Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

Meu lance com Barthes vai além da minha profunda paixão por Semiótica, mais do que sobre o que ele escreve, meu prazer em sua leitura está no como ele escreve.
Exalando cultura, Barthes é um dos mais deliciosos teóricos da palavra justamente por saber usá-la com maestria e estou dando cinco estrelas para este livro em que ele destrincha a arte fotográfica de forma afetiva, não porque concordo inteiramente com ele, longe disso, mas porque é um deleite absorver cada frase.

“Well, I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy. I just like to know what your interest is.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

We used to read books like this in junior high

It was something of an eighth-grade revelation to realize that so-called "Great Books" were deeper than the stories they told. We were reading John Steinbeck. It was April. Our teacher showed us how Of Mice and Men was working double-time; constructing a chthonic web of symbols from the show more window-dressing. So we began to understand that Lennie's love of rabbits symbolized his child-like innocence, the dusty floor symbolized the inhospitable life and (biblical) impermanence of the transient laborer, Curley's wife's absent name symbolized her status as a women trapped in a situation of total dependence. Such reading is enticing because it promises access to a rich structure of secret codes. But it's a mistake to read symbols this way. The literary symbol gives up its meaning so easily because it's always already fixated within the reader's semiotic understanding of the text. To prove a point, one imagines Lenny's hatred of rabbits as a symbol of his child-like innocence which has internalized the brutality of a world it must reject; one imagines the spotless dormitory as symbolizing the inhospitable life and impermanence of the transient laborer, who leaves no trace of creaturely comfort; one imagines Curley's wife given a real name which only proves her degraded status as a women who must answer to the names given by others. These symbolic readings are not very interesting because they can't show us anything we didn't already recognize.

Barthes' proposition in S/Z for a semiotic reading of the various "connotations" of a "polysemous" text appears to be the grown-up version of this kind of junior-high reading. But we think it's suspicious the same way Sheila Heti's Motherhood (2018) is suspicious: Heti's use of the I Ching to write dialogue-by-coin-flip always produces the "interesting" conversations we expect. In theory there are an unlimited number of I Ching conversations or semiotic readings to be found. But everything really-interesting never makes the cut, since even these strategies are limited by what the reader/writer is capable of doing with the text. Barthes's line-by-line reading of Sarrasine somehow never says anything unexpected, from the depiction of a wintery landscape in the opening lines (a symbol of castration) to the denouement depicting a chilled debutante and one of her suitors (also a symbol of castration). Barthes summarizes the rule which produces this banality as follows: "The force of meaning depends on its degree of systematization: the strongest meaning is the one whose systematization includes a large number of elements, to the point where it appears to include everything noteworthy in the world” (154).

Such reading can never produce an analysis of a text divided against itself (like all texts are), in which the truly unexpected (i.e. a brief flash of brilliance) doesn't always yield to banality (i.e. the worst kind of bad writing). We are reminded here of another novella by Balzac, Colonel Chabert, in which our Colonel, interred in a mass grave during Napoleon's Battle of Eylau, (miraculously!) returns to Paris after recovering from the blow which knocked him unconscious. Of course, despite his remarkable similarity to the gentleman everyone once knew, his place in society has already been taken. Chabert, who realizes he has become "a sign without its signified," remains a man of impeccable character, always ready for his moment of redemption ― if only society could read the signs. Yet, Barthes's reading can't recognize this trace of a man whose little petition hardly moves the scales of justice when weighed against the petitions of "[everyone] noteworthy in the world." Chabert, after a final magnanimous swoon (typical of Balzac), dies a penniless indigent. The author, if charged with the responsibility of his burial, would perhaps state that, in such cases of confusion, one should go by the general rule: for this man who calls himself Chabert, back to the mass grave. show less

Well, it wouldn't be a dull, conventional memoir, would it? Writing about himself, Barthes limits the hard biographical facts to a few briefly annotated family photos from his childhood in Bayonne and a two-page CV, and in between them he gives us a couple of hundred index-card sized fragments talking about his "real" life, which of course revolves around ideas and writings rather than boring things like dates, places and people. None of the fragments is much more than a paragraph or two show more long, with the only slightly longer pieces being a catalogue of books he might have written but didn't, and a discussion (you can see where this is going...) of the pleasures of the very short form.

In between times, we get cartoons, photos, sample exam questions, and a couple of examples of Barthes's painting — my favourite was an abstract doodle in the middle of a sheet of Sorbonne notepaper, titled "Gaspillage" (wasting paper). As if that wasn't enough, we also get the sheet music for a song he composed — I haven't tried to play that. He was obviously the Richard Feynman of semiotics.

You probably need at least a little bit of tolerance for French semioticians to enjoy this, and it's obviously more of a bedside book to dip into than a book you should read in one go, but if you like that sort of thing... show less

Que livro delicioso! Com uma escrita descomplicada e de fácil compreensão - li numa sentada, Barthes vai alinhavando psicanálise e o papel dialético do escritor/leitor em seu prazer dual. Meu único porém quanto a esta edição é que o tradutor preferiu traduzir jouissance como fruição e não como gozo, este que seria mais pertinente ao conteúdo da obra que busca dialogar com a psicanálise.