Untitled or, On Barthes
by A. J. Gallop
The irrefutable truth of Roland Barthes’ gayness lies before us in the form of his corpus, his body of work.
Does it desire domination?
Can you tell if someone is queer from their writing alone?
Put sillier, is there such a thing as a “literary gaydar”?
If there is, mine was pinging frantically when I read Dante’s Inferno. D.A. Miller seems to share at least a sliver of my conviction; in Bringing Out Roland Barthes he playfully reconfigures Dante’s encounter with his teacher, Brunetto, in the circle of the sodomites as an unexpected (and slightly awkward) run-in at “that West Village bar.”
What’s slightly unique about Barthes’ situation is that, unlike Dante, there is empirical evidence outside of his writing that proves he was homosexual. The thrill of the hunt is tempered, the pitchforks are lowered. “Well, now what?” No more fighting tooth and nail to overleap the various, “No, you’re just projecting”s, “You can’t just say everyone is gay”s, “You just see queerness in everything because you’re queer”s, and the dreaded beast, “They were just…you know! Really good friends.”
As a queer scholar, my job just got significantly more interesting. I don’t need to “prove” anything, per se, I can move beyond the simple identification, the “GAY! (?)” scrawled in the margin, the pointed finger then ensuing endless search for evidence to justify it.
“this birth defect is a coded factor, a hermeneutic morpheme, whose function is to thicken the enigma by outlining it: a powerful enigma is a dense one, so that, provided certain precautions are taken, the more signs there are, the more the truth will be obscured, the harder one will try to figure it out. The connotative signifier is literally an index: it points but it does not tell; what it points to is the name, the truth as name; it is both the temptation to name and the impotence to name (induction would be more effective than designation in producing the name): it is the tip of the tongue from which the name, the truth, will later fall. Thus, with its designating, silent movement, a pointing finger always accompanies the classic text: the truth is thereby long desired and avoided, kept in a kind of pregnancy for its full term, a pregnancy whose end, both liberating and catastrophic, will bring about the utter end of the discourse; and the character, the very arena of these signifieds, is only the enigma’s passage, the passage for this nominative form of the enigma with which Oedipus (in his debate with the Sphynx) mythically impregnated all Western discourse.” (62).
Viewing Barthes’ entire oeuvre from a distance allows us to distinguish the contours of his queerness rather than merely point out its general existence.
Why not try to know it?
Of all the ways to “know” a text that have been devised over the years, the concept of “distant reading” is one that arose with the advent of digital technology. While many scholars scoff at the practice of using computational methods to analyze something as complexly human as literature, there are some who are excited by the prospect of harnessing machine learning or digital database tools to draw conclusions based off of patterns and trends found in thousands of texts rather than a select few. (I feel like it’s worth mentioning that when I learned about these methods a few years ago, Chat GPT and other equally horrifying programs were nowhere near as mainstream as they are today. Distant reading was never about the act of recreating literature, rather an attempt to understand it in a different way.) Franco Moretti, Richard So, and the Stanford Literary Lab (yes, you read that correctly) were just a few of the sources that helped us on our journey through the class called “Literature and/as Data,” in which I came to the conclusion that, while I still preferred my reading up close and personal as god intended, some more advanced functionality than the occasional “control + F” does come in useful, especially when reading many works by the same author and attempting to trace certain developments through his oeuvre.
Trying to “distant read” Barthes was anticlimactic, but not altogether unproductive. In fact, it was only through the failure of this line of inquiry that I traveled down the path that led me to this paper’s conclusion.
I plug in “The Pleasure of the Text” to Voyant. It feels like I’m lobotomizing it, draining its life force as it chews it up and spits out the most frequently used words: text, pleasure, bliss, language, like. I mean. Yeah. Fair enough. I throw in the French translation, which, to my surprise, the program adapts to immediately: texte, plaisir, joissance, n’est, peut. (The program’s list of “stop words” automatically switched to a comprehensive French list.)
The enormity of the difference between French and English becomes uncomfortably apparent as I stare at the enigma “n’est.” Is not. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Fuck.
Being able to read Barthes in French has certainly helped me understand his animosity towards it. Given the current war on pronouns in America, one would think that the English language is a ripe battlefield for gender convention and identity, but we honestly have no idea how lucky we are. We take for granted the neutrality of job titles, for instance. Doctor, Teacher, Commissioner, Officer, Author, etc., If we wish to supply the gender, we have the choice of adding “male” or “female,” but in French the gender is inseparable from the word. You must choose. “It is quite simply fascist,” he delivers as calmly as if reporting a particularly pleasant sunny afternoon during his inaugural lecture. This fascism that Barthes identifies in language is universal in principle, yet also irrevocably connected to his own subjugation to the gendered structure of French.
«Il s’ensuit que la photographie de jeunesse est à la fois très indiscrète (c’est mon corps du dessous qui s’y donne à lire) et très discrète (ce n’est pas de « moi » qu’elle parle).» (RB/RB 6).
In this sentence, the subject, “childhood photography,” is feminine. An English speaker does not associate an abstract concept like “photography” with either masculinity or femininity at first. The photography’s “femaleness” is asserted with the feminine pronoun “elle.” The English version is translated as “The photograph is not of “me,” but the words translated literally read: “it is not of “me” that she speaks.” Not only is the photograph speaking, but the photograph is imbued with femininity. Given the connection that Barthes feels to his mother through photographs, this does not seem like a coincidence. But it raises a question: to what extent do French speakers intentionally play with the gendered constraints of their native language, especially related to queerness?
According to a survey of French gay men performed in 1994, nearly two thirds of the respondents answered affirmatively to the question, “Do you use the feminine when addressing (or talking about) your boyfriend or male friend? Have you heard other people using the feminine?” “Without exception, all respondents had heard the feminine used by other gay men in reference to both self and others” (371). The connotations of this exchange ranged widely from affectionate, playful, insulting, to derogatory. One respondent commented on a generational difference they observed: “Seems to me more common among men a little older than myself (i.e. over thirty-five), belonging to a different generation and a different gay sensibility…The 1970s, rue Saint Anne.” (273).
If anyone was on the rue Saint Anne in the 70s, it was most certainly Roland Barthes.
Might this (often cited in this area) fragment from RB/RB represent such play with gendered language?
La déesse H.
Le pouvoir de jouissance d’une perversion (en l’occurrence celle des deux H : homosexualité et haschisch) est toujours sous-estimé. La Loi, la Doxa, la Science ne veulent pas comprendre que la perversion, tout simplement, rend heureux ; ou pour préciser davantage, elle produit un plus : je suis plus sensible, plus perceptif, plus loquace, mieux distrait, etc—et dans ce plus vient se loger la différence (et partant, le Texte de la vie, la vie comme texte). Des lors, c’est une déesse, une figure invocable, une voie d’intercession. (p. 68)
In the first sentence, masculine power (pouvoir) overtakes feminine perversion for control- the adjective “underestimated” maintains the masculine ending. But who wants to be underestimated? The “perversion” is safe, nestled, free from further elaboration. Homosexuality and Haschisch are masculine, but the “Goddess H,” “la perversion” the part that makes it “bad”, is feminine in nature.
(Before distant reading him in English, we must close read him in French.)
In his late career, however, Barthes seems tired. He’s done playing and just wants some goddamn peace and quiet where identity and language are concerned. In his Inaugural Lecture he describes himself as someone who “for better and for worse” has been “bedeviled” by language his entire life, though not enough to completely eliminate his playful spirit:
“The semiologist is, in short, an artist…the sign—at least the sign he sees—is always immediate, subject to the kind of evidence that leaps to the eyes, like a trigger of the imagination, which is why this semiology (need I specify once more: the semiology of the speaker) is not a hermeneutics. It paints more than it digs, via di porre rather than via de levare. Its objects of predilection are texts of the Image-making process: narratives, images, portraits, expressions, idiolects, passions, structures which play simultaneously with an appearance of verisimilitude and with an uncertainty of truth.” (14).
In his lectures afterward, he talks openly, even freely, of gay things, no doubt raising eyebrows:
“By the way, just as the sexual fantasy is coded, the fantasy may itself remain crude, subject to a very crude typology (literary “genres”); actually a major problem: it depends on the society; USA, gay small ads: an implacable code (“Handsome, Muscular, Affectionate, Versatile, Chubby, etc. (does not equal) No Fads, Drugs, S/M, Fems” (10).
But what doesn’t he talk about?
“F.W. announces that one of these days I'll have to explain myself about the rejected aspects of my sexuality (in this case, sadomasochism), about which I never speak; I feel a certain irritation at this: first of all, quite logically, how could I explain myself about what does not exist? All I can do is report; and then, it's so discouraging, this fashion—this doxa—of constituting sadomasochism as a norm, as normal, so that any failure to acknowledge it has to be explained—accounted for” (Incidents 64).
How do you resist the domination of language when you’re actually kinda into that sort of thing?
References:
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes Par Roland Barthes. Éditions Du Seuil, 2010.
---. The Pleasure of the Text. Cape, 1976.
---. S/Z. Hill and Wang, 1974.
---. Mythologies. 1st American ed., Hill and Wang, 2012.
---. “Inaugural Lecture” in A Barthes Reader. Edited by Susan Sontag, Hill and Wang, a Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982.
---. Incidents. Éditions Du Seuil, 1987.
Barthes, Roland, et al. The Neutral : Lecture Course at the Collège De France, 1977-1978. Columbia University Press, 2005.
Barthes, Roland, and Léger Nathalie. The Preparation of the Novel : Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège De France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980). Translated by Kate Briggs, Columbia University Press, 2011.
De Villiers, Nicholas. Opacity and the Closet : Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Johnson, Barbara. “Bringing out D.A. Miller” in The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness. Edited by Melissa Feuerstein, Duke University Press, 2014. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jkw7.
Kulick, Don. “Gay and Lesbian Language.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 29, 2000, pp. 243–85. Miller, Arianne E. “Searching for Gaydar: Blind Spots in the Study of Sexual Orientation Perception.” Psychology & Sexuality, vol. 9, no. 3, 2018, pp. 188–203.,
Miller, D. A. “Bringing Out Roland Barthes.” University of California Press, 1992.
Pastre, Geneviève. “Linguistic Gender Play among French Gays and Lesbians” in Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Livia, Anna, and Kira Hall. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Stern, C. H. (2023, May 1). Accidental sapphic icon Hozier stands with his LGBTQI+ fans. Rolling Stone.
T., Anna. Opacity - Minority - Improvisation: An Exploration of the Closet Through Queer Slangs and Postcolonial Theory. 1st ed., transcript Verlag, 2020.