Barthes excerpts

I've been reading "A Lover's Discourse : Fragments" by Roland Barthes lately. An amazing book. It's not often you come across a writer like this. Everyone should read him.

Excerpt from Inexpressible Love (to write)

The full moon this fall,
All night long
I have paced around the pond.

No indirect means could be more effective in the expression of sadness than that "all night long". What if I were to try it, myself?

This summer morning, the bay sparkling,
I went outside
To pick a wistaria.

or:

This morning, the bay sparkling,
I stayed here, motionless,
Thinking of who is gone.

On the one hand, this is saying nothing; on the other, it is saying too much: impossible to adjust. My expressive needs oscillate between the mild little haiku summarizing a huge situation, and a great flood of banalities. I am too big and too weak for writing: I am alongside it, for writing is always dense, violent, indifferent to the infantile ego which solicits it. Love has of course a complicity with my language (which maintains it), but it cannot be lodged in my writing.

Excerpt from The Ghost Ship (errantry)

Amorous errantry has its comical side: it resembles a ballet, more or less nimble according to the velocity of the fickle subject; but it also a grand opera. The accursed Dutchman is doomed to wander the seas until he has found a woman who will be eternally faithful. I am that Flying Dutchman; I cannot stop wandering (loving) because of an ancient sign which dedicated me, in the remote days of my earliest childhood, to the god of my Image-repertoire, afflicting me with a compulsion to speak which leads me to say "I love you" in one port of call after another, until some other receives this phrase and gives it back to me; but no one can assume the impossible reply (of an insupportable fulfillment), and my wandering, my errantry continues.

Throughout life, all of love's "failures" resemble one another (and with reason: they all proceed from the same flaw). X and Y have not been able (have not wanted) to answer my "demand," to adhere to my "truth"; they have not altered their system one iota; for me, the former has merely repeated the latter. And yet X and Y are incomparable; it is in their difference, the model of an infinitely pursued difference, that I find the energy to begin all over again. The "perpetual mutability" (in inconstantia contans) which animates me, far from squeezing all those I encounter into the same functional type (not to answer my demand), violently dislocates their false community: errantry does not align—it produces iridescence: what results is the nuance. Thus I move on, to the end of the tapestry, from one nuance to the next (the nuance is the last state of a color which can be named; the nuance is the Intractable).

Excerpt from Events, Setbacks, Annoyances (contingencies)

In the incident, it is not the cause which pulls me up short and which echoes within me thereupon, but the structure. The entire structure of the relation comes to me as one might pull a tablecloth toward one: its disadvantages, its snares, its impasses (similarly, in the tiny lens embellishing the mother-of-pearl penholder, I could see Paris and the Eiffel Tower). I make no recriminations, develop no suspicions, search for no causes; I see in terror the scope of the situation in which I am caught up; I am not the man of resentment, but of fatality.

(For me, the incident is a sign, not an index; the element of a system, not the efflorescence of a causality.)

Sometimes, hysterically, my own body produces the incident: an evening I was looking forward to with delight, a heartfelt declaration whose effect, I felt, would be highly beneficial—these I obstruct by a stomach ache, an attack of grippe: all the possible substitutes of hysterical aphonia.

Excerpt from Talking (declaration)

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is "I desire you," and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.

(To speak amorously is to expend without an end in sight, without a crisis; it is to practice a relation without orgasm. There may exist a literary form of this coitus reservatus: what we call Marivaudage.)