Roland Barthes, in his book The Pleasure of the Text, posits writing as a form of seduction, and his form expresses his content. The book is a profound collection of fragments about pleasures of texts. In the table of contents, instead of chapter titles or headings, there are key terms. These are embedded in the paragraph fragments. The first half of the list of terms are alphabetized and they are paired consecutive page numbers. Not so random, those fragments. The second half of the list of terms have no page numbers at all, although the terms can be discovered within the book. His page numbers have set up an expectation, and then he interrupted or disrupted the expectation. This is perhaps an example of what he terms "cruising" the reader. The key words from the second half of the list are in the text, and the reader must discover them. The following phrases express his metaphor:
...the cohabitation of languages working side by side...
...there is always a vacillation--I stumble, I err....
...it is intermittence...which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing, between two edges...it is this flash itself which seduces....
...what happens to the language does not happen to the discourse: what "happens," what "goes away," the seam of the two edges, the interstice of bliss, occurs in the volume of the languages, in the uttering...: not to devour, to gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover...
The text needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro.
...the word can be erotic on two opposing conditions, both excessive: if it is extravagantly repeated or on the contrary, if it is unexpected, succulent in its newness....
...implying a split, a cleavage...
...text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving: lost in this tissue--this texture--the subject unmakes himself...
...Pleasure's force of suspension can never be overstated....
...the voice, that writing, be as fresh, as supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal's muzzle...And certainly, poetry that gives pleasure does all of this. In Barthes' arrangements, positions, and subversions, he revels in language. The book lingers, explores, slows, and penetrates.
Work Cited
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Notting Hill Editions, 2012.
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