joyce and Stein used this method, too; Viktor Shklovsky in his best books, from the 1920s, writes in one-sentence paragraphs. The multiple openings and closures produced by the start-and-stop method permit discourse to become as differentiated, as polyphonous, as possible. Its most common shape in
expository discourse is that of short, one- or two-paragraph units separated by spaces. “Notes on …” is the usual literary title—a form Barthes uses in the essay on Gide, and returns to often in his later work. Much of his writing proceeds by techniques of interruption, sometimes in the form of an excerpt alternating with a disjunctive commentary, as in
Michelet
and
S/Z
. To write in fragments or sequences or “notes” entails new, serial (rather than linear) forms of arrangement. These sequences may be staged in some arbitrary way. For example, they may be numbered—a method practiced with great refinement by Wittgenstein. Or they may be given headings, sometimes ironic or overemphatic—Barthes’s strategy in
Roland Barthes
. Headings allow an additional possibility: for the elements to be arranged alphabetically, to emphasize further the arbitrary character of their sequence—the method of
A Lover’s Discourse
(1977), whose real title evokes the notion of the fragment; it is
Fragments d’un discours amoureux
.
expository discourse is that of short, one- or two-paragraph units separated by spaces. “Notes on …” is the usual literary title—a form Barthes uses in the essay on Gide, and returns to often in his later work. Much of his writing proceeds by techniques of interruption, sometimes in the form of an excerpt alternating with a disjunctive commentary, as in
Michelet
and
S/Z
. To write in fragments or sequences or “notes” entails new, serial (rather than linear) forms of arrangement. These sequences may be staged in some arbitrary way. For example, they may be numbered—a method practiced with great refinement by Wittgenstein. Or they may be given headings, sometimes ironic or overemphatic—Barthes’s strategy in
Roland Barthes
. Headings allow an additional possibility: for the elements to be arranged alphabetically, to emphasize further the arbitrary character of their sequence—the method of
A Lover’s Discourse
(1977), whose real title evokes the notion of the fragment; it is
Fragments d’un discours amoureux
.
Barthes’s late writing is his boldest formally: all major work was organized in a serial rather than linear form. Straight essay writing was reserved for the literary good deed (prefaces, for example, of which Barthes wrote many) or journalistic whim. However, these strong forms of the late writing only bring forward a desire implicit in all of his work—Barthes’s wish to have a superior relation to assertion: the relation that art has, of pleasure. Such a conception of writing excludes the fear of contradiction. (In Wilde’s phrase: “A truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true.”) Barthes repeatedly compared teaching to play, reading to eros, writing to seduction. His voice became more and more personal, more full of grain, as he called it; his intellectual art more openly a performance, like that of the other great antisystematizers. But whereas Nietzsche addresses the reader in many tones, mostly aggressive—exulting, berating, coaxing, prodding, taunting, inviting complicity—Barthes invariably performs in an affable register. There are no rude or prophetic claims, no pleadings with the reader, and no efforts
not
to be understood. This is seduction as play, never violation. All of Barthes’s work is an exploration of the histrionic or ludic; in many ingenious modes, a plea for savor, for a festive (rather than dogmatic or credulous) relation to ideas. For Barthes, as for
Nietzsche, the point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure.
not
to be understood. This is seduction as play, never violation. All of Barthes’s work is an exploration of the histrionic or ludic; in many ingenious modes, a plea for savor, for a festive (rather than dogmatic or credulous) relation to ideas. For Barthes, as for
Nietzsche, the point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure.
WRITING IS
BARTHES’S
perennial subject—indeed, perhaps no one since Flaubert (in his letters) has thought as brilliantly, as passionately as Barthes has about what writing is. Much of his work is devoted to portraits of the vocation of the writer: from the early debunking studies included in
Mythologies
(1957) of the writer as seen by others, that is, the writer as fraud, such as “The Writer on Holiday,” to more ambitious essays on writers writing, that is, the writer as hero and martyr, such as “Flaubert and the Sentence,” about the writer’s “agony of style.” Barthes’s wonderful essays on writers must be considered as different versions of his great apologia for the vocation of the writer. For all his admiration for the self-punishing standards of integrity set by Flaubert, he dares to conceive of writing as a kind of happiness: the point of his essay on Voltaire (“The Last Happy Writer”), and of his portrait of Fourier, unvexed by the sense of evil. In his late work he speaks directly of his own practice, scruples, bliss.
BARTHES’S
perennial subject—indeed, perhaps no one since Flaubert (in his letters) has thought as brilliantly, as passionately as Barthes has about what writing is. Much of his work is devoted to portraits of the vocation of the writer: from the early debunking studies included in
Mythologies
(1957) of the writer as seen by others, that is, the writer as fraud, such as “The Writer on Holiday,” to more ambitious essays on writers writing, that is, the writer as hero and martyr, such as “Flaubert and the Sentence,” about the writer’s “agony of style.” Barthes’s wonderful essays on writers must be considered as different versions of his great apologia for the vocation of the writer. For all his admiration for the self-punishing standards of integrity set by Flaubert, he dares to conceive of writing as a kind of happiness: the point of his essay on Voltaire (“The Last Happy Writer”), and of his portrait of Fourier, unvexed by the sense of evil. In his late work he speaks directly of his own practice, scruples, bliss.
Barthes construes writing as an ideally complex form of consciousness: a way of being both passive and active, social and asocial, present and absent in one’s own life. His idea of the writer’s vocation excludes the sequestration that Flaubert thought inevitable, would appear to deny any conflict between the writer’s necessary inwardness and the pleasures of worldliness. It is, so to speak, Flaubert strongly amended by Gide: a more well bred, casual rigor, an avid, guileful relation to ideas that excludes fanaticism. Indeed, the ideal self-portrait—the portrait of the self as writer—that Barthes sketched throughout his work is virtually complete in the first essay, on Gide’s “work of egoism,” his
Journal
. Gide supplied Barthes with the patrician model for the writer who is supple, multiple; never strident or vulgarly indignant; generous but also properly egotistical; incapable of being deeply influenced. He notes how little Gide was altered by his vast reading (“so many self-recognitions”), how his “discoveries” were never “denials.” And he praises the profusion of Gide’s scruples, observing that Gide’s “situation
at the intersection of great contradictory currents has nothing facile about it …” Barthes subscribes as well to Gide’s idea of writing that is elusive, willing to be minor. His relation to politics also recalls Gide’s: a willingness in times of ideological mobilization to take the right stands, to be political—but, finally, not: and thereby, perhaps, to tell the truth that hardly anybody else is telling. (See the short essay Barthes wrote after a trip to China in 1974.) Barthes had many affinities with Gide, and much of what he says of Gide applies unaltered to himself. How remarkable to find it all laid out—including the program of “perpetual self-correction”—well before he embarked on his career.
Journal
. Gide supplied Barthes with the patrician model for the writer who is supple, multiple; never strident or vulgarly indignant; generous but also properly egotistical; incapable of being deeply influenced. He notes how little Gide was altered by his vast reading (“so many self-recognitions”), how his “discoveries” were never “denials.” And he praises the profusion of Gide’s scruples, observing that Gide’s “situation
at the intersection of great contradictory currents has nothing facile about it …” Barthes subscribes as well to Gide’s idea of writing that is elusive, willing to be minor. His relation to politics also recalls Gide’s: a willingness in times of ideological mobilization to take the right stands, to be political—but, finally, not: and thereby, perhaps, to tell the truth that hardly anybody else is telling. (See the short essay Barthes wrote after a trip to China in 1974.) Barthes had many affinities with Gide, and much of what he says of Gide applies unaltered to himself. How remarkable to find it all laid out—including the program of “perpetual self-correction”—well before he embarked on his career.
(Barthes was twenty-seven, a patient in a sanatorium for tubercular students, when he wrote this essay in 1942 for the sanatorium’s magazine; he did not enter the Paris literary arena for another five years.)
When Barthes, who began under the aegis of Gide’s doctrine of psychic and moral availability, started writing regularly, Gide’s important work was long over, his influence already negligible (he died in 1951); and Barthes put on the armor of postwar debate about the responsibility of literature, the terms of which were set up by Sartre—the demand that the writer be in a militant relation to virtue, which Sartre described by the tautological notion of “commitment.” Gide and Sartre were, of course, the two most influential writer-moralists of this century in France, and the work of these two sons of French Protestant culture suggests quite opposed moral and aesthetic choices. But it is just this kind of polarization that Barthes, another Protestant in revolt against Protestant moralism, seeks to avoid. Supple Gidean that he is, Barthes is eager to acknowledge the model of Sartre as well. While a quarrel with Sartre’s view of literature lies at the heart of his first book,
Writing Degree Zero
(Sartre is never mentioned by name), an agreement with Sartre’s view of the imagination, and its obsessional energies, surfaces in Barthes’s last book,
Camera Lucida
(written “in homage” to the early Sartre, the author of
L’Imaginaire
)
.
Even in the first book, Barthes concedes a good deal to Sartre’s view of literature and language—for example, putting poetry with the other “arts” and identifying literature with prose, with argument. Barthes’s view of literature in his subsequent writing was more complex. Though he never wrote on poetry, his standards for literature approached those of the poet: language
that has undergone an upheaval, has been displaced, liberated from ungrateful contexts; that, so to speak, lives on its own. Although Barthes agrees with Sartre that the writer’s vocation has an ethical imperative, he insists on its complexity and ambiguity. Sartre appeals to the morality of ends. Barthes invokes “the morality of form”—what makes literature a problem rather than a solution; what makes literature.
Writing Degree Zero
(Sartre is never mentioned by name), an agreement with Sartre’s view of the imagination, and its obsessional energies, surfaces in Barthes’s last book,
Camera Lucida
(written “in homage” to the early Sartre, the author of
L’Imaginaire
)
.
Even in the first book, Barthes concedes a good deal to Sartre’s view of literature and language—for example, putting poetry with the other “arts” and identifying literature with prose, with argument. Barthes’s view of literature in his subsequent writing was more complex. Though he never wrote on poetry, his standards for literature approached those of the poet: language
that has undergone an upheaval, has been displaced, liberated from ungrateful contexts; that, so to speak, lives on its own. Although Barthes agrees with Sartre that the writer’s vocation has an ethical imperative, he insists on its complexity and ambiguity. Sartre appeals to the morality of ends. Barthes invokes “the morality of form”—what makes literature a problem rather than a solution; what makes literature.
To conceive of literature as successful “communication” and position-taking, however, is a sentiment that must inevitably become conformist. The instrumental view expounded in Sartre’s
What Is Literature?
(1948) makes of literature something perpetually obsolete, a vain—and misplaced—struggle between ethical good soldiers and literary purists, that is, modernists. (Contrast the latent philistinism of this view of literature with the subtlety and acuity of what Sartre had to say about visual images.) Riven by his love of literature (the love recounted in his one perfect book,
The Words
) and an evangelical contempt for literature, one of the century’s great
littérateurs
spent the last years of his life insulting literature and himself with that indigent idea, “the neurosis of literature.” His defense of the writer’s project of commitment is no more convincing. Accused of thereby reducing literature (to politics), Sartre protested that it would be more correct to accuse him of overestimating it. “If literature isn’t
everything
, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble,” he declared in an interview in 1960. “That’s what I mean by ‘commitment.’” But Sartre’s inflation of literature to “everything” is another brand of depreciation.
What Is Literature?
(1948) makes of literature something perpetually obsolete, a vain—and misplaced—struggle between ethical good soldiers and literary purists, that is, modernists. (Contrast the latent philistinism of this view of literature with the subtlety and acuity of what Sartre had to say about visual images.) Riven by his love of literature (the love recounted in his one perfect book,
The Words
) and an evangelical contempt for literature, one of the century’s great
littérateurs
spent the last years of his life insulting literature and himself with that indigent idea, “the neurosis of literature.” His defense of the writer’s project of commitment is no more convincing. Accused of thereby reducing literature (to politics), Sartre protested that it would be more correct to accuse him of overestimating it. “If literature isn’t
everything
, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble,” he declared in an interview in 1960. “That’s what I mean by ‘commitment.’” But Sartre’s inflation of literature to “everything” is another brand of depreciation.
Barthes, too, might be charged with overestimating literature—with treating literature as “everything”—but at least he made a good case for doing so. For Barthes understood (as Sartre did not) that literature is first of all, last of all, language. It is language that is everything. Which is to say that all of reality is presented in the form of language—the poet’s wisdom, and also the structuralist’s. And Barthes takes for granted (as Sartre, with his notion of writing as communication, did not) what he calls the “radical exploration of writing” undertaken by Mallarmé, Joyce, Proust, and their successors. That no venture is valuable unless it can be conceived as a species of radicalism, radicalism thereby unhinged from any distinctive content, is perhaps the essence
of what we call modernism. Barthes’s work belongs to the sensibility of modernism in the extent to which it assumes the necessity of the adversary stance: literature conceived by modernist standards but not necessarily a modernist literature. Rather, all varieties of counterposition are available to it.
of what we call modernism. Barthes’s work belongs to the sensibility of modernism in the extent to which it assumes the necessity of the adversary stance: literature conceived by modernist standards but not necessarily a modernist literature. Rather, all varieties of counterposition are available to it.
Perhaps the most striking difference between Sartre and Barthes is the deep one, of temperament. Sartre has an intellectually brutal,
bon enfant
view of the world, a view that wills simplicity, resolution, transparence; Barthes’s view is irrevocably complex, self-conscious, refined, irresolute. Sartre was eager, too eager, to seek confrontation, and the tragedy of this great career, of the use he made of his stupendous intellect, was just his willingness to simplify himself. Barthes preferred to avoid confrontation, to evade polarization. He defines the writer as “the watcher who stands at the crossroads of all other discourses”—the opposite of an activist or a purveyor of doctrine.
bon enfant
view of the world, a view that wills simplicity, resolution, transparence; Barthes’s view is irrevocably complex, self-conscious, refined, irresolute. Sartre was eager, too eager, to seek confrontation, and the tragedy of this great career, of the use he made of his stupendous intellect, was just his willingness to simplify himself. Barthes preferred to avoid confrontation, to evade polarization. He defines the writer as “the watcher who stands at the crossroads of all other discourses”—the opposite of an activist or a purveyor of doctrine.
Barthes’s utopia of literature has an ethical character almost the opposite of Sartre’s. It emerges in the connections he makes between desire and reading, desire and writing—his insistence that his own writing is, more than anything, the product of appetite. The words “pleasure,” “bliss,” “happiness” recur in his work with a weight, reminiscent of Gide, that is both voluptuous and subversive. As a moralist—Puritan or anti-Puritan—might solemnly distinguish sex for procreation from sex for pleasure, Barthes divides writers into those who write
something
(what Sartre meant by a writer) and the real writers, who do not write something but, rather,
write
. This intransitive sense of the verb “to write” Barthes endorses as not only the source of the writer’s felicity but the model of freedom. For Barthes, it is not the commitment that writing makes to something outside of itself (to a social or moral goal) that makes literature an instrument of opposition and subversion but a certain practice of writing itself: excessive, playful, intricate, subtle, sensuous—language which can never be that of power.
something
(what Sartre meant by a writer) and the real writers, who do not write something but, rather,
write
. This intransitive sense of the verb “to write” Barthes endorses as not only the source of the writer’s felicity but the model of freedom. For Barthes, it is not the commitment that writing makes to something outside of itself (to a social or moral goal) that makes literature an instrument of opposition and subversion but a certain practice of writing itself: excessive, playful, intricate, subtle, sensuous—language which can never be that of power.
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