The theme of this month’s reading has been reading above my weight class. I went to mediocre schools my entire life, from growing up in small town Virginia to attending a swindling art college in San Francisco. My intellectual development has happened almost entirely outside of academic institutions, just me following whatever I’m interested in at the moment to the point of mania.
Deep down I wish I would have focused more on my education when I was younger so I could have gotten into a good college. But this also presumes that in that scenario I would have figured out literature is my passion sooner instead of two years into college like in reality. (Literature has been a strong interest of mine since high school, but it took two wasteful years in a Film program for me to accept my book hoarding fate.)
Nonetheless, I do fantasize about a scenario where I would have discovered my literature obsession sooner and gotten into the industry in a more editorial direction, or even academia. The numerous crises in academia do a good job snapping me out of this illusion and back to reality—with that said, the academics I read in literary publications and interact with on social media do make me feel like they are my people.
This brings me to my first recent read: Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes (Hill and Wang, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith). Like with Sontag’s Against Interpretation, but to a far more extreme degree, I feel woefully inadequate to the task of writing about it. This is a heavily technical work where Barthes explores the aesthetic, political and ethical tasks of the writer. His language is dense and polemical. Also, he is not very optimistic. He sees writers plagued by classicism and politics, with aesthetics stifled by the rigidity of the form as well as political and ideological messages overshadowing writing quality.
It’s a strange sensation to read Barthes’s fatalistic picture of the future of writing, particularly fiction, in 2021 and to know it was published in 1953. Not sure how prophetic his specific diagnoses are, but feel like he really captured the sterile and stiflingly unambitious direction commercial fiction still continues to take. On the one hand, I read much of this book with ample skepticism, he feels rather like a detached scientist dissecting literature, not simply analyzing form, style and aesthetics but the further underlying symbols of these aspects. On the other hand, his manifesto reveals a passion and dedication to literature that doesn’t take the art form lightly. It betrays the high standards of someone who wants more than stuffy ideology and endlessly recycled forms from writers.
The book often felt over my head, but, as complex as he can be when picking apart symbols and specialist trends, Barthes is brilliant on the pervasive influence of 19th century fiction, how political literature parasitically recycles its forms, the struggles of 20th century writers to discover new languages, the important writers whose influence can be seen everywhere, among other subjects.
I especially savored when Barthes would focus on individual writers. He is fascinating on the legacies of Mallarmé and Flaubert, the former representing a radicalization of form that was far too advanced and which contemporary writers struggle to expand from, the latter turning writing into a sort of cult of technique (which, perhaps wrongly, sounded to me fairly like Barthes’s approach). He also has insightful thoughts on the work of Raymond Queneau and Marcel Proust which I would love to see expanded.
Writing Degree Zero reads like a young man’s book, polemical and aspiring to be prophetic, but with a calm, measured assurance that avoids arrogance. It is because of this that he can claim that modern masterpieces are impossible and it feels more like a melancholy prediction than a jeering assurance. At only around 90 pages, it is a dense book which should be read slowly. For us dilettantes, it requires effort to decipher his ideas, but it is almost always worth it whether you agree or not with what he’s saying. I will certainly be returning to it, especially as I read more of his work and see how his ideas develop.
Speaking of young man’s books, and books sub-100 pages, my next read was Adolphe by Benjamin Constant (Oxford World’s Classics, translated by Margaret Mauldon). Published in 1816, it has immediate superficial similarities to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Narrated by a bored and disaffected young man who spends his days bemoaning his life of easy privilege, pretentiously disdaining the society snobbery surrounding him. Then one day he learns that a friend has fallen in love with an older woman, and he jealously realizes that he has never been in love or had a serious affair and cannot stand this inadequacy. Promptly he becomes infatuated with Ellénore, the mistress of a prominent official.
The narrator is a convincing tortured lover, during the first stages of his and Ellénore’s affair his duplicity fades to the background. When Ellénore gives up her social position in order to commit to him you can’t say he conspired to make it happen. He creates a fairly convincing impression of moral agony when it is his turn to sacrifice for her, but while at face value his hesitations make sense they also reveal why their affair was doomed from the start.
He plays us all, hiding behind a façade of earnestness where he is always reminding us that he knows he is a scoundrel, but that we must not demonize him because suffering from his flaws is his own hell. The tragic masochism implied by the way he relentlessly analyzes his weaknesses, the cruelty of him not loving a woman who has sacrificed everything for him and the cruel plight of a man from influential society who must follow his predestined path (even as no matter what he does this society is at first waiting and then actively plotting for his return) is all a manipulative smokescreen to disguise the truth which is that he never loved Ellénore. He desired her and his dignity craved winning her, but there was no love, only pride.
Constant was not a young man when he wrote this work, being nearly fifty when it was published. Much of the notoriety surrounding Adolphe is that it is heavily inspired by Constant’s own affair with writer and salon host Germaine de Staël. In a fascinating appendix written by Constant he discusses his intention to write a work about the futility of sacrificial love and the posturing passion of men, “a theory arising out of deceit—a fatal tradition”. Constant is very insightful writing on the themes of his work. But what I found especially fascinating was the beginning of the appendix where Constant scolds the public for projecting real life figures and events on his fiction. He writes:
This mania for recognizing, in works of imagination, individuals we meet in society is a real curse for these creations. It belittles them, gives them a false purpose, ruins their interest and destroys their utility. To search for allusions in a novel is to prefer quibbling to nature, and to substitute gossip for the observation of the human heart.
All the more fascinating when you learn that Constant withheld publishing an entire section of the book until Staël’s death because it too closely resembled reality. Don’t see our contemporary autofiction scribblers running these risks!
Last but not least, one of the strangest works of fiction I’ve read (and I primarily seek out strange fiction): Texterimination by Christine Brooke-Rose (New Direction). This novel starts mid-sentence and opens with a dizzying sequence where characters with strangely familiar names are riding in carriages (or maybe just one morphing carriage?) and then in an aerobrain (maybe you can guess what this is, but it is explicitly expressed later) and struggling to interact with each other, made all the more difficult as they mostly speak different languages.
Then things get a bit clearer and much weirder. The characters have arrived at the Hilton in San Francisco for a literary conference, and the reason all those names sounded familiar is that almost all of the characters in this book are characters from other fictional works. The purpose of the conference is for the characters to pray for their continued survival in the public mind and then to participate in panels discussing the current state of their legacies. But right from the start plottings of sabotage spiral the conference into chaos. Terrorists rebel against the Christian characters getting the first pray-in session, another gathering for dead characters who have been removed from the Canon for falling out of public conscious devolves into anarchy over semantics, and TV and film characters infiltrate the conference to protest for their own representation.
It’s all very odd stuff. You can feel Brooke-Rose’s relish in utilizing her set pieces where hundreds of characters are present and throwing them into hysteria. These scenes are highly entertaining, but the best parts are when she puts a group of characters together and lets their personalities, cultures, and values clash. Emma Woodhouse takes Emma Bovary under her wing, only to become appalled at the latter’s insatiable flirting. Charlotte Kestner from Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar believes she is the real Lotte from The Sorrows of Young Werther and searches ceaselessly for Goethe, Captain Ahab, Leopold Bloom, and Odysseus journey on a tour bus to see the Bay. The most gleefully inventive scene is a meeting between I-narrators, hosted by Ishmael, to plot a coup in order to give proper representation to the anonymous ones, but most of the unnamed don’t attend and the meeting devolves into arguments. Brooke-Rose’s own I-narrator, Mira Enketei from Amalgamemnon, watches on, bemused. Meanwhile Oedipa Maas from Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman and Roger Lambert from Updike’s Roger’s Version argue about chauvinistic narrators, free indirect discourse, their disdain for their authors, and conspiracies.
As much as the book is character and inter-textual reference overload, especially at the beginning, Brooke-Rose’s nuanced depth of knowledge is in evidence everywhere. The conspiracies plaguing the conference ultimately reflect the futile effort to manufacture the cultural influence of art, and the legacies of its creations. Art is a construct and its works, once created, have a life of their own, wholly dependent on cycles and spirals of history as well as, perhaps most of all, the unreliability of their audience (or lack of). The characters themselves care about their influence out of vanity, but most not to an extent even remotely close to Casaubon’s. As in the literary, cinematic, and television works that they exist within, their real attentions are focused inward on their own transient existences. Knowing that they can die as characters from being forgotten only confirms the humanity that has always been their fixation. Godlike characters such as Odysseus are not exempt. Brooke-Rose’s concept, which sounds so wacky in summary, becomes an ingenious and wonderfully entertaining means to experiment, subvert, honor, defame, celebrate, etc. everything great and ridiculous about art. She does what great art is best at, raising questions and finding elaborate and exciting ways to not answer them.
Can't remember if I said this to you already, but Jonathan Culler's book on Barthes in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series is great. V helpful in tracking the shifts in RB's thinking. He was sort of a Dylan/Miles Davis type in that regard. At the point of WRITING DEGREE ZERO, IIRC, he is in thrall to structuralism, and hating the influence of Sartre.
Funnily enough I've been going through the same process of realizing my true passion. It's just a shame, as you said, I didn't discover it 10 or 15 years ago. In retrospect it was blindingly obvious. There wasn't a time, except perhaps a year or two of burnout during college and university, where I didn't have a book close to hand. Having said that, the younger me would probably not believe I would be buying essay collections, or books about readers and books etc. I do wonder how different my life would be had I done something like English Literature at university level. As it is, like you, I'm trying to build towards that in my own way.