Text Shmext

Roland Barthes: The Pleasure of the Text

The only time I have had more difficulty with a book, had to look up more words, was in trying to read Immanuel Kant. Like that text, I feel like I only incompletely understood Barthes' meaning. Unlike it, however, I don't feel guilty or inferior as a result. Barthes lays out early that the pleasure of a text does not come from comprehensive comprehension. It is "our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages . . . has anyone ever read War and Peace word for word?" (11).

I did grasp it enough to resonate with its central premise: that getting bliss (literally: orgasm) from a text is different from getting pleasure. Bliss cannot come from words, sentences, it is inscrutable and comes unbidden. It is the act of the writer cruising, yes cruising the reader without the two ever meeting. The writer of bliss does not speak to the reader; he makes love to him.

This is much like what Lin Yutang writes in The Importance of Living. There, he describes love affairs he has had with certain authors, insatiably devouring all of their works in a lustful frenzy. I have never had this experience, although I keep expecting to encounter an author who makes love to me. It was not Lin Yutang, and so far, it is not Barthes, but I plan on revisiting this quick and impossible read anyway. Perhaps next time my literary morals will be a bit more lax.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Leaf Storm and other stories

My trouble with Marquez has always been similar to my trouble with Toni Morrison: they have a run in every literary suit but theme. Each marvelous, magically realistic story remains but a story. I know, I know, who says that literature has to say anything? But I am not a postmodernist, and it is unlikely I shall be one ever. Text can have, as Morrison and Marquez always do, indelible characters, inventive and surprising situations, and a superhuman gift for the laying down of words, but if they do not go even further, their attempts to make love to me result in blue balls.

Which is why I am so grateful to Marquez for at least trying to give this collection thematic unity. If I didn't know better, I would say it was written after One Hundred Years of Solitude, for it feels even more sophisticated in parts. The two books treat the same fictional village of Macondo, and have a similar texture, but the stories of Leaf Storm, both individually and collectively, have more of the thematic rhythm that I enjoy so much. Robert often chastises me for my insistence that movies and books be tied up with neat little bows, but he is only partly right. I have no problem with plot lines, character arcs, sentences or anything else dangling incompletely in a text. What I object to is for themes to be left incompletely treated, without a proper arc.

Marquez does himself a service in this regard by giving Leaf Storm etc. an epigraph that tips his hand thematically. The selection from Antigone regarding Creon's refusal to bury her brother perfectly mirrors the way things can never be buried in the little village of Macondo. In the eponymous story, the entire town conspires to refuse a literal burial, but the theme opens up further with the exposed memories of the three narrators. Likewise, the title character in "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" is unburiable, and it is fitting that these two stories are the first in the collection. They represent the exposition in the thematic arc, and the beginning of rising action. My favorite, though not the best in the book, "Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Miracles", raises the action with a variation: a man who is buried, but is resurrected in his very tomb. The climax then comes with "Monologue of Isabel Watching the Rain in Macondo". This structurally vague but emotionally desperate story takes the theme to its ultimate length, one hinted at in "Leaf Storm": for Isabel, even time itself never truly passes. The denouement then comes with "Nabo", which is engaging, but not challenging, as a denouement should be.

I realize all of this makes me a heathen among literary critics. But for me, the metanarrative is not yet dead. It lives, it will always live, for books like this one are beats of its heart. Wow, that was melodramatic.

Sylvia Plath: collected poems of 1956

I decided to tackle this project in bits, as though each year of Plath's collected works are individual books. It would be easy to read through this quickly and cross it off my list, but I've been leaning in the other direction lately, as seen from my ponderous posts on The Bible. Sorry about those, BTW.

I've never had a particular taste for Plath. All of her famous poems (especially the Ariel set) seemed woefully confessional for me. These earlier poems, however, have had an interesting effect. I find that the content of them is not what grabs my attention, but rather the texture. I found myself hypnotized by the rhythm, the unique way she has with consonants and syllables, that I had never appreciated before. I guess the obligatory teaching of silly little things like alliteration and assonance has had an effect on me, but often I was so taken in by the tactile layer of the poems that I didn't even know what they were about. Let us take a random example, and I will show you what I mean. Let's see . . . the book falls to:

Channel Crossing

On storm-struck deck, wind sirens caterwaul. (already we see example of some of her neatest tricks: "storm-struck" is, of course, alliteration, and Plath is seemingly addicted to it, but it is also an example of her tmesis:the taking out of intermediary words to make new and rhythmically stronger hybrids. "Wind Sirens" is another example of this in the same line.)

With each tilt, shock and shudder, our blunt ship (more alliteration, and a nice example of her parsimony with words: blunt is an almost onomatopoetically precise and surprising choice)

Cleaves forward into fury; dark as anger, (the semicolon here is not grammatically appropriate--a colon would have been a better choice--but in Plath's world "dark as anger" is a complete thought and requires its own clause.)

Waves wallop, assaulting the stubborn hull. (more alliteration, and the first instance in this poem of her other favorite: slant rhyme. Her rhyme scheme and meter are so subtle as not to be noticed unless you have been teaching Freshman English: these lines are pentameter [ish], but they don't feel like it. They rhyme [sorta] but do not seem to.)

Flayed by spray, we take the challenge up (assonance flanked by more slant rhyme)

Grip the rail, squint ahead, and wonder how much longer (a sly variation on her meter that accents the very word such variations would in Shakespeare: longer).

I had intended to break apart a whole poem, but as you can see, even one stanza has so much packed into it that it would be a real undertaking, and I think I have Swine Flu. I had better not tax myself too much.

All of this is very well, but I have to say that Plath overdoes it a bit. It comes across as a bit too forced, almost pretentious, as though she were modeling for a poetry textbook. It got in the way of her content, which took a second reading to even notice, let alone grasp. Once grasped, the content revealed things that could never be taught: mad, cold, biting, desperate, these poems make the reader want to lash out--whether at himself or at the nearest piece of furniture. Her affectionate images of nature invariably are dashed to pieces, and revealed in the fragments are more jewels of longing, discontent and hatred. I am especially fond of "Street Song", and can relate to the narrator's disbelief that passersby don't notice her gaping metaphorical wounds, each of which "reeks of the butcher's cleaver / its heart and guts hung hooked / and bloodied as a cow's split frame" (7-9) . "Resolve" even reminds me of something I might have written, though I would have undoubtedly taken more words to do it. In fact,I did write one called "Re:solution", now that I think of it. In the "bent bow of thorns" which she addresses lie the same gaping wounds as in "Street Song", but in a more subtle expression (16). Happily, despite these wounds, hers and mine, "Miracles occur, / if you care to call those spasmodic / Tricks of radiance miracles". All is not completely dark, and in spite of the hurt that drove Plath and has driven me to terrible ends, "with luck, . . . I shall / patch together a content / Of sorts" ("Black Rook in Rainy Weather, 32-38).