A compelling reading. And, in its striving for closure, for centrality, for the transcendence of the historical, an all-too-familiar one—as Barthes himself has shown us so convincingly. Such “retroactive completeness” is surely the retroactive imposition of precisely the discursive imperatives that so much of Barthes’s work was clearly positioned against. No, Barthes’s life and work did not end with the neat, closed parenthesis of the final revelation of his transhistorical self: he was, after all, struck down by a laundry van—a sign of the object-world of our industrial culture if there ever was one.
Yet Sontag is indubitably right about Barthes’s style—it is irrepressibly aphoristic. Moreover, Barthes’s privileging of thematic/synchronic readings, which we noted earlier, would seem to be an emblem of the very discursive imperatives which so many other components of his work were contrived to contest. How are we to view Barthes, then? What are we to do with him? Are we to bracket all that was radical in him and place him on the altar of the sovereign self? Or does another, longer view suggest itself—and another course of action?
Here we might do well to recall Delany’s words near the end of “Reading at Work”:
As I conclude this minimal bit of work—of interpretive vigilance, of hermeneutic violence, of pleasure, of aggression—my eye lifts from the text and again strays, glances about, snags a moment at a horizon, a boundary that does not so much contain a self, an identity, a unity, a center and origin which gazes out and defines that horizon as the horizon is defined by it; rather that horizon suggests a plurality of possible positions within it, positions which allow a number of events to transpire, move near, pass through, impinge on each other, take off from one another, some of which events are that an eye looks, a voice speaks, a hand writes. (RW 117)
In this ontology of the open horizon—which relativizes discourse to rhetoric, refuses closure and the transcendence of history, places the subject back into its object-context, and privileges the active, social self over the passive sovereign self—surely the proper response to Barthes would be to carry Barthes’s project forward. But that project is not the “national literary project, inaugurated by Montaigne” of making self-consolidation into public spectacle. It is, rather, Montaigne’s other project, marginalized by subsequent discursive practices but in fact preceding the rest of Montaigne’s work: the project of reading texts into their own radicalism, of writing the extended essay. It is that project, abandoned by Montaigne, which Barthes and the post-structuralists have begun to take up again—and which Delany carries significantly forward here.
By ordinary standards—by ordinary readerly expectations—these essays, with their intricate formal strategies, their remarkable erudition, and their sheer length, may seem daunting, intimidating, “forbidding.” Yet far more so than the seemingly more “accessible,” monologic works which currently dominate the literary landscape, these essays are, fundamentally, invitations. As we begin them—and indeed as we finish them—we must hold in our minds one of the closing comments of “Reading at Work,” which suggests our place within the discursive space Delany is exploring:
Clearly, there is no survival here unless the reader turn to Haraway’s manifesto, to do her or his own work, which alone can restructure mine. (RW 118)
The universe of discourse these essays begin to map out is not monolithic, eternal, always-already complete. It is evolving, historical, subject to dialogue and revision. We can revise it ourselves, with our own creative and critical work. All we need to do is enter it—with all the analytic vigilance (and sense of play) we can muster.
The universe of discourse is an open universe. With these essays, Delany invites us in.
NOTES
1. Lydia Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991), p. xv.
2. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). (Hereafter referred to as CE.)
3. Scott Russell Sanders, “The Singular First Person,” from Secrets of the Universe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 190.
4. Francis Bacon, “Of Studies,” from The Essays (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 209.
5. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), pp. 3–4.
6. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1972), p. 15. (Hereafter referred to as M.)
7. Edward Hoagland, “That Gorgeous Great Novelist,” from Red Wolves and Black Bears (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 176.
8. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Introduction,” from The Norton Book of Science Fiction, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), p. 27.
9. Samuel R. Delany, “‘The Scorpion Garden’ Revisited,” from The Straits of Messina (Seattle: Serconia Press, 1989), p. 29.
10. Bensmaia, Reda, The Barthes Effect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 92.
11. See my own “Subverted Equations: G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form and Samuel R. Delany’s Analytics of Attention,” in Ash of Stars, ed. Jim Sallis (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi) for a more detailed discussion of the problem of “primitive calculi” in Delany’s work.
12. Barthes, S/Z (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1974), pp. 5–6.
13. Delany, “The Rhetoric of Sex, the Discourse of Desire,” from Heterotopia, ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 232. (Hereafter referred to as RS.)
14. Delany, Starboard Wine (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1984), p. 188. (Hereafter referred to as SW.)
15. Delany, The American Shore (Elizabethtown, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1978), p. ii. (Hereafter referred to as AS.)
16. Delany, “Neither the First Word nor the Last on Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Semiotics, and Deconstruction for SF Readers: An Introduction” [Original title: “Neither the Beginning nor the End . . .”], The New York Review of Science Fiction, Number Six (February 1989), p. 1. (Hereafter referred to as NFW.)
17. Stephen Tyler, The Unspeakable (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 16–17.
18. Delany, Triton (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), p. 357. (Hereafter referred to as T.)
19. Delany, “Shadows,” p. 252 of this volume.
20. Delany, “Wagner/Artaud,” p. 20 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as W/A.)
21. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, from The Purloined Poe, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 53. (Hereafter referred to as PP.)
22. Delany, “Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority: A Reading of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs,’” p. 104 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as RW.)
23. Delany, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” from Flight from Nevèrÿon (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), p. 348.
24. “Aversion/Perversion/Diversion,” p. 141 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as APD.)
25. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water (New York: Masquerade Books, 1993), p. 270.
26. Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” from The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. xv.
27. Delany, “Shadow and Ash,” p. 149 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as SA.)
28. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 12.
29. Delany, “Atlantis Rose . . .,” p. 202 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as AR.)
30. Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof Books, 1989), p. 30.
31. See O. B. Hardison, Jr.’s “Binding Proteus,” from Essays on the Essay (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 17–20, and the Translator’s Introduction to Montaigne’s Complete Essays (cited above), pp. xx–xliii for more detailed discussions of Montaigne’s “Apology.”
32. Susan Sontag, “Introduction,” from A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), p. ix. (
Hereafter referred to as BR.)
Longer Views
Wagner/Artaud:
A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions
For Cynthia Belgrave
and Ethyl Eichelberger
What follows is a work of popular cultural history, not of original research. It required not one foray into any other library save my own. Here is its only justification:
This scholar is often chary of quoting the first-hand sources of that one, tending to summarize rather than repeat. It waits, then, for a work of assemblage such as this to retell the social tale with the immediacy and richness of shared original accounts through judicious quotation. To make points, I have put together what struck me as the most exciting parts of the stories around Artaud’s final year at Ivry (and his earlier encounter with Jacques Rivière of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise) and of Wagner’s participation in the Dresden Uprising of 1849. Lest some scholar chide me for ignorance or willful distortion, I state here that in neither case have I told the whole story; there are many facts that are known about both that do not fit into the neat and headlong narratives I have constructed. A reader would never know, from this account (for example), that the composer’s young niece, Johanna Wagner, was a singer in Wagner’s company in Dresden, who, since premiering Elizabeth in Wagner’s Tannhäuser in October 1845 at age nineteen, was coming to rival Schröder-Devrient in popularity, and that from time to time throughout the fighting Wagner was concerned for her safety; nor will the reader find any mention of some of Artaud’s more tempestuous relations with any number of fascinating figures of ’30s and ’40s Paris (such as his brief, intense pursuit of Anaïs Nin) that laid another layer of legend over an already legendary man. This work is selective, then, not exhaustive. I urge anyone intrigued by it to pursue the stories into the realm of detail (my briefest of bibliographies will only be a beginning) where narrative neatness crumbles and—very possibly—knowledge, with its real limitations, begins.
I
Were two men more alike in their designs on an audience, in their desire to thrust theater, even art itself, to the horizon of its time, then shatter that horizon, to call up new images, sounds, emotions at the behest of spectacle? There is at least one level where—cruel, after all (Artaud explains to us in The Theater and Its Double), not because of its violence or its pain but because of its rigor, its demand for committed audience attention, for complete artistic dedication—Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty is the performance site for Wagner’s Total Artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk.
Here is a passage from the opening page of a biography of one of them:
[He] was both a visionary and a mystic. He saw the theater as had the people of antiquity, a ritual able to give rise to a numinous or religious experience within the spectator. To achieve such experience theatrically, he expanded the spectator’s reality by arousing the explosive and creative forces with man’s unconscious in determining man’s actions. By means of a theater based on myths, symbols, and gestures, the [work] . . . became a weapon to be used to whip up man’s irrational forces, so that a collective theatrical event could be turned into a personal living experience.
This is Bettina L. Knapp writing about Antonin Artaud. But anyone who knows of Wagner’s articulate study of German mythology, from the Eddas and the Volsungasaga to the German legal records edited by Grimm, of his fascination with classical Greek theater or his desire to make his “music-dramas”—the term he devised to replace “opera”—strike effects of the most basic and profound emotional sort in his hearers, akin to moments of religious ecstasy, must pause a moment to be sure which man is being talked of. It would take almost no revision to make it a perfectly accurate description of Richard Wagner.
Were two men more dissimilar in the material reality of their artistic productions, in the immediate effect of that art on the world?
In February 1883, at Venice, in his apartments at the sumptuous Palazzo Vendramin, with an international entourage in attendance and an even greater audience in awe of him, favored by a king who had funded for him a temple at Bayreuth to the art of his own creation—yes, the “music-drama”—Wagner died in his wife’s arms at age sixty- nine, of diverticular gastric complications and a ruptured heart vessel. His last words were “My watch!” It had fallen from his pocket as Cosima tried to comfort him in the terminal agony that had seized him at his work desk.
Behind him were ten major and three minor operas, a youthful symphony, various preludes and much occasional music, as well as volumes of literary and theoretical works—Art and Revolution, The Artwork of the Future, the notorious anti-Semitic article “Jewry in Music,” and Opera and Drama—as well as volumes of autobiography, music reviews, essays on the organization of orchestras, music schools, and opera companies, historical speculations, political essays and pamphlets, poems, plays, and stories, as well as the thousands on thousands of letters sent throughout his life.
Artaud’s death?
On the chill morning of March 4th, 1948, an old man at 52, all but toothless and emaciated as only a lifetime opium addict can be, his body eaten out by rectal cancer, his bloodstream thick with the chloral that he’d used to dampen the pain once the opium and morphine had ceased to have any effect, in a room in the small eighteenth-century pavilion without heating or water at the Ivry-sur-Seine clinic on the outskirts of Paris, seated at the foot of his bed not far from a fireplace filled with the ashes from the previous day against winter’s ending cold, Artaud was found dead by the gardener who was, as he had been doing for some months now, bringing Artaud his breakfast. Ivry had been Artaud’s home for two years since his release from his most recent confinement at the Rodez Asylum. The walls of his room, in which the mad poet Gérard de Nerval had once been confined, were covered with Artaud’s drawings. A stout wooden block, which sometimes served as a table, and which a few months before Dr. Delmas had put in his room, telling him to hammer or stab it with a knife in order to take out his hostile feelings, was chopped nearly to bits. But almost a third of Artaud’s life had been passed in one mental hospital or another.
Thirteen months prior to his death, Artaud may have had his best hours. The Theater and Its Double (1938)—Artaud’s finest book and his greatest claim to our attention—had been reprinted in 1944. His essays from the ’30s on the Tarahumara Indians had been gathered into a book, A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara (republished in the U.S. as The Peyote Dance), at the end of 1945. The previous spring, the five long letters he had written to Henri Parisot about his drug addiction, language, poetry, and art, Letters from Rodez (1946), had appeared. And in June, after nine years, he had been released from Rodez and had moved into the comparatively benign Ivry-sur-Seine clinic, where he shortly was allowed to take up residence in the pavilion at the edge of the property, apart from the main building. Artaud had been released on condition that his livelihood would be taken care of; and a group of leading painters—among them Picasso, Braque, Arp, Léger, Duchamp, and Giacometti—had donated paintings for a benefit to raise the money; Gide, Sartre, René Char, Tristan Tzara, and more had given manuscripts and autographs that were also sold; and France’s theater community staged another benefit on Artaud’s behalf at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, at which various writers delivered appreciations of Artaud, Artaud’s works were read, and where Jean-Louis Barrault took part in a forty-minute reading from The Cenci, Artaud’s single full- length play—while Artaud himself waited, nervously, happily, in a cafe with a friend a few streets away. Interest in the haggard but brilliant man was, at this point, higher than ever before.
Artaud wanted to give a public reading of his new works—for since his release he was writing incessantly. A reading was arranged at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier for January 13, 1947, as part of a series of poetry readings billed as Têteà-Têtes. The rush on tickets was astonishing—most of them bought just before curtain time, as though the rumor of Artaud’s talk had just gone around in the last hours. There were a hundred standees in the five-hundr
ed-seat theater. The audience waiting for the curtain to open at nine included Gide, Breton, Arthur Adamov, and Albert Camus, as well as Artaud’s close friends Roger Blin and Jean Paulhan—along with a host of actors, producers, directors, journalists, and students.
Shabby, dishevelled, like a zombie with overlong hair, Artaud walked on stage. He began to read from his work. He read from his recent poem “The Return of Artaud, le Mômo” (mômo is Marseillaise slang for fool; Araud had been born in Marseille):
. . .o kaya
o kaya pontoura
o pontoura
a pena poni
. . .
Not the membrane of the vault,
not the omitted member of this fuck,
born of devastation,
but meat gone bad,
beyond membrane,
beyond where it’s hard or soft.
. . .
And if you don’t understand the image,
—and this is what I hear you say
in a circle,
that you don’t understand the image
which is at the bottom
of my cunt’s hole,—
it’s because you don’t know the bottom,
not of things,
but of my cunt
mine,
although from the bottom of time
you all plashed there in a circle
the way one slanders a madman,
plots to death an incarceration
ge re ghi
regheghi
geghena
e reghena
a gegha riri. . .
He read from another poem that night, “Centre-Mére et Patron- Minet” (“Center-Mother and Boss-Puss”):
. . . cunta-mite and boss-puss
are the shit vocables
Longer Views: Extended Essays Page 5