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Tantric Text

by R. M. Corbin

—an end: a goal, a closing point, that which justifies the means. For some, the end is that which imbues a literary project with its meaning, its utility and, in ending the process, destroys it. Upon the appearance of a product, the process by which it was produced disappears or, at least, lives within it as a ghost. Roland Barthes has, for me, become a medium–not an exorcist (he does not banish; he wears no cross)–he who calls forth the ghosts of Literature and makes them speak. Barthes’ ghost left him (his body, his corpus) in 1980. If his ghost is anywhere now, it is likely cruising: drifting through beautiful bodies of text and flesh. Here, I hope to call him forth for a little while and, in doing so, listen to whatever voices may arise.

 

The proliferation of modes of writing brings a new Literature into being in so far as the latter invents its language only in order to be a project: Literature becomes the utopia of language. (Barthes 2012, 88)


 

“Utopia.” There’s a persistent populist myth that it means both “good place” and “no place.” The latter is undoubtedly true: Thomas More assured it. But the shared etymology between “no” and “good” proves to be untrue. Here’s something that is true: the Greek root “ou” derives from an earlier Greek root “aiw,” meaning “vital force, life, long life, or eternity.” Thus we can read Literature as both the no-place and the always-living-place of language. But Literature is multivalent and decidedly not monolithic. Its entry points involve writing (écriture; verb and noun), reading (as one does quietly by lamp- or blue-light), and criticism (a mode of both reading and writing: the process by which one organizes second-level thought about Literature, thus producing a meta-Literature). Barthes drifted through all three doors, sometimes simultaneously. 


* Writing

 

The ‘soul’ of any function is, as it were, its seedlike quality, which enables the function to inseminate the narrative with an element that will later come to maturity, on the same level, or elsewhere on another level. (Barthes 1977, 244)


 

I entered into writing through the mouth–or perhaps it entered me: inseminated me. My earliest writing was not writing at all: it was rapping. In backyards and garages; with drunk shirtless friends and boys who could smoke and speak at the same time; among the low hum of uninterested chatter from girls with short legs and fat bottoms. Rapping in a group is idiorrhythmic: one person raps (spits, we used to say–breath that is aspirated with an aim to percuss often ejaculates) before another (then another, then another, then oneself again) jumps in. Rapping had the “seedlike quality” necessary to the function of any structural narrative: this narrative being nothing less than my life. I do not yet know if it has come to “maturity.” Something I do know: the practice of freestyle rapping in a group is called “cyphering” (its “y” distinguishing it from a coded message; its phonetic relation maintaining kinship): from the Old French “cifre” meaning “zero.” As I’ve grown older, as Barthes noticed in culture itself, the cyphers of my adolescence have become codified as memory: no proper basis upon which to write something new and yet all I have. Zero is that vanishing point of my creative consciousness toward which I constantly recur: a well at the bottom of which, reflected in the water, I see myself.

 

... History puts in his hands a decorative and compromising instrument, a writing inherited from a previous and different History, for which he is not responsible and yet which is the only one he can use. Thus is born a tragic element in writing, since the conscious writer must henceforth fight against ancestral and all-powerful signs which, from the depths of a past foreign to him, impose Literature on him like some ritual, not like a reconciliation. (Barthes 2012, 86)


 

For Barthes, Literature was a prisonhouse: an immense system of signification from which no person can escape. The warden of our prisonhouse is History: dictatorial, inevitable, older than any father; the only referent any of us has. Language, the historical firmament of Literature, is fascist. Importantly, Barthes asserts the existence of multiple histories as writing is “inherited from a previous and different history.” Yet these histories exist in mutual intercourse: the writer of the present must use the tools of a previous history of literary style toward the construction of something new and inevitably, in said construction, reflects upon and recontextualizes their forebears. How can one now think of Joyce, Nabokov, or Morrison without also thinking of Homer, Pushkin, or Achebe? Literature is daisy-chained across history–through style and affiliation and the fact of language itself–and thus constitutes a path spanning out in two directions, from neither of which an ending can be seen.

 

‘Behold this gateway, dwarf!’ I went on: ‘it has two aspects. Two paths come together here: no one has ever reached their end.

‘This long lane behind us: it goes on for an eternity. And that long lane ahead of us–that is another eternity.

‘They are in opposition to one another, these paths; they abut on one another: and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is written above it: ‘Moment.’ (Nietzsche 251)


 

Two metaphors that come to bear on Literature within history (the first my own, by way of Jameson and on behalf of Barthes): the prisonhouse and Moment’s gateway. They are seemingly incompatible, the first closed and monitored; the second open with the promise of infinity. But perhaps we can think toward them not being so different. If Literature is a prisonhouse, its bricks noemes and moras (the cell-units of Literature), it must be one of practically infinite scale–there are more noemes, moras, words, phrases, and sentences than land upon which to build. With nothing outside of our prisonhouse, bondage becomes the fact-of-the-matter–that which we do not consider–and thus we are free to play within our established rules. If Nietzsche’s abutting paths expand on into infinity, and the gateway shifts with the arrival of each new moment, then we must constantly recur: infinity arrives in our world through recurrence. Writing within Literature is thus the practice by which one engages with the recursive nature of practical infinity.

 

* Reading

I was six years old when I first came upon a copy of John Gardner’s Grendel. I did not read it. I stood in my grandmother’s garage–maybe knock-kneed, maybe unwashed–and stared at the cover (the book was my mother’s from college–we lived with her mother through my adulthood). The titular monster was a long black crawl, wrapping from back to front, his hip at the book’s spine, grasping a skull in his left palm. Then, as a boy, my eye was repeatedly drawn to the monster’s speckled back. Now, as an adult and having read many books since, I notice the skull and think of Yorick and Hamlet and the clueless gravedigger. All of these elements are always present, twirling one-and-many like synchronized swimmers. As life goes on, different swimmers emerge from the water in reverse time: dry-haired, clear-faced, utterly obvious. 

 

Teach us, good Lord,

To serve thee as thou deservest;

To give and not to count the cost;

To fight and not to heed the wounds;

To toil and not for seek for rest;

To labour and not to ask for any reward

Save that of knowing that we do thy will. (Ignatius)

 

You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction. (Gita)


 

I did not read Grendel until I was instructed to do so. The copy I received from the campus bookstore had a different cover: a shaggy puppetish monster weeping skyward against the rain. For my adult life, my primary snorkel in the deep waters of Literature has been academia: the prescribed work of reading. One is meant to labor through (sometimes against) a book to arrive at a unifying moment of interpretation. If this labor will bear fruit, it will be an essay, a discussion post, or the warm satisfaction of articulation amid weary seminar classmates. These labors are meant to produce within oneself meta-discourse (to speak about that which speaks) and knowledge (to grow bored of a work, an era, a genre for having so thoroughly gutted it). The former builds a grotesque spire atop Literature’s estate; the latter levels the house entirely. 

 

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas–for my body does not have the same ideas I do. (Barthes 2011, 17)


 

Perhaps because my childhood visit to the garage imbued Grendel with a kind of untouchable sweetness, I felt that I needed to protect it from myself. I read the book for the course but did not write about it. I was absent from the session in which we discussed it. My selfishness was like that of schoolboy eros: if I speak my love, I will disappear. 

 

[This] is what the inter-text is: the impossibility of living outside the infinite text–whether this text be Proust or the daily newspaper or the television screen: the book creates the meaning, the meaning creates life. (Barthes 2011, 36)


 

Roland Barthes did not know his father. Grendel did not know his father. They were functionally unsired: products without processes. I had an occasional father–an inter-father: appearing periodically like a holiday tree or a tidal wave. My father’s mother, my Memaw, once delivered my father the following edict: “If you continue like this, you’ll be nothing but an uncle to your children.” Uncle: mere brother of the father (or the mother [perhaps a relegation of my mother’s lover to her brother]), separated from the role of progenitor by mere circumstance and a genetic leap like that over a garden wall. “Un jour ou l'autre on sera tous papa/ Et d'un jour à l'autre on aura disparu” (Stromae). Is this true? One thing for certain: the author-as-father disappears within the breadth of Literature. The author-as-father is not my father: more like that of Barthes' or Grendel’s: il a disparu.  

 

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost: a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. (Barthes 1977, 148)


 

In proclaiming the death of the author, Barthes expanded the exegetic criteria of literary criticism so as to encompass everyone who reads. If one is to be a literary critic, one must account for oneself in the reading of Literature. If one is a reader, one has already stepped onto the fertile ground of criticism. Thus a practically infinite space of meaning-making was opened. A question occurs to me: in keeping Grendel for myself–in wanting the book to only know me as reader rather than scholar–have I closed it/myself (a chimera made up of us both) off from the world-at-large? Have I enforced finitude where there ought to be the infinite? I think not. Once, Maurice Sendak sent a letter to a young fan. The boy was so overjoyed by the letter that he ate it. Reading within Literature is thus the practice by which one engages with the personal nature of practical infinity. 

 

* Criticism

For all of his open concern with Literature, Barthes did not publish a work of literary exegesis until 1970–ten years before his death: S/Z, a study of Balzac’s “Sarrasine.” The book was the result of a two-year seminar held at the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes, and thus cannot be said to have a single subjective origin. Like the castrato Zambinella at the heart of “Sarrasine” (the heart of the heart of S/Z), the work does not bear an erect and obvious organizational origin. But it does bear the seed of its own significatory reproduction (“seminar” sharing an etymological root with “semen” and “semiology”). S/Z is a work of structuralist criticism: its bones and joints are set with group intention (like the demiurgic singers of Tolkien’s Silmarillion) so as to graft the story’s flesh onto an operational skeleton–each “lexia” a named, functional, multivalent muscle. But the final lexia remains open: it is an orifice through which one can freely enter and exit. 

 

(561) And the Marquise remained pensive. * Pensive, the Marquise can think of many of the things that have happened or will happen, but about which we shall never know anything: the infinite openness of the pensive (and this is precisely its structural function) removes this final lexia from any classification. (Barthes 1974, 216)


 

“* Pensive”–the asterisk both sphincter and star: an aperture and a single node within a constellation (constellations themselves interpretative constructions: “Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty–he forgets that it is he who has created it.” [Nietzsche 145]). To be pensive as we behold this asterisk (in our beholding there is no knowing–one can only “think of many of the things that have happened or will happen”) is to account for infinity in the exegetic project within Literature: to wait before an open door, a single text, within a star system that is Literature itself.

 

This is the Tantra definition of our sexuality: The return to absolute innocence, absolute oneness. The greatest sexual thrill of all is no search for thrills, but a silent waiting. Utterly relaxed, utterly mindless. One is conscious, conscious only of being conscious. One is consciousness. One is contented, but there is no content to it. And then there is great beauty, great benediction. (Osho)
 

The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits. (Barthes 1995, 40)


 

To enter Literature as a critic is to enter as a lover: waiting (not patient: there is nothing to wait for), conscious (only of consciousness itself: which, of course, accounts for everything there is), thrilled. Criticism also involves reading and writing within Literature: these are not monadic and reified categories but elements of one immense organ. Is this piece (that I’m now/then writing; that you’re now/then reading) a work of criticism? I don’t know. Something that I do know: criticism is nothing less than a life-work; a life-spanning praxis. It’s what we do with Literature; what we do with our lovers; what we do within ourselves. Literature, as we’ve come to know it, is also life-spanning. Criticism within literature is thus the practice by which one engages with the practical nature of practical infinity.


Literature is not the Obeah Man. It is not the brimstone-bellied corp(us/se)-raiser, chimera-sorcerer from the outer reaches: the star-child arbiter of sense and nonsense who sits in shadow. Sense is not the point–there is, after all, no point to be made. Literature is not a space one could occupy… what is a house without walls? It is not a person to whom you can entreat. Literature is atopic and thus omnitopic.  Literature is within; Literature is without—

Appendix:

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An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative: 1975 lecture/essay by Roland Barthes responsible for the birth of Structuralist literary theory as we’ve come to know it. Asserts that the meaning-producing functions of narrative arise from the relations between elements of a narrative rather than the elements themselves. The Structuralist ethos spans outward from the interior of each narrative to account for whole narratives within a structure including all narrative works related through notions like genre–thus all things in the narrative realm are inevitably interrelated.

 

Bhagavad Gita: Seminal text in Hinduism. Prince Arjuna finds himself unable to enter a holy war against the Kauravas: he can’t justify the bloodshed. The deity Krishna, intervening as fathers do, assures Arjuna that bloodshed is inevitable and thus to fight for a holy cause is to act in accordance with one’s lord; to walk in the light atop the bones of one’s kin.

 

Death of the Author: 1967 essay by Roland Barthes. Asserts that “the author” is an insufficient, if not impossible, logical center by which a literary critic may derive meaning from a text. After Barthes, Literature has no father. Each reader is a fatherless child–all of us Hamlets–searching for an edict of meaning, a final and sensical admission, within a Literature that (if we are true to it) refuses to cease speaking. “List, list, O list!/ If thou didst ever thy dear father loved…” (Hamlet).

 

The Dead Father: 1975 novel by Donald Barthelme in which a troupe transports their father (sometimes an immense monolith dragged foot-first, sometimes a living swordsman) to his burial site.

 

Camera Lucida: 1980 study of photography by Roland Barthes. His final book and his final testimony to his deceased mother. Barthes posits that each photograph bears a “studium” and a “punctum”: 1) that which one has been taught to notice; 2) that which is noticed spontaneously. That which Barthes does not posit: that with each moment in life, the punctum changes. As we age, we are pricked again and again.

 

How to Live Together: Barthes’ first seminar/lecture as the Chair of Semiology at the Collège de France which was partially interested in the notion of the “idiorrhythmic”: a monastic mode of self-regulated community. Barthes was not a career academic and was only elected to the esteemed seat by the vote of Michel Foucault. Did Foucault assist in electing Barthes as a friend or as a colleague? Isn’t that an absurd question?

 

Inaugural Lecture: Roland Barthes’ 1977 lecture upon election to the Chair of Semiology at the Collège de France. In the lecture, Barthes earnestly renounces semiology–it is no longer of use to him–and thus accepts and rejects his new position at the zenith of French academia. To simultaneously accept and reject that which is given: a central temperament of Barthes (the neutral): the praxis of infinity in a finite world.

 

Karl Marx: “Commodity fetishism” as the phenomenon through which the labour-power of many, focused into the production of a product, congeals into the product-as-commodity. The process disappears into the product but remains obliquely perceptible.

 

Kurt Vonnegut: 20th-century fiction writer from whom the asterisk-as-asshole was famously and repeatedly received. The arrival of the doodle came in Breakfast of Champions, and was Vonnegut’s self-proclaimed attempt to empty himself out: “I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago” (Vonnegut 5). 

 

Osho: 20th-century Indian guru (Godman to his followers) of the Hindu tantras. In 1984, his followers committed the single largest bioterror attack on U.S. soil by infecting restaurant salad bars with salmonella.


Writing Degree Zero: 1953 work of literary criticism by Roland Barthes–his first work to be published. Through an analysis of historical style ethe, Barthes maps the process by which style is produced and thus formulates a model for truly original writing–its degree zero: while the writer’s style is always a response to the dominant style of their present, one can offer a style of writing that is “colorless” or “transparent.”

References:

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“Act 1, Scene 5,” Hamlet.  myShakespeare, 1 Dec. 2022. myshakespeare.com/hamlet/act-1-scene-5.

Barthes, Roland, and Richard Howard. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. Hill and Wang, 1995. 

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Vintage, 1993. 

Barthes, Roland, and Richard Howard. “Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977.” October, vol. 8, 1979, pp. 3–16. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/778222. 

Barthes, Roland, and Richard Miller. The Pleasure of the Text. Hill and Wang, 2011. 

Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Hill and Wang, 1974. 

Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. HarperCollins UK, 1977.

Barthes, R., Lavers, A., & Smith, C.. Writing Degree Zero. Hill and Wang, 2012.

“Cipher | Etymology, Origin and Meaning of Cipher by Etymonline.” Etymonline, www.etymonline.com/word/cipher.

Mukundananda, Swami. “Chapter 2 – Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God.” Bhagavad Gita, The Song of God, Jagadguru Kripaluji Yog, USA, https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/2.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. A Nietzsche Reader. National Geographic Books, 1978.

Osho. “This Very Body The Buddha.” Osho Complete Online Library, https://www.baytallaah.com/osholibrary/reader.php?endpos=354520&page=162&book=This+Very+Body+the+Buddha. 

“Stromae – Papaoutai.” Genius, genius.com/Stromae-papaoutai-lyrics.

“Utopia | Etymology, Origin and Meaning of Utopia by Etymonline.” Etymonline, www.etymonline.com/word/utopia.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions: Or, Goodbye Blue Monday! Turtleback Books, 1973.
Work, Theology Of. “St Ignatius Loyola: Teach Us, Good Lord, to Toil (Prayer) | Theology of Work.” Theology of Work, 23 Feb. 2023, www.theologyofwork.org/work-in-worship/prayer-material-for-services/closing-prayers/st-ignatius-loyola-teach-us-good-lord-to-toil-prayer.

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