From the Archives: Updike on Barthes
A Barthes Reader
ed. with introduction by Susan Sontag
(Barnes & Noble Rediscovers by arrangement with FS&G, 2009)
I almost missed the table. Whoever really looks at the book table stuck in the back of the store between the travel games and the commuter mugs? Barnes & Noble certainly doesn't want to give up valuable space in the front of the store for "hardvcover editions ... of special merit in literature, philosophy, history, religion, the arts and the sciences." (Quote from the back cover blurb). Thankfully, I looked down at the table and Susan Sontag's name caught my eye. The last time I saw a book cover with her blurb on it (Dubravka Ugresic), I was not disappointed. Ahh... Roland Barthes! Yes, she had a thing for the French, didn't she? Literary criticism of the highest order? Well, I must get it on my shelves. It's going to be heavy reading, but I feel that reading Barthes comes under the heading of "Professional Duty." After a thorough skim-through, I've decided this volume will be more than worth my time. The essay entitled "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers" looks especially interesting.
In the meantime, I checked through my New Yorker archives and, naturally, found John Updike singing Barthes praises in the November 24, 1975 edition. Here's a bit of Updike at his finest::
"Barthes scattered, playful apercus in search of 'pleasure' are, like the rigorous anaylsis of "S/Z," a way of combatting the 'deceptively univocal reading' that castrates. "The Pleasure of the Text" is a little flirt of a text, but she ends splayed by a hearty assault of sexual imagery from Barthes, who demands to hear, as he reads, 'the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony,' who asks writing to be 'as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal's muzzle,' who defines his critical lust as the wish to admit 'the anonymous body of the actor into my ear.' Such is his bliss; such is the strenuous relationship he proposes between the literate and literature. Strenuous, but scarcely admitting of qualitative distinctions. The muzzle that his own prose presses at our ear smiles a little curiously, even smirks, like the author's photograph on the back of these two jackets. Barthes compels our respect more by what he demands than by what he delivers; his criticism lacks only the quality of inspiring trust. It is never relaxed. He teaches us to see mutilple layers of reader-writer interaction hovering above every page; above his own pages there is, faint but obscuring, a frosted layer of irony that blurs opus and commentary into a single plane."
(And a playful apercus is ...?)