1
Where to begin with Richard Howard’s translation of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse?
Before the mirror, with cold coffee and a willingness to reconsider fidelity. One must meet Barthes there, with uncombed hair and a certain intellectual piety, a willingness.
His arguments undress themselves continuously before the mind’s mirror. Open the book anywhere and you will catch a flash of something falling off, a shoe being abandoned, a necklace being admired and laid aside.
Stripteases are linear: no performance has a clearer narrative arc. The narrative shape associated with the Iowa workshop is the striptease par exemplar. Rising action, climax, falling action— everything lands in that resolution, that happy ending. I take happy ending, here, to indicate closure—- it doesn’t have to be happy so much as it needs to give the illusion of ending. Thus is the reader satisfied by the experience of the book.
There is no single striptease in Barthes’ Discourse. There are countless undressings and stripteases occurring simultaneously. Even the visual layout does its own dance for the head of the John the Baptist. Given this multiplicity, the book lacks a crescendo. It situates its dimensional dynamics on the page rather than the entirety.
2
No discursive regime can exist without its lexicon.
The table of contents is its own poem, a visual painting dressed up as a lexicon of loved-over words. The loose links and connections between these words serve to order and disorder what is to come.
3
Conversationally:
BARTHES: What is proposed, then, is a portrait but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.
ME: So, the lover is not a subject so much as the object—the loved object, the material altered by idealization? And the lover whose entire discourse is “woven of languorous desire, of the image-repertoire, of declarations” speaks in a way that will be challenged by epistemology, or by what he cannot know about the love in relation to meaning, which is the narrative that will emerge as a story later.
BARTHES: But he who utters this discourse and shapes its episodes does not know that a book is to be made of them…
ME: Two things are happening. One is the claim that situates the beloved and the lover in the text-to-come. The text-to-come occupies the eternity of possibility. Once the book is made, the beloved and the lover occupy a material terrain, and there is a compensatory aspect to this. He says he will love you forever. He meant he would write a book about it.
The other thing happening is that hallowing of the utterance as action. The role accorded to utterance creates an interesting dialogue with J.L. Austin’s ‘speech acts’ in the margins. Although this is not what you are doing, it is what I do when reading you. This is why the margins of my Lover’s Discourse is filled with speech bubbles. Perhaps no striptease declares itself as explicitly as the comic strip.
4
To be engulfed feels presumptive; it courts a certain notion of solidity and separate selfhood that exists in relation to not-feeling surrounded. a certain destructive relationship with desire—and to be failed by love if the pitch doesn’t reach a level that requires succumbing.
I hear suck my thumb, numbing, and dumbing in this succumbing. I visualize the mysterious succubus.
And all this —- “this” being a digression from the things I owe the world, the words I am supposed to be writing—began, really, with the moment I realized what you had done to futility.
[The work Barthes demands of "sometimes" here ... not to mention the way he makes the parentheses work against themselves. Would the futility be as poignant without those visual hands cupping the word? He *arrests* us with it.]
5
What was it that you said in The Preparation of the Novel?
The part where you asked the question you have always avoided, and then distracted yourself from answering it:
“What do I believe in?”
Wanting to write is to be suddenly and violently confronted with that question from the outset, and that sudden violence is a trial you have to overcome.
Slap me with your ought, Barthes.
Look: I cannot.