The Pleasure of the Text

I returned to Barthes not having read him in a long time. A graduate TA, with shaky french herself, had us reading Mythologies in the early '80's. As students working hard just to translate the text, I'm afraid we let certain funny jokes, like the fact of a frenchman discussing the meaning of french fries in America, go directly over our heads. I happened to read a review of a movie where Ben Kingsley romances college student Penelope Cruz. One detail, "She had under her arm, The Pleasure of the Text," reeled me in to order it, though I did not consider the movie any further(maybe that was wrong). I also ordered two others by Barthes. One was A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, a short, easy enjoyable read I recommend. Pleasure of the Text is a little more involved but certainly not impenetrable. I actually was finding it funnier and funnier until I got to page 9, where I laughed out loud as he talked about the "narrative" being "dismantled" in Flaubert. Maybe it was just me. On rereading it I realized it was not really a joke; I think Barthes is a little more serious here than in the french-fry book(some may say that was serious, too). In sum, definitely lovely, accessible writing. And he seems like a pretty nice guy after all these years.

The text is pleasurable. The text is bliss. Barthes perforates the being of the text, he pinpoints the ineffability of the greatness of the truly great writers. He writes about Nietzsche, about Sade, about Flaubert, and many others. Unlike the general dynamic of French post-modernity and post-structuralism, Barthe's style and tone are unusually playful and entertaining. This treatise flows with the lucid readability of a good William Carlos Williams poem. Barthes relates reading to orgasm (petite mal=small death in Lacanian terms), reading is related to the act of striping, to seduction. "The pleasure of the text is not the pleasure of the corporeal striptease or of narrative suspense" (pg. 10). "I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me" (pg.38) And this text will seduce you too.

Reading this long essay, I was reminded of Barthes' contention that he was not a literary critic--this work goes farther than most anything that passes for literary criticism nowadays. This is a beautiful, concise essay on what makes reading pleasurable, something most critics wouldn't dare to tackle. But Roland Barthes is no critic--he's a philosopher and a poet, a gifted writer whose words desire your reading (and you'll desire the words) as much as they illuminate that desire itself. It's a rare person who can explain literature while creating it. Barthes is one such person, which is just another reason he's no literary critic.

"The Pleasure of the Text," by Roland Barthes, is a work of literary and cultural philosophy that actually transcends the genre. The short book consists of a series of "meditations," many less than a page long, that explore various facets of language and reading. Barthes' work has been translated from French into an elegantly playful English by Richard Miller.As a whole, the book has an informal, almost stream-of-consciousness feel to it. Barthes' text is richly studded with numerous cultural references--Bataille, the Kama Sutra, Sade, Severo Sarduy, Marx, the Buddhist sangha, Poe, Chomsky, and much more. Barthes often uses sexual imagery as a vehicle by which to construct a philosophy of reading. The result of all these elements is a dizzying, yet oddly delightful reading experience.One of the key themes of "The Pleasure of the Text" is Barthes' attempt to define "pleasure" and "bliss," and to delineate the differences between the text of pleasure and the text of bliss. From Barthes' project the close reader can thus derive a new way of looking at all texts.Among other topics Barthes considers the hierarchical nature and pleasure factor of the sentence, as well as the erotic potential of the word. And throughout, his writing is marked by passages of wit and insight. A typical observation: "The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition [...].""The Pleasure of the Text" often takes on a metaphysical, almost prophetic flavor. For those who are willing to dig into this dense text with gusto, it may prove to be an intellectual treasure heap.

If Angela Carter called Emily Dickinson the Madame deSade of Amherst, maybe we should call Barthes the Charlie Chaplin of language. Barthes is a Quixotic little tramp with too much erotic energy for the common reader. Of course, Barthes' Eros, like Chaplin's, is not a matter of subject but of point of view. From this angle, his project--the ripping-at-the-seams of the stale pleasantries of any Victorian approach to reading --seems more important now than ever. Everyone knows ours is a dispensation infected with simulations of pleasure--from the Ecstacy-riddled rave scene, whose aim is pleasure, to bad Kubrik movies "about" pleasure, to ever-tyrannical taxes on tobacco, which tax pleasure unfairly, to the very dubious simulo-pleasure of sending a critique, such as this one, to an invisible audience in hopes of getting 50 much-needed dollars. Given all that, then a re-reading of Barthes may be mandatory to remember that the good old fashioned word can be and has been in fact just as irrational and fearsomely enjoyable as anything else. Finally, it is far past time that Barthes be relinquished from the category of the avant gard and join the ranks of *covertly* Socialist products such as Coca Cola, Camels, and Kodak, and all the other bad habits that may now be used to prevent us from straying off into some atactile ionosphere of Internet affairs, book-of-the-month clubs and long-distance learning courses.