Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole

 

I arrived at Teju Cole’s work by that mysterious alchemy to which we are sometimes subject. I believe it was a path or perhaps constellation wherein I read Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, which referenced Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, which I went looking for and found this among its similar books. I can’t guarantee that that’s how I found Known and Strange Things, but it seems like an appropriately meandering journey to Cole’s collection of essays, which are themselves such rich explorations of human experience, discussing literature, photography and art, and travel writing. Known and Strange Things compiles essays on these subjects essentially in that order in a series of focused, manageable short (sometimes too short!) chapters. Ultimately, I would say that Cole does the thing that critics should: inspire you to engage with more works, or with works at a deeper level. He’s the kind of appreciator that shares an appraising eye and ignites curiosity towards his subjects, to an especially surprising degree for those topics to which I don’t normally gravitate.

Of course, the section on literature was most consistently engaging to me. In one of the earliest essays, if not the first, Cole references some of James Baldwin’s writing on Blackness, which sets up an interesting framework for his own project here. To paraphrase, Baldwin was deeply engaged by European culture, despite its long-standing racist foundation, and I see a similar disposition in Cole, a Nigerian-American writer, who references this Baldwin anecdote at least three times in this collection and yet who focuses a great deal on white European writers: Joseph Conrad, W.G. Sebald, Tomas Transtromer, and V.S. Naipaul among them.

Cole’s analysis of V.S. Naipaul is of particular interest in this respect, especially because Cole dedicates two chapters to Naipaul. In the first, he offers a riveting reading of A House for Mr. Biswas, a book I’d never heard of but is read with such compelling insight that it inspires me to read it. The fact that Cole gives such a rich reading of the book that it makes the subsequent chapter on V.S. Naipaul more surprising: Cole offers a somewhat critical portrait of the man himself. Cole recounts attending his house for a dinner in celebration of what was likely to be Naipaul’s final book. Like Baldwin, Cole navigates the contradictions of culture and politics. Cole toasts Naipaul but with an edge:

“Your work which has meant so much to an entire generation of post-colonial writers. I don’t agree with all your views, and in fact there are many of them I strongly disagree with [...] but from you I have learned how to be productively disagreeable in my own views. I and others have learned, from you, that it is fine to be independent, that it is fine to go your own way and go against the crowd. You went your own way no matter what it cost you. Thank you for that.”

There’s a distinct critique in the toast. Cole even notes that he hoped that his use of the word “strongly” would come across in a “menacing tone.” It’s really interesting to see such a strong personal objection to an author whose work was praised just the chapter prior. Naipaul’s fondness of using the N word is a particular sticking point, as is Naipaul’s purported “lack of sympathy towards Africa” and his “brutal” treatment of women. Cole sets up such a contradictory portrait of his personal distaste for who was, by then, a feeble old man: “He knew nothing about that. He knew only that he needed help standing up, needed help walking across the grand marble-floored foyer towards the private elevator.”

Towards the end of the essay, Cole admits to Naipaul that the party was not what he had expected. Naipaul asks what he expected with “some new mischief in his eyes.” Cole tells him, “I don’t know. Not this. I thought you’d be surly, and that I’d be rude” and Naipaul says how good that is and how he must write it down “so that others know.” Cole suggests that “the combination of ego, tenderness, and sly provocation was typical.” It’s certainly an interesting portrait of such a literary force. There’s a kind of sympathy for the old racist that seems to channel Baldwin in a way that I think Cole himself must recognize.

Of course, other literary discussions are less ambiguous. Cole offers quite a bit of unequivocal praise of Derek Walcott’s poetry and presents some beautiful readings of his work. Similarly, Cole engages with W.G. Sebald in a truly meaningful way. The entire chapter on Sebald discusses his literary style in his literary style. Cole speaks to strangers and the narrative meanders through the back alleys of historical memory, leaving me to think that Sebald most certainly would have appreciated the stylistic homage. Similarly, Cole’s discussion of Tomas Transtromer’s poetry and Ivan Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative spark that exploratory interest that can get us so far in life.

The second section of the book is essays on art and photography. Being a photographer and novelist by trade, Cole offers some compelling readings of the artform. Admittedly, this section of the book was somewhat less compelling (of course not uninteresting), but I account for that with two issues in my own reading. First, I am far more familiar with literature than photography, so the first part of the book naturally was more engaging. Second, I purchased Known and Strange Things as an audiobook, which meant that I had to do supplemental searching if I wanted to look at the images, which I believe are reproduced in the physical copy of the novel. All that said, there were some really interesting notes, particularly about colour and light in the work of various photographers and the political implications that has, especially for Black bodies.

Under the surface of Cole’s essays, occasionally made explicit, is a commitment to politics. Cole discusses, for example, the way photography developed and how it was developed with White bodies in mind, failing to capture certain tones of Black bodies. Some essays are provided with brief examples of political commentary—like when the NYPD cracked down on subway dancers. Who are the subway dancers? Predominantly Black people practicing an art form on public transit. Surely, the implication runs, there must be better ways of spending resources.

Some of the chapters are more explicitly political, especially in the travel writing section of the book. The political discussion cuts any number of ways. There was some excellent discussion of the ambivalence in Barrack Obama’s elections. Cole offers some commentary on Obama’s first election and the peculiarity of the United States where electing a Black president is not the normal state of affairs. There’s a sly remark, too, about how electing a Black president allows for White complacency towards the daily acts of racism and its infusion into our most common institutions. 

Cole offers a fair amount of criticism towards Obama, too. I’d be interested to see how Cole responded to the subsequent election of Donald Trump, but he brings up valid points of critique. For instance, under Obama, there was increased targeting of Mexican-Americans (including the expunging of Mexican-American studies from American high schools) and Cole notes that Obama had a huge deportation rate—higher than almost all other presidents, even while touting the importance of the Dreamers Act. Moreover, Obama’s use of drone strikes was frequent and indiscriminate, which finds critique in several essays of this book. In one essay, Cole considers the supposed benefits of having a reader-president like Obama. Literature is supposed to increase our empathy and capacity for nuance, is it not? In noting the failure of such a philosophy, Cole rewrites the famous first lines of several books, but including drone strikes. It’s a poignant commentary that I won’t tarnish with my own notes. I’ll merely offer some of Cole’s examples:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity, a signature strike levelled the florist’s.

Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.

I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me. 

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a predator drone.

Mother died today. The program saves American lives.

The thoughtfulness of Cole’s commentary is not limited to American politics, though. In another compelling essay, Cole considers justice in Nigeria. He outlines the mob-mentality of what they refer to as “jungle justice,” where someone accused of theft (if they react without sufficient anger at the accusation), might be beaten to within inches of life by a mob in the street. Cole thoughtfully considers the mitigating impact of more formal law, often seen as being “too slow” for the Nigerian public and the tension that necessarily produces in terms of cultural norms. It’s difficult not to feel surprise at some of the details from that essay—for instance that Nigerian men frequently have dreams in which their penises are stolen and that you can accuse others of stealing it, subjecting the accused to attacks on their lives. It’s a fascinating historical-cultural-judicial exploration (seriously: go read up on Nigerian Penis Theft). Cole’s essay offers this snapshot into customs that seem distant from our own, but it truly becomes a human story when he considers the victims of mob justice, like the Aluu Four, who were lynched for being accused of theft. Videos of these executions go up online and the comments are purportedly often in favour of those enacting “justice.” Cole ends the essay by examining Tweets by one of the victims, which come to be seen as prophetic retroactively. It has the impact of a documentary, and Cole accomplishes it through words alone.

Overall, I feel really glad to have stumbled upon Known and Strange Things. The subject matter Cole touches on and his voice offer new angles for engaging with the world, and it’s hard to turn up your nose to something like that.

Happy reading!

The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet

    On the heels of reading Roland Barthes, I have here a novelization of his death: The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet (translated by Sam Taylor). Here’s a zero-context excerpt to entice you into reading it:

In Bologna, he had sex with Bianca in a seventeenth-century amphitheatre and narrowly escaped death in the bombed train station. Here, he has almost been stabbed in a library at night by a linguistics philosopher and has witnessed a decidedly mythological doggy-style sex scene on a photocopier. He met Giscard in the Élysée Palace, bumped into Foucault in a gay sauna, took part in a car chase that ended with an attempt on his life, saw a man kill another man with a poisoned umbrella, discovered a secret society where people had their fingers cut off if they lost a debate, and crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a mysterious document. In the course of a few months he has lived through more extraordinary events than he expected to witness in his entire lifetime … Simon knows how to spot the novelistic when he sees it. He thinks again about Umberto Eco’s supernumeraries. (247).

I hope this passage sparks your fancy because Binet is up to something delightful, comic, and profound with this historically-inspired murder mystery. In some ways, Binet brings forth the historical record accurately, at least in its broad strokes. For instance, it’s true that Roland Barthes was hit by the driver of a laundry van on February 25th 1980 and died a month later; it’s true that Louis Althusser murdered his wife. Where the story is not (necessarily) true is where Roland Barthes was carrying a secret document that outlines how to use language to magical effect and persuade people to act in a kind of hypnotic fashion. Where the story is not (necessarily) true is where Louis Althusser murdered his wife because she threw out a junk mail envelope that hid Barthes’ secret document. Where the story is not (necessarily) true is where Julia Kristeva and her husband Philppe Sollers sicced a pack of dogs on Derrida that tore out his throat and murdered him. The blend of past / present / reality / unreality is achieved with a sense of surprise (is this the new Bliss that Roland Barthes discusses in The Pleasure of the Text?!). There are passing moments that Binet shows his hand in a cheeky way. When Bernard-Henri Georges Lévy (BHL) appears, Binet narrates that “even back then, he is always where the action is.” Notice how the present creeps into the past. He is where the action is—even in the past.

In the wake of Barthes being hit by the laundry van, the central characters of the book are called upon to investigate: detective Jacques Bayard and a young professor named Simon Herzog, who gets enlisted as a“translator” (of deconstructionism) and co-investigator. Binet’s voice is fresh, lively, and intensely humorous, which allows the book to work well as a detective novel and a satirical lampoon. For example, the fact that the detectives interview Michel Foucault while he receives oral sex in a gay bath is such a ridiculous image, but it still works in the context of a mystery novel.

Progressing through the novel, Binet has a caravan of literary figures to progress the story. In addition to the previous figures mentioned, we see from the likes of Umberto Eco, Judith Butler, Jonathan Culler, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and a range of others. If I have one gripe about the novel, it is that Binet really makes readers rely on their extant knowledge of deconstructionists and French intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s and political figures like Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterand. Without at least baseline knowledge, this text could be pretty inaccessible. It was a little challenging to keep the circus in order.

I think what I love about the book is that it engages sincerely with philosophical discourse, even if it’s presented in a somewhat tongue-and-cheek manner. For instance, early in the book Simon Herzog is lecturing about James Bond (why is the topic so fruitful? I’ve seen all kinds of academics comment on it!). The professor does a semiotic reading (in the style of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. He talks about how the Double 0 is code for the right to murder because death is nothingness and “nothingness is zero” (25). He continues, “It is death times two: his own inevitable death [...] and that of the other” (25). He continues on to talk about the magic of the number 7 and then contrasts it with the protagonist Number 6 from The Prisoner who wants to assert his identity (25). James Bond is presented as antithetical: one who dwells in the anonymity, Number 6 is the one who longs for identity. Because of his special privileges, 007 works to maintain the established order:

“Where Number 6 is a revolutionary, 007 is a conservative. The reactionary 7 here opposes the revolutionary 6, and as the meaning of the word reactionary supposes the idea of posteriority (the conservatives ‘react’ to the revolution by working for a return to the ancient regime, i.e., the established order), it is logical that the reactionary figure succeeds the revolutionary figure (to put it as plainly as possible: that James Bond is not 005). The function of 007 is, therefore, to guarantee the return of the established order. The end of each episode coincides always with a return to ‘normality,’ i.e., ‘the old order.’ Umberto Eco calls James Bond a fascist. In actual fact, we can see that he is, above all, a reactionary” (26).

The passage gives a sense of Binet’s experience and facility with semiotic discourse. Clearly, Binet is much-learnèd, given that Simon is a fictional professor and serves as a voice for Laurent Binet. In the 007 scene, a student then raises the question of Q and the significance of his name. Herzog expands:

“Q is a paternal figure, because he is the one who provides James Bond with weapons and teaches him how to use them. He passes on his savoir faire. In this sense, he ought to be called F, for Father…. But if you watch the scenes involving Q carefully, what do you see? A distracted, impertinent, playful James Bond, who doesn’t listen (or pretends not to). And, at the end, you have Q, who always asks: ‘Questions?’ (or variations on the theme of ‘Do you understand?’). But James Bond never has any questions; although he plays the dunce, he has assimilated what has been explained to him perfectly because he is an extraordinarily quick study. So Q is the q of ‘questions’---questions that Q calls for and that Bond never asks, except in the form of jokes, and his questions are never those that Q is expecting.” (26).

I love this reading of the James Bond, first off. It’s somewhat absurd (I’m not sure if I give Ian Fleming so much credit), but also entirely plausible. Recognizing the role of questions in the James bond series like this, I think, provides a productive reading of the films (even if the premises are spurious). The conversation continues afterward, with the student pointing out the similarities in sound of Q and queue—people waiting to be served, dead time between action scenes (27). It’s a great observation, which Herzog acknowledges “that one interpretation never exhausts the sign, and that polysemy is a bottomless well where we can hear an infinite number of echoes: a word’s meaning never runs dry” (27).

It’s worthwhile to pause here for a moment to consider the epistemic framework of the book. At the two-thirds mark for the text, Binet offers a discussion of how continental philosophy has become more successful in the U.S. than europe. He outlines the process pretty poignantly where “For English departments, French Theory was a revolutionary weapon that enabled them to go from being the fifth wheel of the social sciences to being the one discipline that subsumes all the others” (235). The premise is that French Theory is “founded on the assumption that language is at the base of everything, then the study of language involves studying philosophy, sociology, psychology” (235-236). Then, people like Searles and Chomsky demand clarity and demystification. The passage outlining the process ends with an amusingly anticlimactic phrase: “But you have to admit, Foucault is a lot sexier than Chomsky” (236).

It’s surprising how well Binet can navigate the deeply intellectual with the shlocky fun of an action novel. Yes, the book involves car chases and kidnappings and mutilations and the highly political intrigue of a spy thriller. Yet, it also involves deeply intense intellectual debate. In fact, some of the most intense scenes of the novel are pages and pages of debate—for instance, which is better: written or spoken language? Throughout the book, there’s The Logos Club, a cultish debate society where people go up against one another and whoever is deemed to be the loser has a finger cut off (or, in the case of a bizarre scene between Sollers and Eco: a castration). I found myself completely engrossed in these debate scenes, the intellectual stakes being as high as the stakes of car chases and hostage negotiations.

The book is extraordinarily hard to summarize in its non-plot particulars. There are passages that are insightful tidbits of cultural criticism. For instance, one passage defends Machiavelli’s The Prince as a work not of “the height of political cynicism” but “a definitive Marxist manifesto” (176). The book is presented as making explicit the unspoken rules of political economies: “By publishing The Prince, he reveals the truths that would have remained hidden and reserved exclusively for the purposes of the powerful: so — it’s a subversive act, a revolutionary act” (176). The book “delivers the secrets of the Prince to the people. The arcana of political pragmatism stripped of fallacious divine or moral justifications. A decisive act in the liberation of humankind, as all acts of deconsecration are” (176). Reframing Machiavelli this way is an against-the-grain reading that I find illuminating—controversial, really. Similarly illuminating, Binet discusses how Baudrillard described the Centre Georges-Pompidou (an art museum that I absolutely adored—way more than the Louvre). Binet retells Baudrillard’s stance on the building and how it “risked ‘folding’ under too much pressure (200). Binet summarizes that “the mass (of visitors) magnetized by the structure should become a destructive variable for the structure itself” (200), destroying architecture and culture at the same time.

The quirky humour of the book, the last laugh of history, gets brought to the surface. Whether it be the odd couple buddy-cop dynamic of Simon and Bayard or the historically incongruous moments, Binet reaches multiple levels of humour—and he knows it. It’s a self-aware humour that invites the audience to play. Whether it’s Bayard and Simon arguing over language (whether to describe the same people as suspects or witnesses, or the joke of theorists’ affectations (“What would you do if you ruled the world?” The gigolo replied that he would abolish all laws. Barthes said: “Even grammar?” (44)), or the absurdity of situations (a revenge-driven climax in a volcano?), every layer is rewarding.

One of the funniest scenes, in my mind, is when Simon has sex with Bianca on a dissecting table following the cultish debate club (they wear Venetian masks, sometimes—it gets more and more like Eyes Wide Shut here!). The entire scene is described so grotesquely, borrowing language from Deleuze and Guattari. It’s deeply amusing to me to see their theoretical language appropriated (they would say reterritorialized) into a sexual context. Simon’s seductive line is “Let’s construct an assemblage”

 

Bianca shivers with pleasure. Simon whispers to her with an authority that he has never felt before: “Let’s construct an assemblage” (179). Following that, “She gives him her mouth” and tells him “Fuck me like a machine” (179). Then, SImon’s “tongue-machine slides insider her like a coin in a slot, and Bianca’s mouth, which also has multiple uses, expels air like a bellows” (179). The scene goes on; I’ll spare you the details, but it’s a hilarious use of gross-sounding language that makes the sexual act a completely inhuman exercise.

Of course, at the core of the novel is a discussion of language. The macguffin of the book is Roland Barthes’ copy of Roman Jakobson’s “the seventh function of language”, an idea he is purported to have considered but then left out of his book (is this true? Historically? It is irrelevant to the book.). The seventh function of language, as described by Jakobson, works out to be a kind of magic spell that makes people behave the way you want. People are murdered over the macguffin. Later, Phillippe Sollers relies on a falsified version of the text to win a debate and reading it is such a glorious mess. Ultimately, the seventh function is used for political ends, too. Incidentally, Binet offers some consideration of totalitarian countries emerging from their relationship to linguistic theories:”Rhetoric can truly blossom only in a democracy, because it requires a venue for debate that, by definition, neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship can offer” (127). Throughout the debate, there is some consideration of whether speech is valuable and a historical tracing of how “Speeches were no longer expected to be effective, simply beautiful. Political issues were replaced by purely aesthetic issues. In other words, rhetoric became poetic” (127). So, then, what does language do? (Incidentally, J. L. Austin, author of How to Do Things With Words, makes an appearance).

Running parallel to the power of language is Simon’s introspection. Throughout the book, he suspects himself of being a character in a novel. When he is almost crushed by crumbling architecture, he considers that his author will have to be trickier in defeating him. At one point, Simon hears about Morris Zapp’s theory that life should not be considered with literature because it “does not function in the same way” (234). He is told that “life is transparent, literature opaque” (234), which Simon suggests is debatable. He notes that “Life is an open system, literature a closed system. Life is made of things, literature of words. Life is what it seems to be: when you are afraid of flying, it is a question of fear. [...] But in Hamlet, even the most stupid critic realizes that it is not about a man who wants to kill his uncle—it is about something else” (234). The relationship between reality and fiction is well-worth thinking about.

Further to that point, our own identities are subject to question. Are we authored by someone else? In addition, there’s a section that questions where our identities come from and where our words are from. He asks, “when I make phrases, is it really me who is speaking? How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of preexisting words?” (252). The ways we formulate our identities are so influenced by “external forces: our times, the books we read, our sociocultural determinisms, our linguistic ‘tics’ so precious that they form our identity, the speeches we are constantly bombarded with in every possible and imaginable form” (252). He then goes on to talk about how we note phrases emerging from our loved ones’ mouths that are clearly appropriated from elsewhere “as if he were the source of those thoughts rather than a sponge for them, rehashing the same formulas, the same rhetoric, the same presuppositions, the same indignant inflections, the same knowing tone, as if he were not simply the medium through which a newspaper’s prerecorded voice repeated the words of a politician who himself had read them in a book whose author, and so on…” (252). We become, essentially, citations.

I’m not even close to articulating how entertaining and thoughtful this book is. It’s a perfect blend of so-called high-brow and low-brow entertainment. I had the good fortune to read, essentially, 200 pages of this book in (almost) one sitting. As a result, the book was deeply satisfying. It felt like an intimate experience with central characters and had an ending worthy of literary classic. Not to spoil too much, but it offers multiple possibilities—again, language is never singular.

At times like this, I feel like the quality of my reviews is in direct contradiction to my enjoyment of the book. There are so many wonderful turns in the plot, thoughtful philosophical discussions, humorous incongruities between history and fiction, and … well, it’s just a good book.

If only I had the seventh function of language at my disposal, this review would compel you to read Laurent Binet’s book. If I just say “do it” would that work? “Do it.”

The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes

  No matter how many books I read, I’m still learning how to read. Enter: The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes, a literary force for whom I hold great reverence. While this theoretical work scarcely hits the 65 page mark, the framework herein provided is reinvigorating as a frequent reader and inconsistently productive reviewer. Essentially, Barthes explores the cause(s) of our pleasure when reading, presenting his theory via erotically-charged metaphors. He’s the kind of writer that makes me excited to read: what more can be asked of a literary critic than that?

As I write this, I’m examining my “notes and quotes” files to present his philosophy in an accessible and engaging fashion. I’ll rely pretty heavily on his words themselves, but in general some of the things I found most interesting were his discussion of the ‘seam’ (where a book’s stitches start to pull apart), the relative agency of authors / books / readers, and the delineation of our oft-decried reading processes, which Barthes here justifies and redeems. Actually, it’s a little ironic: Barthes makes a comment about how readers never actually read each word of a book in full, but some parts stand out and here I am taking a piecemeal approach to explore what I found resonant in The Pleasure of the Text.

Barthes is a well-read man, so it’s not surprising that he draws from the language of his contemporaries and his predecessors to describe the phenomena in question. Early in his book, he talks about the necessity of neurosis in the writing process and boy does he know how to validate his audience! Barthes draws on Bataille’s phrase that “Neurosis is the fearful apprehension of an ultimate impossible” but then notes that this “makeshift [neurosis] is the only one that allows for writing (and reading)” (5). Barthes explores the paradox that texts “written against neurosis, form the center of madness, contain within themselves, if they want to be read, that bit of neurosis necessary to the seduction of the readers: these terrible texts are all the same flirtatious texts” (5-6). This passage gives us a little of the flavour you can expect with the text. There’s the sly reference to the agency of texts either wanting or not wanting to be read, first of all. Additionally, we start to see his vocabulary for discussing texts early: reading involves “seduction” and texts can be “flirtatious.” Not only do texts have agency, but they are saucy. It appears to me that at the fundamental level Barthes here is drawing on a tradition that goes beyond him, as well. Where Barthes talks about the necessity of neurosis for reading and writing, you might see an echo of Thomas Mann’s essay on Dostoyevski regarding the demonic power in all literary geniuses.

From production, we then proceed toward pleasure. Barthes tries to provide language to the almost indefinable sensation for when a book hits that exact right note. If you are familiar with the poststructuralists, it will be no surprise to hear that reading, and indeed pleasure, involves a doubling. When looking at modern art, Barthes suggests it has two edges: “The subversive edge may seem privileged because it is the edge of violence; but,” he notes, “it is not violence which affects pleasure, nor is it destruction which interests it” (7). If pleasure were only pleasure as subversion against the dominant forces, then radically subversive texts would be the most pleasurable ones of all. We can likely agree that a book needs to do something different, but if it is so radically different that it is not even comprehensible to readers, it will not be pleasurable at all. Thus, I find Barthes to be pretty persuasive on the topic, suggesting that it isn’t destruction alone that causes pleasure: “what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss” (7).

Put another way, indeed a more erotic way, we find pleasure in the almost. The concealment is the pleasure of the text, the place where the seams come apart and reveal just that little bit of skin. For Barthes, reading is somewhat like a striptease where “the entire excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing the sexual organ” or “in knowing the end of the story (novelistic satisfaction)” (10). The Oedipal pleasure, he notes, is “to denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end” (10). Yet, this implies that every narrative unveils the truth and stages the absent father (10). Ironically, our compulsion to reveal everything runs counter to the process of actually reading: “Our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as ‘boring’) in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote (which are always its articulations: whatever furthers the solution of the riddle, the revelation of fate” (11). Essentially, Barthes posits that much of our reading in this mode is “unconcerned with the integrity of the text” (11). This really calls into question various literary theories and approaches, namely the New Critics who think that a work is a well-wrought urn where everything has its proper place and all details are critical (hence why a poem can’t be paraphrased). If we don’t actually care about all the details of a text, that theory stops serving us. There’s also a thread here that we could explore about the colonial approach to literature—we extract and sample, rather than viewing a book as a more holistic artifact.

In expanding on this, I actually find Barthes to be pretty humorous. He continues on with a curious passage that makes cheeky references to our own lazy reading habits:

“we boldly skip (no one is watching) descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations; doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer’s striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is: on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening the episodes of the ritual (like a priest gulping down his Mass). Tmesis, source or figure of pleasure, here confronts two prosaic edges with one another; it sets what is useful to a knowledge of the secret against what is useless to such knowledge; tmesis is a seam or flaw resulting from a simple principle of functionality; it does not occur at the level of the structure of languages but only at the moment of their consumption; the author cannot predict tmesis: he cannot choose to write what will not be read. And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust’s good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages.) (11).

This passage is intensely interesting to me. In the back half of the passage, Barthes references the logical impossibility of an author choosing to write what will not be read. That on its own conjures surprising notions; he really calls into question the idea of intention in a text. How can an author intend passages or trust the audience to actually read the passages as intended? We’ll see more on this later, but the idea of an author not being able to control the book is a common motif and there’s something about the parenthetical “(no one is watching)” that feels as if Barthes is anticipating us, exactly what cannot be done in the back half of the passage. Of course, contradictions—forces in opposition to each other—work to create the pleasure of the text, so Barthes seems to model for us that process: he cannot know what we will read, but includes a parenthetical reference as if he does. In any case, the framework he presents here that the revelation cannot be rushed is, of course, accurate: for aesthetic pleasure, you can’t skip to the climax. Before moving on, I just want to note the amusing parenthetical at the end: of course you’ll skip parts of Proust, but never skip the same passage twice. Hilarious. 

Barthes’ book offers a defence of distracted reading, writing that “The pleasure of the text is the moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do” which again points to the multiplicity of a text, of a reader, of authorship. Rather than reading in a singular fashion, the joy is in the multiplicity, taken up in Barthe’s fly metaphor:

We read a text (of pleasure) the way a fly buzzes around a room: with sudden, deceptively decisive turns, fervent and futile: ideology passes over the text and its reading like the blush over a face […] nothing is really antagonistic, everything is plural. I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness. (31)

This irreducibility of the text is pretty significant. As much as a text might be “for me”, it can be “for me” in different ways at different times—and how I approach it might vary from reading-to-reading. An important distinction that I believe I’m right in inferring is that a text is not reducible to an ideology (cf. Althusser’s letter to André Daspre), but it does exist within ideology. At one point, Barthes discusses how people sometimes want a text “without a shadow, without the ‘dominant ideology’” (32), but notes how that means they want a text “without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text” (32). Barthes argues that a text needs its shadow, it needs “a bit of ideology, a bit of representation” (32). As an aside both here and the in the book, Barthes critiques the idea of “dominant ideology” as an “incongruous” expression (32). He notes that ideology is what it is by virtue of its domination and it can be nothing other than that. Ultimately, the lower class is “forced [...] to borrow from the class that dominates them” (32); it recalls to me the Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak essay that asks “Can the subaltern speak?” Well, probably only in the language of their oppressors.

This will come up several times, but the idea of texts resisting singularity presents itself as a connected discourse. Identity and reading come to be linked through Barthes’ rationales about each. If we resist ideology, it is to do something new. Barthes holds up the New (I’m reminded of Ezra Pound’s maxim for modernity: “Make it new!”) as “the basis of all criticism” (40). He suggests that we evaluate based on “Old and New” and that the “only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society [is] to retreat ahead of it: every old language is immediately compromised, and every language becomes old once it is repeated” (40). If ever I have infinite time and a bigger brain, I would write an essay on the connection between this single statement and Mark Fisher’s discussion of accelerationism and Acid Communism. How does one get ahead of a past? How do we rush forward? I suppose Barthes himself asks this question when he writes, “How can a text, which consists of language, be outside languages? How exteriorize the world’s jargons without taking refuge in an ultimate jargon wherein the others would simply be reported, recited? As soon as I name, I am named: caught in the rivalry of names. How can the text ‘get itself out’ of the war of fictions, of sociolects?” (30). I can’t help but feel a connection with Althusser’s notion of interpellation: Ideology calls out “Hey you!” and you turn around. Now you are you. Through the vehicle of text, how can we escape this system?

As with most problems, it can be solved, at least in part, through multiplicity. We are all Spartacus, after all. Having multiple readings is a potential solution. Barthes notes that “Many readings are perverse, implying a split, a cleavage” (47). As readers, we succumb to this both-here-and-not-ness: “the reader can keep saying: I know these are only words, but all the same…(I am moved as though these words were uttering a reality)” (47). The boundary between our fictive and ‘real’ identities can perhaps take a similar approach. I know I am not really this, but all the same…Acting as if in some ways is no different than actually being. As an aside, Barthes makes a comment to this effect that I find so resonant, in particular, to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Barthes suggests that reading a tragedy is the most perverse: “I take pleasure in hearing myself tell a story whose end I know: I know and I don’t know, I act toward myself as though I did not know” (47). Ishiguro’s masterpiece involves children being “told and not told” about their future. In it, we see that tragedy unfolding. It’s horrific, and yet it’s one of the most intensely moving books I’ve ever read. I can both know and not know. It’s just words, but all the same…Reading moves me.

  The dichotomy Barthes sets up is two systems of reading: “one goes straight to the articulations of the anecdote” that “ignores the play of language” (12); the “other reading skips nothing; it weighs, it sticks to the text, it reads, so to speak, with application and transport, grasps at every point in the text the asyndeton which cuts the various languages—and not the anecdote” (12). At the most fundamental level, we might consider this as seeing the forest or the trees. Yet, the answer is not what excites us, “but the layering of significance” (12). Barthes compares it to a children’s game, but essentially the idea is that “the hole, the gap, is created and carries off the subject of the game” (12). What is surprising, though, is the way that Barthes posits these ideas within a historically-rooted aesthetic framework. He suggests that if you “read all of a novel by Zola” then “the book will drop from your hands” but that if you read a modern text quickly “it becomes opaque, inaccessible to your pleasure: you want something to happen and nothing does, for what happens to the language does not happen to the discourse” (12-13). He grasps different genres of reading, certainly, but also presents language as an action. Language itself creates the art, rather than simply being its vehicle, so “what ‘happens,’ what ‘goes away,’ the seam of the two edges, the interstice of bliss, occurs in the volume of the languages, in the uttering, not in the sequence of utterances” (13). I’m forced to recall so many of those great fragmentary writers I’ve come to love over the years: Kafka, Benjamin, Nietzsche, the aphorists…

I recently re-read John Crowe Ransom’s essay “Criticism, Inc.”, in which he argues that to do criticism properly is to be objective. He specifically denounces people that engage in criticism by discussing the pleasure a text brings them, how the poem affected them, and so on. It’s a somewhat cold version of criticism that might cause us to ask: well why read something if we don’t care about its impact? For Barthes, we see somewhat of the opposite emerge. He wants to judge texts precisely according to pleasure, but notes, “I cannot go on to say: this one is good, that bad” (13) and suggests that all critique “always implies a tactical aim, a social usage” (13). The only response a work can evoke, Barthes thinks, is “that’s it! And further still: that’s it for me! This ‘for me’ is neither subjective nor existential, but Nietzschean” (13). There’s a kind of transcendence to this approach in which pleasure is the purpose of the text and it’s hard not to favour this approach over one that removes my own response from the equation (as if that were actually possible). Where Barthes and Ransom (or New Critics in general) seem to overlap is the focus on the text itself, at least to some degree. The New Critics decry the way that books are subsumed by ideologies, or judged relative to their service to a particular point of view. Barthes reinforces that the text is “for me” and notes that “the pleasure of the text does not prefer one ideology to another” (31). He reads this as a kind of perversion: “the text, its reading, are split. What is overcome, split, is the moral unity that society demands on every human product” (31). The text is never reducible to one discourse or significance. Barthes suggests that “no sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of the text, than two policemen are ready to jump on you” (57). He gives two types of policeman: the political one and the psychoanalytical one, both of whom aim to subsume the text and repress the hedonism affiliated with reading and both aim to instrumentalize reading for a means other than pleasure.

What’s particularly compelling are some of the epistemic claims Barthes posits to defend his position. For one, he talks about how hedonism has historically been repressed. Then he takes a strange turn to note that hedonism is a pessimism: “Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc.” (57). Thinking about these ideas in conflict with one another has the effect of elevating pleasure, at least in my mind, to the same status. Barthes is onto something, though, when he notes that “we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure; Desire has an epistemic dignity, Pleasure does not” (57). Then, society ignores bliss “to such a point that it can produce only epistemologies of the law (and of its contestation) never of its absence” (57). The unbound freedom of pleasure always comes up against restrictions. I wish I had read this text during my Master’s, actually, because when it comes to epistemes, Barthes notes that the world of language is a “vast and perpetual conflict of paranoias” (28) and he gestures towards the destructive capacity for paranoiac epistemology and its effects on reading. He suggests that the only survivors of the paranoiac mode are “the systems (fictions, jargons) inventive enough to produce a final figure, the one which brands the adversary with a half-scientific, half-ethical name, a kind of turnstile that permits us simultaneously to describe, to explain, to condemn, to reject, to recuperate the enemy, in a word: to make him pay” (28). This limiting force of the paranoiac mindset which resists (in fact, prevents) pleasure from forming in its multiplicity is well-worth exploring.

I must admit to some confusion over Barthes’ key terms surrounding this pleasure. He notes that “pleasure can be expressed in words, bliss cannot” and says that “Bliss is unspeakable” (21). Later in that same paragraph, he suggests in italics that “criticism always deals with the texts of pleasure, never the texts of bliss” (21). I suppose this approaches the classic New Critic argument from a different angle. For a New Critic, a poem might not be able to be paraphrased precisely because of its poetic form. For a poststructuralist like Barthes, a poem might not be able to be paraphrased precisely because it is so beautiful. Later on there is the helpful distinction that “Bliss may come only with the absolutely new, for only the new disturbs (weakens) consciousness” (40). I find that idea as promising as it is unsettling, suggesting that only that which weakens our individual concept grants us bliss—we lose ourselves in reading, quite literally.

  Given that the book is couched in the language of desire, it’s worth questioning just who is doing the desiring. Books (or at least the reading of them) are disconnected from singular ideologies. Likewise, “the author is dead” (27). Barthes brackets his “civil status, his biographical person” and books are disconnected from their history. Barthes notes that in that way, he desires the author. A reader longs for an author no longer accessible. Meanwhile, the text has its own notion of desire: “The text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me” (27). It’s a compelling inversion to think that people are desired by their objects, rather than vice versa, but I can’t help but feel the authenticity of the idea that “the text chooses me, by a whole disposition of invisible screens, selective battles: vocabulary, references, readability, etc.; and, lost in the midst of a text (not behind it, like a deus ex machina) there is always the other, the author” (27). And yet, the author is lost. The author desires a reader, but does not know us specifically. The reader desires an author who has been lost to time. The book desires a reader.

That said, perhaps desire and pleasure are separate entities (indeed, pleasure is necessarily fulfilled desire, I imagine). Towards the end of the text, Barthes discusses the pleasure which repairs certain forms of cleavages (and yes, he would recognize that as innuendo, I’m sure). For one, he discusses the pleasure one derives from “imagining oneself as individual” which he says is a “fiction” (though notably not an “illusion”) (62). We create identities for ourselves which are “a final, rarest fiction: the fictive identity” (62). In this context, though, there’s more of a Deleuze and Guattari-esque bent. In the opening of A Thousand Plateaus they joke that they wrote the book together, and since each one of us is already multiple, there was quite the crowd. Here, Barthes takes a similar line: the fiction of identity is “no longer the illusion of a unity; on the contrary, it is the theater of society in which we stage our plural: our pleasure is individual—but not personal” (62). From there, Barthes gives a typology of the readers of pleasure. He traces the line from neurosis to a hallucinated form of the text (i.e., I think, one with which you have infused yourself) and suggests there are fetishists that “would be matched with the divided-up text, the singling out of quotations, formulae, turns of phrase, with the pleasure of the word” (63) —uh oh, guilty!—or the obsessive that “would experience the voluptuous release of the letter, of secondary, disconnected languages, of metalanguages” (63), or the paranoiac who “consume[s] or produce[s] complicated texts, stories developed like arguments, constructions posited like games, like secret constraints” (63)—uh oh, guilty again!! Finally, there’s the hysteric who “would be the one who takes the text for ready money, who joins in the bottomless, truthless comedy of language, who is longer the subject of any critical scrutiny and throws himself across the text” (63). Barthes notes that in the final iteration, it is different to throw oneself across the text than it is from projecting oneself into it.

  By my estimation, this review is coming to about 12 pages double-spaced, which would be almost 20% of the text I’m actually writing about. Yet, I can’t help it and I can’t stop myself. The Pleasure of the Text is a theoretical work, a work on criticism and cultural theory that gets me excited. Barthes’ focus on pleasure is invigorating and the sheer number of connections and points of illumination it offers is wonderful. A good critic provides tools and encourages you to read more—I won’t say intently—vigorously. Between the concept of the seam, the implications for identity, and the edification of pleasure as a guideline for reading, I find myself enriched by Barthes’ work. It’s one I’ll have to return to again and again (and thankfully it’s short enough that I can actually read it without skipping any parts or acting like a fly).

Pleasurable reading, everybody. May you find bliss!