the pleasure of the text
There is supposed to be a mystique of the Text. –On the contrary, the whole effort consists in materializing the pleasure of the text, in making the text an object of pleasure like the others. That is: either relate the text to the “pleasures” of life (a dish, a garden, an encounter, a voice, a moment, etc.) and to it join the personal catalogue of our sensualities, or force the text to breach bliss, that immense subjective loss, thereby identifying this text with the purest moments of perversion, with its clandestine sites. The important thing is to equalize the field of pleasure, to abolish the false opposition of practical life and contemplative life. The pleasure of the text is just that: claim lodged against the separation of the text; for what the text says, through the particularity of its name, is the ubiquity of pleasure, the atopia of bliss.
Notion of a book (of a text) in which is braided, woven, in the most personal way, the relation of every kind of bliss: those of “life” and those of the text, in which reading and the risks of real life are subject to the same anamnesis.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
I love Barthes. He’s hardly ever taught in my program, but we got to him last week in Rhetorical Theory. He’s one of the easiest French Structuralists to read, but his is a deceptive sort of easiness. There’s lots of thought packed into those lovely words he writes, and you can dig deeper and deeper into them and never hit bottom. Every time I read Barthes, I found that I’ve fallen in love with a dead gay guy. Hopeless, I know.
My professor asked, at the end of his lecture, what texts we had taken pleasure in. For whatever reason, I had never really thought about it directly in conjunction with this essay. One of the first that came to mind was Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, which I read last December. As it happened, I was in the process of falling in love myself at that time. (Not with a dead gay guy, either.) It was a lovely bit of synchronicity to read a chapter of Barthes every night before sleep.
Another pleasure-text is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. And anything Milan Kundera ever wrote. And this line, from Yevgeny Yevtushenko:
In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight… Not people die, but worlds die in them.
Amelie is a text that gives me intense pleasure every time I see it. And so is Howard’s End, but only the very beginning of it, where Vanessa Redgrave is walking around the house at twilight, and you see the hem of her dress dragging through the grass as she walks. I have no idea why, but I’m deeply attached to that scene. Why not the rest of the movie? Dunno.
Reading back over this, it seems like a horribly pretentious list. The thing is, I also love Tank Girl and Spice World. And just about everything John Waters ever did. (I’ve written about beauty and trash here before.) It’s all pleasure. It’s all text. And they’re all beautiful in their own way. So I wonder why I think of the more ethereal texts first? For some reason, I tend to file those under "pleasure" and the rest under "fun." I'm not sure why that would be.
Comments
Nice to see Barthes discussed with affection. When Pleasures of the Text came out, long ago, it seemed almost a rebuke to the theorists. Lest they forget that these Texts were actually meant to be read and enjoyed.
Posted by: Tutor | October 25, 2003 11:03 PM