In the pleasure of the text there is a dialogue
02
Sep
In the previous post there are Barthes’ expressions on
literature, writing and text, and we have already conceptualized the idea of inscription which is supposed to be supported, writing and the cognitive aspect and in the text the linguistic, artistic and “installation” aspect, and it is this is where his book “The pleasure of the text” is analyzed.
The book despite theoretical aspects is in fact a pleasure to be read, there is dialogue and mainly pleasant surprises, such as, for example, a semiological space, a kind of place between two margins: “an obedient margin, according to, plagiarism (…) the canonical state of the tongue and another movable, empty (…) these two margins wax, are necessary ”(page 40).
It yields more classic literature: “by Zola, by Balzac, by Dickens, by Tolstoy) it carries with it a kind of weakened mimesis: we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, leisurely, with little respect for the integrity of the text ”(page 17)
Proust, Balzac and Tostói deals in a single line of ruptures, “the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that produces the pleasure of great stories: Proust, Balzac, Guerra e Paz will sometimes have been read , word by word? (Proust’s happiness: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages) ”(page 18).
He recommends how to do the real reading: “Read slowly, read everything, from a Zola novel, the book will fall from your hands; read quickly, in fragments, a modern text, that text becomes opaque, timely for our pleasure: you want something to happen, and nothing happens; because what happens to language doesn’t happen to speech: what “happens” *, what “goes away”, the gap in both margins .. “(page 19).
Contrast the text with the theater or the cinema: “In the text scene there is no limelight: there is no one active behind the text (the writer) nor before anyone passive (the reader); there is no subject and object. The text prescribes grammatical attitudes: it is the undifferentiated eye that an excessive author (Angelus Silesius) speaks: ‘The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which he sees me.” (pag.52).
It reveals the secret of another book of his: “Old, very old tradition: hedonism has been repelled by almost all philosophies; only the hedonistic claim is found among the outcasts, Sade, Fourier; for Nietzsche himself, hedonism is pessimism ”(page 74), the book quoted in the previous post that goes far beyond hedonism.
BARTHES, Roland. (1987) O prazer do texto. Trad. J. Guinsburg. Brazil, SP: Editora Perspectiva. (portuguese edition in pdf, in english edition pdf)
