The Pleasure Of The Text

The other afternoon, I was discussing French theorist Roland Barthes' spectacular The Pleasure Of The Text with a friend. This short book is probably my favorite work of literary theory. It combines semiotics with a grand discussion of texts and their intermittent nature. As with most of Barthes' work, it is also about numerous other things. In this case, it is romance and sexuality which seems to come up occasionally. Barthes, rumored to be asexual himself, discusses romance and sexuality in the same terms that he discusses texts. Both are a jangled web of connections and intermittent ideas, never showing too much but always indicating there is something more hidden beneath.

Anyhow, one quote from near the beginning of the book has stayed with me since I finished my reading. This quote sums up how I feel about a few different things:

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no “erogenous zones” (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance. (10)

War Prayer 025

(sex in general is stupid)

War Prayer 025

The more Drew rejected sex and all of its mind numbing idiocy, the more it came to occupy his every waking thought.  The roll of a pair of hips, the toned arms of another, the seductive, alluring, mind of a third.  He became obsessed with his idealized concept of what love should be.  But he continued to deny it had anything to do with sex.  The more he denied,  his imaginary world became more developed. 

This denial became a game.  He could excuse his fantasies by saying he would never act on them, never try to recreate them in the real world.  At the end of the year, the tag for books read that year was rather sad and small on his weblog’s tag cloud.  So much time wasted on sex that could have been spent on Barth or Sorrentino or hypertext fiction or adhering a sticker somewhere. 

Drew and Theresa made love often during this period, trying to recreate that pair of hips and mashing it up with the third’s alluring mind.  Sex became as meaningless for them as it was in real life. 

Weekly Reader

New York Times on Orwell’s diaries being blogged on WordPress.

Christopher Sorrentino reviews John Barth’s new novel in Bookforum.

A book of letters between Bernard Henri Levy and Michel Houellebecq will be published soon.

An interesting “first person” piece in The Guardian about asexuality.

Alice Ferrebe’s Digital Orientalism: Japan & Electronic Literature.