Roland Barthes

The Rustle of Language

Hill and Wang

PARTIAL EXHILARATION, partial disappointment: one reader's response to this latest collection of essays by Roland Barthes. Intellectual morsels, released posthumously for our literary delectation--they can only be read in the light of all that has gone before, all that has been said and done, Barthes' own deja-dit, deja-vecu.

Isn't there always something futile, pathetic, uncomfortably personal about the post-script? Displaying its ostensible, self-conscious triviality like an impostor's fake medals, it challenges us to criticize: "Today only the critic executes the work (pun intended)." Yes, but who sentenced it to death?

In a tribute to literary critic Gerard Genette--"Return of the Poetician"--and in random reflections on culture, language and history, Barthes is inimitable in the clarity of his observation, in the music of his language that is like "the noise of what, functioning to perfection, has no noise...happy machines which rustle...." It stammers, it shimmers--his writing does whatever he desires.

We bow our heads in deference, we revere his clipped eloquence the only way we can--clipped, in fragments. "History exists only because words are corrupted." Or, "reading is the site where structure is made hysterical." How true, how banal--and how much of the banality lies in the dimensions of his discourse. Moment follows isolated moment, nothing is sustained.

Long ago in his critical excursions, Barthes abandonned the principle that an idea, a theme must be sustained in order to have meaning. Writing in fragments no longer represents a failure but an aesthetic choice, a statement:

a fragment of writing is still an essence of writing...no one can deny the greatness of fragmentary works...only scholarship, which is the contrary of reading, can regard Pascal's Pensees as an uncompleted work.

Yet, the shiny appeal of such fragments--like slogans, logos, celebrated epigrams--leads us to swallow them whole without looking inside to the essential emptiness. Here, the fragmentation in Barthes' writing is not deliberate, not a formal statement but rather an unfortunate accident.

Ironically, the sense of incompletion that strikes us in this collection of essays arises primarily from accidental repetitions which we cannot help but notice. We find repeted allusions, identically worded, idees fixes sprinkled throughout essays that span many years--essays organized according to the editor's idea of "theme". The allusions tease us with the illusion of continuity, the reward for our "careful" reading. We reach towards it and find only the discontinuity of meaning.

"Ideas" are not developed to the point where they deserve this name; they are only alluded to in passing, in an often impenetrable idiolect. As we read, Barthes tells us that "reading is the permanent hemorrhage by which structure--patiently and usefully described by Structural Analysis--collapses, opens, is lost." His writing on reading is not even Barthes' beloved skidding-of-words effect but rather an effect of neglect, which frustrates reading, which hastens reading, which promotes erasure: bad faith. Read slowly, if you can. Linger over each "gustative sensation" and remember that "the submission of the gustative sensation to time permits it to develop somewhat in the manner of a narrative."

PARADOXICALLY, IT IS the very insistence of Barthes' manner that fails to satisfy us. His writing continually points to itself, to its own idiolect, through devices which by now reek of affectation.

But perhaps it is not just the writing, but the author, which points to itself: "How to keep a Journal without egotism? That is precisely the question which keeps me from writing one (for I have had just about enough egotism)." This is Barthes at his most selfindulgent. Even in those essays of purported didactic intent, we sense the powerful motions of this desire-to talk about self through self.

And we begin to suspect that there is in us a voyeuristic craving, an instinct which tempts us to spectate rather than to read. "In other words, I never get away from myself." A twinge of uneasiness prompts us to ask, what are we reading here? This writing defies understanding, subverts the process of making meaning through any rubric.

It seems to be in response to an unspoken, unmediated desire on our part that Barthes accedes to this self demystification, a sublimated egotism. It grates on the nerves: "little by little I recognize in myself a growing desire for readability...I want the texts I write to be readable, too...." But the air of gratuitousness embellished with sincerity leads us to suspect that we are imprisoned in a confessional--on the wrong side of the screen--listening with horror and fascination to the "powerful and pathetic stream" of Barthes' language.