Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

  The formalist temperament is just one variant of a sensibility shared by many who speculate in an era of hypersaturated awareness. What characterizes such a sensibility more generally is its reliance on the criterion of taste, and its proud refusal to propose anything that does not bear the stamp of subjectivity. Confidently assertive, it nevertheless insists that its assertions are no more than provisional. (To do otherwise would be bad taste.) Indeed, adepts of this sensibility usually make a point of claiming and reclaiming amateur status. “In linguistics I have never been anything but an amateur,” Barthes told an interviewer in 1975. Throughout his late writings Barthes repeatedly disavows the, as it were, vulgar roles of system-builder, authority, mentor, expert, in order to reserve for himself the privileges and freedoms of delectation: the exercise of taste for Barthes means, usually, to praise. What makes the role a choice one is his unstated commitment to finding something new and unfamiliar to praise (which requires having the right dissonance with established taste); or to praising a familiar work differently.

  An early example is his second book—it appeared in 1954—which is on Michelet. Through an inventory of the recurrent metaphors and themes in the great nineteenth-century historian’s epic narratives, Barthes discloses a more intimate narration: Michelet’s history of his own body and the “lyric resurrection of past bodies.” Barthes is always after another meaning, a more eccentric—often utopian—discourse. What pleased him was to show insipid and reactionary works to be quirky and implicitly subversive; to display in the most extravagant projects of the imagination an opposite extreme—in his essay on Sade, a sexual ideal that was really an exercise in delirious rationality; in his essay on Fourier, a rationalist ideal that was really an exercise in sensual delirium. Barthes did take on central figures of the literary canon when he had something polemical to offer: in 1960 he wrote a short book on Racine, which scandalized academic critics (the ensuing controversy ended with Barthes’s complete triumph over his detractors); he also wrote on Proust and Flaubert. But more often, armed with his essentially adversary notion of the “text,” he applied his ingenuity to the marginal literary subject: an unimportant “work”—say, Balzac’s Sarrasine, Chateaubriand’s Life of Rancé—could be a marvelous “text.” Considering something as a “text” means for Barthes precisely to suspend conventional evaluations (the difference between major and minor literature), to subvert established classifications (the separation of genres, the distinctions among the arts).

  Though work of every form and worth qualifies for citizenship in the great democracy of “texts,” the critic will tend to avoid those that everyone has handled, the meaning that everyone knows. The formalist turn in modern criticism—from its pristine phase, as in Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarizing, onward—dictates just this. It charges the critic with the task of discarding worn-out meanings for fresh ones. It is a mandate to scout for new meanings. Etonne-moi.

  The same mandate is supplied by Barthes’s notions of “text” and “textuality.” These translate into criticism the modernist ideal of an open-ended, polysemous literature; and thereby make the critic, just like the creators of that literature, the inventor of meaning. (The aim of literature, Barthes asserts, is to put “meaning” into the world but not “a meaning.”) To decide that the point of criticism is to alter and to relocate meaning—adding, subtracting, multiplying it—is in effect to base the critic’s exertions on an enterprise of avoidance, and thereby to recommit criticism (if it had ever left) to the dominion of taste. For it is, finally, the exercise of taste which identifies meanings that are familiar; a judgment of taste which discriminates against such meanings as too familiar; an ideology of taste which makes of the familiar something vulgar and facile. Barthes’s formalism at its most decisive, his ruling that the critic is called on to reconstitute not the “message” of a work but only its “system”—its form, its structure—is perhaps best understood thus, as the liberating avoidance of the obvious, as an immense gesture of good taste.

  For the modernist—that is, formalist—critic, the work with its received valuations already exists. Now, what else can be said? The canon of great books has been fixed. What can we add or restore to it? The “message” is already understood, or is obsolete. Let’s ignore it.

  OF A VARIETY of means Barthes possessed for giving himself something to say—he had an exceptionally fluent, ingenious generalizing power—the most elementary was his aphorist’s ability to conjure up a vivacious duality: anything could be split either into itself and its opposite or into two versions of itself; and one term then fielded against the other to yield an unexpected relation. The point of Voltairean travel, he remarks, is “to manifest an immobility”; Baudelaire “had to protect theatricality from the theatre”; the Eiffel Tower “makes the city into a kind of Nature”—Barthes’s writing is seeded with such ostensibly paradoxical, epigrammatic formulas as these, whose point is to sum something up. It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.

  Less elegant, indeed making a point of dogged explicitness, and far more powerful as an instrument for giving himself something to say, are the classifications that Barthes lays out in order to topple himself into a piece of argument—dividing into two, three, even four parts the matter to be considered. Arguments are launched by announcing that there are two main classes and two subclasses of narrative units, two ways in which myth lends itself to history, two facets of Racinean eros, two musics, two ways to read La Rochefoucauld, two kinds of writers, two forms of his own interest in photographs. That there are three types of corrections a writer makes, three Mediterraneans and three tragic sites in Racine, three levels on which to read the plates of the Encyclopedia, three areas of spectacle and three types of gesture in Japanese puppet theatre, three attitudes toward speech and writing, equivalent to three vocations: writer, intellectual, and teacher. That there are four kinds of readers, four reasons for keeping a journal …

  And so on. This is the codifying, frontal style of French intellectual discourse, a branch of the rhetorical tactics that the French call, not quite accurately, Cartesian. Although a few of the classifications Barthes employs are standard, such as semiology’s canonical triad of signified, signifier, and sign, many are inventions devised by Barthes in order to make an argument, such as his assertion in a late book, The Pleasure of the Text, that the modern artist seeks to destroy art, “this effort taking three forms.” The aim of this implacable categorizing is not just to map the intellectual territory: Barthes’s taxonomies are never static. Often the point is precisely for one category to subvert the other, as do the two forms, which he calls punctum and studium, of his interest in photographs. Barthes offers classifications to keep matters open—to reserve a place for the uncodified, the enchanted, the intractable, the histrionic. He was fond of bizarre classifications, of classificatory excess (Fourier’s, for example), and his boldly physical metaphors for mental life stress not topography but transformation. Drawn to hyperbole, as all aphorists are, Barthes enlists ideas in a drama, often a sensual melodrama or a faintly Gothic one. He speaks of the quiver, thrill, or shudder of meaning, of meanings that themselves vibrate, gather, loosen, disperse, quicken, shine, fold, mutate, delay, slide, separate, that exert pressure, crack, rupture, fissure, are pulverized. Barthes offers something like a poetics of thinking, which identifies the meaning of subjects with the very mobility of meaning, with the kinetics of consciousness itself; and liberates the critic as artist. The uses that binary and triadic thinking had for Barthes’s imagination were always provisional, available to correction, destabilization, condensation.

  As a writer, he preferred short forms, and had been planning to give a seminar on them; he was particularly drawn to miniature ones, like the haiku and the quotation; and, like all true writers, he was enthralled by “the detail” (his word)—experience’s model short form. Even as an essayist, Barthes mostly wrote sh
ort, and the books he did write tend to be multiples of short forms rather than “real” books, itineraries of topics rather than unified arguments. His Michelet, for example, keys its inventory of the historian’s themes to a large number of brief excerpts from Michelet’s prolific writings. The most rigorous example of the argument as an itinerary by means of quotation is S/Z, published in 1970, his model exegesis of Balzac’s Sarrasine. From staging the texts of others, he passed inevitably to the staging of his own ideas. And, in the same series on great writers (“Ecrivains de toujours”) to which he contributed the Michelet volume, he eventually did one on himself in 1975: that dazzling oddity in the series, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. The high-velocity arrangements of Barthes’s late books dramatize both his fecundity (insatiability and lightness) and his desire to subvert all tendencies to system-making.

  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.

  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.)

  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.

  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.

  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 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 sel
f-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.