by Susan Sontag
To conceive of literature as successful “communication” and position-taking, however, is a sentiment that must inevitably become conformist. The instrumental view expounded in Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1948) makes of literature something perpetually obsolete, a vain—and misplaced—struggle between ethical good soldiers and literary purists, that is, modernists. (Contrast the latent philistinism of this view of literature with the subtlety and acuity of what Sartre had to say about visual images.) Riven by his love of literature (the love recounted in his one perfect book, The Words) and an evangelical contempt for literature, one of the century’s great littérateurs spent the last years of his life insulting literature and himself with that indigent idea, “the neurosis of literature.” His defense of the writer’s project of commitment is no more convincing. Accused of thereby reducing literature (to politics), Sartre protested that it would be more correct to accuse him of overestimating it. “If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble,” he declared in an interview in 1960. “That’s what I mean by ‘commitment.’” But Sartre’s inflation of literature to “everything” is another brand of depreciation.
Barthes, too, might be charged with overestimating literature—with treating literature as “everything”—but at least he made a good case for doing so. For Barthes understood (as Sartre did not) that literature is first of all, last of all, language. It is language that is everything. Which is to say that all of reality is presented in the form of language—the poet’s wisdom, and also the structuralist’s. And Barthes takes for granted (as Sartre, with his notion of writing as communication, did not) what he calls the “radical exploration of writing” undertaken by Mallarmé, Joyce, Proust, and their successors. That no venture is valuable unless it can be conceived as a species of radicalism, radicalism thereby unhinged from any distinctive content, is perhaps the essence of what we call modernism. Barthes’s work belongs to the sensibility of modernism in the extent to which it assumes the necessity of the adversary stance: literature conceived by modernist standards but not necessarily a modernist literature. Rather, all varieties of counterposition are available to it.
Perhaps the most striking difference between Sartre and Barthes is the deep one, of temperament. Sartre has an intellectually brutal, bon enfant view of the world, a view that wills simplicity, resolution, transparence; Barthes’s view is irrevocably complex, self-conscious, refined, irresolute. Sartre was eager, too eager, to seek confrontation, and the tragedy of this great career, of the use he made of his stupendous intellect, was just his willingness to simplify himself. Barthes preferred to avoid confrontation, to evade polarization. He defines the writer as “the watcher who stands at the crossroads of all other discourses”—the opposite of an activist or a purveyor of doctrine.
Barthes’s utopia of literature has an ethical character almost the opposite of Sartre’s. It emerges in the connections he makes between desire and reading, desire and writing—his insistence that his own writing is, more than anything, the product of appetite. The words “pleasure,” “bliss,” “happiness” recur in his work with a weight, reminiscent of Gide, that is both voluptuous and subversive. As a moralist—Puritan or anti-Puritan—might solemnly distinguish sex for procreation from sex for pleasure, Barthes divides writers into those who write something (what Sartre meant by a writer) and the real writers, who do not write something but, rather, write. This intransitive sense of the verb “to write” Barthes endorses as not only the source of the writer’s felicity but the model of freedom. For Barthes, it is not the commitment that writing makes to something outside of itself (to a social or moral goal) that makes literature an instrument of opposition and subversion but a certain practice of writing itself: excessive, playful, intricate, subtle, sensuous—language which can never be that of power.
Barthes’s praise of writing as a gratuitous, free activity is, in one sense, a political view. He conceives of literature as a perpetual renewal of the right of individual assertion; and all rights are, finally, political ones. Still, Barthes has an evasive relation to politics, and he is one of the great modern refusers of history. Barthes started publishing and mattering in the aftermath of World War II, which, astonishingly, he never mentions; indeed, in all his writings he never, as far as I recall, mentions the word “war.” Barthes’s friendly way of understanding subjects domesticates them, in the best sense. He lacks anything like Walter Benjamin’s tragic awareness that every work of civilization is also a work of barbarism. The ethical burden for Benjamin was a kind of martyrdom; he could not help connecting it with politics. Barthes regards politics as a kind of constriction of the human (and intellectual) subject which has to be outwitted; in Roland Barthes he declares that he likes political positions “lightly held.” Hence, perhaps, he was never gripped by the project that is central for Benjamin, as for all true modernists: to try to fathom the nature of “the modern.” Barthes, who was not tormented by the catastrophes of modernity or tempted by its revolutionary illusions, had a post-tragic sensibility. He refers to the present literary era as “a moment of gentle apocalypse.” Happy indeed the writer who can utter such a phrase.
MUCH OF BARTHES’S WORK is devoted to the repertoire of pleasure—“the great adventure of desire,” as he calls it in the essay on Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste. Collecting a model of felicity from each thing he examines, he assimilates intellectual practice itself to the erotic. Barthes called the life of the mind desire, and was concerned to defend “the plurality of desire.” Meaning is never monogamous. His joyful wisdom or gay science offers the ideal of a free yet capacious, satisfied consciousness; of a condition in which one does not have to choose between good and bad, true and false, in which it is not necessary to justify. The texts and enterprises that engaged Barthes tend to be those in which he could read a defiance of these antitheses. For example, this is how Barthes construes fashion: as a domain, like eros, where contraries do not exist (“Fashion seeks equivalences, validities—not verities”); where one can allow oneself to be gratified; where meaning—and pleasure—is profuse.
To construe in this way, Barthes requires a master category through which everything can be refracted, which makes possible the maximum number of intellectual moves. That most inclusive category is language, the widest sense of language—meaning form itself. Thus, the subject of Système de la mode (1967) is not fashion but the language of fashion. Barthes assumes, of course, that the language of fashion is fashion; that, as he said in an interview, “fashion exists only through the discourse on it.” Assumptions of this sort (myth is a language, fashion is a language) have become a leading, often reductive convention of contemporary intellectual endeavor. In Barthes’s work the assumption is less a reductive one than it is proliferative—embarrassment of riches for the critic as artist. To stipulate that there is no understanding outside of language is to assert that there is meaning everywhere.
By so extending the reach of meaning, Barthes takes the notion over the top, to arrive at such triumphant paradoxes as the empty subject that contains everything, the empty sign to which all meaning can be attributed. With this euphoric sense of how meaning proliferates, Barthes reads that “zero degree of the monument,” the Eiffel Tower, as “this pure—virtually empty—sign” that (his italics) “means everything.” (The characteristic point of Barthes’s arguments-by-paradox is to vindicate subjects untrammeled by utility: it is the uselessness of the Eiffel Tower that makes it infinitely useful as a sign, just as the uselessness of genuine literature is what makes it morally useful.) Barthes found a world of such liberating absences of meaning, both modernist and simply non-Western, in Japan; Japan, he noted, was full of empty signs. In place of moralistic antitheses—true versus false, good versus bad—Barthes offers complementary extremes. “Its form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full,” he writes about myth in an essay in the 1950s. Arguments about many subjects have this identical climax: that absence is really
presence, emptiness repletion, impersonality the highest achievement of the personal.
Like that euphoric register of religious understanding which discerns treasures of meaning in the most banal and meaningless, which designates as the richest carrier of meaning one vacant of meaning, the brilliant descriptions in Barthes’s work bespeak an ecstatic experience of understanding; and ecstasy—whether religious, aesthetic, or sexual—has perennially been described by the metaphors of being empty and being full, the zero state and the state of maximal plenitude: their alternation, their equivalence. The very transposing of subjects into the discourse about them is the same kind of move: emptying subjects out to fill them up again. It is a method of understanding that, presuming ecstasy, fosters detachment. And his very idea of language also supports both aspects of Barthes’s sensibility: while endorsing a profusion of meaning, the Saussurean theory—that language is form (rather than substance)—is wonderfully congruent with a taste for elegant, that is, reticent, discourse. Creating meaning through the intellectual equivalent of negative space, Barthes’s method has one never talking about subjects in themselves: fashion is the language of fashion, a country is “the empire of signs”—the ultimate accolade. For reality to exist as signs conforms to a maximum idea of decorum: all meaning is deferred, indirect, elegant.
Barthes’s ideals of impersonality, of reticence, of elegance, are set forth most beautifully in his appreciation of Japanese culture in the book called Empire of Signs (1970) and in his essay on the Bunraku puppets. This essay, “Lesson in Writing,” recalls Kleist’s “On the Puppet Theatre,” which similarly celebrates the tranquillity, lightness, and grace of beings free of thinking, of meaning—free of “the disorders of consciousness.” Like the puppets in Kleist’s essay, the Bunraku puppets are seen as incarnating an ideal “impassivity, clarity, agility, subtlety.” To be both impassive and fantastic, inane and profound, unselfconscious and supremely sensuous—these qualities that Barthes discerned in various facets of Japanese civilization project an ideal of taste and deportment, the ideal of the aesthete in its larger meaning that has been in general circulation since the dandies of the late eighteenth century. Barthes was hardly the first Western observer for whom Japan has been an aesthete’s utopia, the place where one finds aesthete views everywhere and exercises one’s own at liberty. The culture where aesthete goals are central—not, as in the West, eccentric—was bound to elicit a strong response. (Japan is mentioned in the Gide essay written in 1942.)
Of the available models of the aesthetic way of looking at the world, perhaps the most eloquent are French and Japanese. In France it has largely been a literary tradition, though with annexes in two popular arts, gastronomy and fashion. Barthes did take up the subject of food as ideology, as classification, as taste—he talks often of savoring; and it seems inevitable that he would find the subject of fashion congenial. Writers from Baudelaire to Cocteau have taken fashion seriously, and one of the founding figures of literary modernism, Mallarmé, edited a fashion magazine. French culture, where aesthete ideals have been more explicit and influential than in any other European culture, allows a link between ideas of vanguard art and of fashion. (The French have never shared the Anglo-American conviction that makes the fashionable the opposite of the serious.) In Japan, aesthete standards appear to imbue the whole culture, and long predate the modern ironies; they were formulated as early as the late tenth century, in Sei Shnagon’s Pillow Book, that breviary of consummate dandy attitudes, written in what appears to us an astonishingly modern, disjunctive form—notes, anecdotes, and lists. Barthes’s interest in Japan expresses the attraction to a less defensive, more innocent, and far more elaborated version of the aesthete sensibility: emptier and prettier than the French, more straightforward (no beauty in ugliness, as in Baudelaire); pre-apocalyptic, refined, serene.
In Western culture, where it remains marginal, the dandy attitude has the character of an exaggeration. In one form, the older one, the aesthete is a willful exclusionist of taste, holding attitudes that make it possible to like, to be comfortable with, to give one’s assent to the smallest number of things; reducing things to the smallest expression of them. (When taste distributes its plusses and minuses, it favors diminutive adjectives, such as—for praise—“happy,” “amusing,” “charming,” “agreeable,” “suitable.”) Elegance equals the largest amount of refusal. As language, this attitude finds its consummate expression in the rueful quip, the disdainful one-liner. In the other form, the aesthete sustains standards that make it possible to be pleased with the largest number of things; annexing new, unconventional, even illicit sources of pleasure. The literary device that best projects this attitude is the list (Roland Barthes has many)—the whimsical aesthete polyphony that juxtaposes things and experiences of a starkly different, often incongruous nature, turning them all, by this technique, into artifacts, aesthetic objects. Here elegance equals the wittiest acceptances. The aesthete’s posture alternates between never being satisfied and always finding a way of being satisfied, being pleased with virtually everything.1
Although both directions of dandy taste presuppose detachment, the exclusivist version is cooler. The inclusivist version can be enthusiastic, even effusive; the adjectives used for praise tend to be over- rather than understatements. Barthes, who had much of the high exclusivist taste of the dandy, was more inclined to its modern, democratizing form: aesthete leveling—hence his willingness to find charm, amusement, happiness, pleasure in so many things. His account of Fourier, for example, is finally an aesthete’s appraisal. Of the “little details” that, he says, make up the “whole of Fourier,” Barthes writes: “I am carried away, dazzled, convinced by a sort of charm of expressions … Fourier is swarming with these felicities … I cannot resist these pleasures; they seem ‘true’ to me.” Similarly: what another flâneur, less committed to finding pleasure everywhere, might experience as the oppressive overcrowdedness of streets in Tokyo signifies for Barthes “the transformation of quality by quantity,” a new relation that is “a source of endless jubilation.”
Many of Barthes’s judgments and interests are implicitly affirmations of the aesthete’s standards. His early essays championing the fiction of Robbe-Grillet, which gave Barthes the misleading reputation as an advocate of literary modernism, were in effect aesthete polemics. The “objective,” the “literal”—these austere, minimalist ideas of literature are in fact Barthes’s ingenious recycling of one of the aesthete’s principal theses: that surface is as telling as depth. What Barthes discerned in Robbe-Grillet in the 1950s was a new, high-tech version of the dandy writer; what he hailed in Robbe-Grillet was the desire “to establish the novel on the surface,” thereby frustrating our desire to “fall back on a psychology.” The idea that depths are obfuscating, demagogic, that no human essence stirs at the bottom of things, and that freedom lies in staying on the surface, the large glass on which desire circulates—this is the central argument of the modern aesthete position, in the various exemplary forms it has taken over the last hundred years. (Baudelaire. Wilde. Duchamp. Cage.)
Barthes is constantly making an argument against depth, against the idea that the most real is latent, submerged. Bunraku is seen as refusing the antinomy of matter and soul, inner and outer. “Myth hides nothing,” he declares in “Myth Today” (1956). The aesthete position not only regards the notion of depths, of hiddenness, as a mystification, a lie, but opposes the very idea of antitheses. Of course, to speak of depths and surfaces is already to misrepresent the aesthetic view of the world—to reiterate a duality, like that of form and content, it precisely denies. The largest statement of this position was made by Nietzsche, whose work constitutes a criticism of fixed antitheses (good versus evil, right versus wrong, true versus false).
But while Nietzsche scorned “depths,” he exalted “heights.” In the post-Nietzschean tradition, there are neither depths nor heights; there are only various kinds of surface, of spectacle. Nietzsche said that every profound na
ture needs a mask, and spoke—profoundly—in praise of intellectual ruse; but he was making the gloomiest prediction when he said that the coming century, ours, would be the age of the actor. An ideal of seriousness, of sincerity, underlies all of Nietzsche’s work, which makes the overlap of his ideas and those of a true aesthete (like Wilde, like Barthes) so problematic. Nietzsche was a histrionic thinker but not a lover of the histrionic. His ambivalence toward spectacle (after all, his criticism of Wagner’s music was finally that it was a seduction), his insistence on the authenticity of spectacle, mean that criteria other than the histrionic are at work. In the aesthete’s position, the notions of reality and spectacle precisely reinforce and infuse each other, and seduction is always something positive. In this respect, Barthes’s ideas have an exemplary coherence. Notions of the theatre inform, directly or indirectly, all his work. (Divulging the secret, late, he declares in Roland Barthes that there was no single text of his “which did not treat of a certain theatre, and the spectacle is the universal category through whose forms the world is seen.”) Barthes explains Robbe-Grillet’s empty, “anthological” description as a technique of theatrical distancing (presenting an object “as if it were in itself a spectacle”). Fashion is, of course, another casebook of the theatrical. So is Barthes’s interest in photography, which he treats as a realm of pure haunted spectatorship. In the account of photography given in Camera Lucida there are hardly any photographers—the subject is photographs (treated virtually as found objects) and those who are fascinated by them: as objects of erotic reverie, as memento mori.