“Desire seeks out words, taking them wherever it find them; what’s more: words themselves engender desire, and what’s more besides: words obstruct desire.” That’s the Roland Barthes I love. But immediately I have a question: what about this unstable relation that the notes for a lecture have with writing—what desire, what obstruction? In the last of these lectures—that is, in the notes for the last of these lectures—Barthes evokes “the whole of the subject in all his breadth and depth, in his individuation, that is to say his entire personal history,” adding,
only a written form would be capable of taking account of that—or, if you prefer, a novelistic act (if not a novel). Only writing is capable of picking out extreme subjectivity because only in writing is there a concord between the indirectness of the expression and the truth of the subject—concord that’s impossible on the level of speech (and so impossible to achieve in a lecture course).
In any case, one reads lecture notes differently than one would read a finished book. They are written, but do they amount to writing? There’s a particular kind of reading proper to a book that never became a book under its author’s hand: Like what Theodor Reik called “listening with the third ear,” this is reading with the third eye: a kind of scanning that is at once attentive and quick, able to pass over some things very quickly in order to grasp more intensely what might be significant. And this writing is made for quick scanning: thus the use throughout of signs such as →. =, ≠, which represent a thought that is too impatient to wait for words. With the notion of indirect expression in mind, this helps explain why, despite the subtitle’s mention of “novelistic space,” these lectures hardly concern the novel. Most of Barthes’ examples come from the history of monasticism. Yes, there are recurrent references to The Magic Mountain and In Search of Lost Time, even Robinson Crusoe, as well as to novels far less well-known (an 1882 work by Zola sometimes known in English as Pot Luck or Piping Hot; an essay by Gide, The Confined Woman of Poitiers, which Barthes seems to treat as something like a nonfiction novel) but these don’t amount to a contribution to the criticism or theory of the novel. I see these notes as ventures toward what Barthes, this “erstwhile structuralist,” in his final series of lectures will call The Preparation of the Novel. For Barthes in his last years seems to have been contemplating writing a novel—or at least, of a work that would somehow be novelistic—and his desire to see how “living together” had been written was part of this effort. (Here, he speaks of “a form of preparation whose final achievement is forever postponed.”) Still, I wish I’d read How to Live Together before reading Anita Brookner’s A Private View last week, because that book—set in the apartment building where the protagonist is always having to face his neighbor, his concierge, and the young woman who (with his complicity) commandeers the apartment of some vacationing neighbors—is very much what Barthes calls an idiorrythmic novel, that is, one concerning several people attempting to live in proximity “while each preserving his or her rhuthmos.” (This idiorrhythmy is a bit like what, in toddlers, we call parallel play.) And of course, in Brookner’s as in so many apartment novels, Zola’s being the one Barthes cites, there is the question of hearing and being heard by the neighbors. Barthes evokes a listening that is a listening-in, eavesdropping—that is prurient. “With music,” by contrast, “we’re not listening in on anything or anyone else—nor, in a sense, are we listening.” (Suddenly I want to re-read Adorno on the fetish character of listening.) Brookner, however, finally evades the pathos that makes Barthes’ text so poignant, the intuition that “Living together: perhaps simply a way of confronting the sadness of the night together. Being among strangers is inevitable, necessary even, except when night falls.”
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Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces: Notes for a lecture course and seminar at the Collège de France (1976-1977), translated by Kate Briggs, is published by Columbia University Press, New York, 2013.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.