ROLAND ZEE LEEPAIR

On a couple of previous blogposts (here and here), I've tossed out brief references to Roland Barthes, as well as talking about his work on Some Damn Messboard, though always with the caveat that I'd only read two of his works: the execrable MYTHOLOGIES (1957) and the somewhat more thoughtful PLEASURE OF THE TEXT (1975).


In one of my Messboard posts from 9/30/99, I stated:


"both [Jung and Campbell] are a good deal more concerned with scientific process than Roland Barthes, who at times seems to be making it up as he goes along. I've read but two works of his, MYTHOLOGIES and THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT, and the only science he cares about is his version of semiology, which can pretty much mean whatever he wants it to mean, the very objection that's often tossed at Jung and Campbell. I also have my doubts as to how many of his historical readings are supported by experts in history, and how many are just disguised ideological rants."


As the first of my blog-essays shows, the Barthes concept I found most interesting was his dichotomy of the "readerly" and "writerly," which are referenced in PLEASURE but were first introduced in 1970's S/Z. I happened to come across a cheap bookstore copy of S/Z and finally decided to see what all the fuss was about.


What I read convinced me that Barthes should be considered as being about as profound as that other French guy famous for taking mammoth leaps (albeit not of logic): Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's BATROC THE LEAPER. (I considered making a MAD-style pun out of Barthes' name but it just didn't work.)





The book S/Z was Barthes' attempt to formulate his own system of interpretative codes by taking a single short story-- Balzac's SARRASINE-- and breaking it down into narrative units he called "lexias," each of which he then interpreted according his system.


I have no problem with such in-depth interpretations. But I read nothing in S/Z to contradict my earlier-voiced impression that Barthes was often guilty of making massive logical leaps that make one of his main influences, Big Sigmund Freud, seem a model of restraint by comparison. I have to admit that, as little as I like Frankfurt-School critics like Theodor Adorno and Frederic Jackson, their arguments are coherent even if they argue from false premises. Half the time Barthes seems to argue not from premises but from his impressions about art and culture. In this his writing-style resembles that of philosopher Henri Bergson. But whereas Bergson would sometimes throw out a subjective statement or apparent non-sequitur, he usually developed the notion into some more refined concept.


Not so Roland the Leaper. On occasion certain of his observations about the Balzac story-- which is a good deal more enjoyable than Barthes' analysis of it-- seem on target.


And then, even putting aside the doctrinaire Freudianism, you get howlers like this on page 49:


"What is amazing in the myth of Minerva is not that the goddess sprang from her father's head but that she emerged 'tall and strong,' already fully armed and fully developed."


This is a response to Balzac's use of the classical Minerva-image to describe the appearance of a young woman whom the narrator thinks of as being "at once a hundred years old and twenty-two years old." While it's true that Balzac is conflating impressions of contradictory ages to get across the narrator's weird mental mood, it is certainly not experientially the case for any reader-- save perhaps Barthes-- that there's nothing "amazing" about any sort of offspring proceeding from the head of a male entity, be it the god Zeus or the imaginative narrator. Thus Barthes has given his readers a highly-overdetermined interpretation that is meant to emphasize not what Balzac has written but Barthes' own hierarchy of impressions.


Similarly, his other hierarchies-- the readerly and the writerly, joissance and plaisir-- are also overdetermined by Barthes' haphazard reasoning and highly-personalized methodology.


What I find "amazing" is that this erratic thinker became such a name to conjure with, for all that he's been far less imitated than the Frankfurters. I have to put it down to his appeal for those who like ideological correctness: who prefer to see complex myth and symbol boiled down to some refined-sounding concept like "the writerly," which purports to be above the ordinary processes of reading but represents nothing more a quasi-intellectual's attempt to exalt his own intellect above all else.


So while I may not have been fair in calling him a "moron" earlier, I do think he's not far removed from the colorful insult bestowed on Batroc by Captain America, courtesy of Stan Lee:


"You Gallic, granite-skulled gorilla!"