The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes
Welcome to a little dispatch from inside my own literary obsession on the erotics of reading.
I found this book in my search to help give me language for things I’ve been circling a lot this year: the way prose can seduce, disturb, excite, and make reading feel so bodily… and why.
Why am I drawn to the perverse, the psychologically uncomfortable, the transgressive? Why are you? Why aren’t you?
For me, it can be just one sentence that feels like an experience in itself, quite apart from what it is saying.
So yes, Barthes, you have my attention.
Barthes distinguishes between pleasure and jouissance – often translated as bliss or rapture. I’m still turning that distinction over. There’s the pleasure of a good book, and then there’s the pure current of a text that jolts my system, shorts my circuits, or forces a physical reaction.
I’ve talked a good deal about literary encounters, about what happens when a book triggers a chemical spike in me. But I’m increasingly interested in what’s actually happening in those encounters. The doing of language. The surge of being seduced by a sentence. The buzz I get from something repellent or utterly horrific. The total thrill of finding myself charged up by the taboo, the transgressive, the violent. And, no doubt, the pain.
So naturally, I’ve been trying to dissect this somatic frequency of my own reading habits, mapping how words/prose morph into physical reactions for me.
I’m not much of a visual reader, I know that. I don’t necessarily see scenes playing out in my head or construct elaborate pictures of characters and places. Well, I do in dark romance but I’m not considering that here. But I hear the words. There’s an internal voice, and I’m acutely aware of cadence, tone, rhythm, etc.. The way a sentence sounds, certain words, how it’s all put together. The way a character speaks, or thinks. The particular music of a writer’s prose (a nod to Lispector here of course, iykyk).
So how much of that voice do I supply myself, and how much does the writing create? Who knows. But whether I’m reading Clarice or Nabokov or Eliot, I can get caught up in the language without necessarily seeing much of anything. Do you see where I’m going here?
Maybe this is part of what I’m trying to get at with Barthes. It’s rarely what a text means, or even what it makes me feel, but the pleasure of the language itself. The sound of it. The way it moves through my head. The bliss. The rapture.
Oh shit, and I’m near halfway through Eroticism by Bataille and that’s even more exciting. Clearly Bataille and Barthes are deeply connected through some idea that true ecstasy requires crossing a line. Yes, please!
And The Pleasure of the Text has been a great companion work to Bataille because of this. It feels like Barthes handed me the decoder ring for what Bataille is doing. Bataille shows us that breaking taboos is what makes us human, and Barthes proves that language is the ultimate playground for doing exactly that. It seems they both want us to stop reading safely and start reading dangerously. Yes, please!
Anyway. I know I respond to the performance of language as much as its meaning. And I’m curious about what the hell that means and why. So any analysis of the physical, sensual and emotional ecstasy (‘jouissance’) that reading and language can provoke, I’m gonna seek it out.
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