Roland Barthes’ LE BRUISSEMENT DE LA LANGUE (1984) is a book that left a decisive marking on my writing self in my late twenties. I know, I know, but then I’ve been away from it for a long time, repeating incessantly what is already there in the book at each occasion of my having-to-write such and such on writing, reading, and translation. I don’t mean to say I imitated, or copied, or paraphrased; I didn’t even open the book once. But repetition was inescapable.
I’ve just begun (re)reading Richard Howard’s superb translation of the above book: THE RUSTLE OF LANGUAGE (1989) and I am out of breath. I find everywhere that “this, too, has been said by Barthes!” Consider, for example, the following paragraph:
Here we discern the total being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, proceeding from several cultures and entering into dialogue, into parody, into contestation; but there is a site where this multiplicity is collected, and this site is not the author, as has hither to been claimed, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any of them being lost, all the citations out of which a writing is made; the unity of a text is not in its origin but in its destination, but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds collected into one and the same field all of the traces from which writing is constituted. (“The Death of the Author”, original written in 1968)
Change the word “reader” to “consumer,” and that’s my basic thesis in my mémoire d’études in 1983. Transpose the textuality to our material being and environment, and that’s what Glissant means by “échos-monde.” Talk about perspicacity.
Barthe is THE critic of the latter half of the twentieth century, and his ghostly body is haunting us well into this century and beyond.
