IV
For the reader positioned comfortably within the traditional discourse of the modern essay, the origins of which I began this Introduction by positing, it may come as a surprise to learn that the earliest essay Montaigne wrote which would eventually appear in the Essais was, in fact, an extended essay, entitled “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Sebond had written a Natural Theology whose principal thesis is that the natural landscape is one gigantic text — literally a second book of God, which Man in his post-lapsarian state has lost the ability to read. Montaigne attempted to defend Sebond’s thesis by doing an extended close reading of both Sebond’s text and those of its detractors. Over the course of that extended reading, however, Montaigne manages to argue himself into a state of near-total skepticism: by the end of the “Apology,” Montaigne has arrived at an image of a landscape-text that is opaque to analysis and in constant flux.[31]
After that first, long work, Montaigne’s remaining essays generally restrict their focus to the concerns of the subject. We no longer see extended analytical attention paid to texts. We no longer see the topics under consideration dissolve into indeterminacy and undecidability. Instead we see meditations in which the sovereign self is the authoritative ground for analytical inquiry. Does this shift in focus trace the inevitable course toward the subject which any work aspiring toward “universality” must take? Or is this shift to be read as a restricting of horizons — a retreat from the vagaries of a mysterious reality, a mysterious play of language, towards seemingly more stable certainties?
Yet when Montaigne occasionally contemplates the effectiveness of using his own self as an anchor for his meditations, he finds that it, too, begins to dissolve under extended scrutiny: “I am unable to stabilize my subject: it staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness… I am not portraying being but becoming… If my soul could only find a footing I would not be assaying myself but resolving myself” (CE 907–8).
Even at the origin we have posited for it, then, the essay is a contestatory site, a turbulent confluence of — at the very least — the medieval Book of Nature and the more-recently-emerged Renaissance Book of the Self.
With this point in mind, let us return to Barthes for a moment.
In her Introduction to the essay collection A Barthes Reader, Susan Sontag notes that a major feature of Barthes’s prose is its “irrepressibly aphoristic” quality.[32] She goes on to say: “It is in the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making” (BR xii). Yet doesn’t this characterization of the aphoristic style — not far, after all, from Barthes’s own characterization, or indeed from the root meaning of the word — suggest that Barthes’s style is at odds with his message?
It would seem to depend on where we posit the metaphysical ground of our argument. For Sontag, looking specifically at his later, more autobiographical work, “Barthes is the latest major participant in the great national literary project, inaugurated by Montaigne: the self as vocation, life as a reading of the self” (BR xxxiii). If we posit the self as the metaphysical ground — and this places us squarely within the discourse of the transcendental subject — then we must agree with Sontag that Barthes was not fundamentally a political writer, that he merely “put on the armor of postwar debate about the responsibility of literature,” only to take it off again later; that he was “the opposite of an activist… one of the great modern refusers of history” (BR xix, xxii); that in his later work he systematically “divested himself of theories,” presumably to leave the unadorned, central, transcendent self open for all to view (BR xxxv). From this interpretation of Barthes arises “the awareness that confers upon his large, chronically mutating body of writing, as on all major work, its retroactive completeness” (BR ii).
A compelling reading. And, in its striving for closure, for centrality, for the transcendence of the historical, an all-too-familiar one — as Barthes himself has shown us so convincingly. Such “retroactive completeness” is surely the retroactive imposition of precisely the discursive imperatives that so much of Barthes’s work was clearly positioned against. No, Barthes’s life and work did not end with the neat, closed parenthesis of the final revelation of his transhistorical self: he was, after all, struck down by a laundry van — a sign of the object-world of our industrial culture if there ever was one.
Yet Sontag is indubitably right about Barthes’s style — it is irrepressibly aphoristic. Moreover, Barthes’s privileging of thematic/synchronic readings, which we noted earlier, would seem to be an emblem of the very discursive imperatives which so many other components of his work were contrived to contest. How are we to view Barthes, then? What are we to do with him? Are we to bracket all that was radical in him and place him on the altar of the sovereign self? Or does another, longer view suggest itself — and another course of action?
Here we might do well to recall Delany’s words near the end of “Reading at Work”:
As I conclude this minimal bit of work — of interpretive vigilance, of hermeneutic violence, of pleasure, of aggression — my eye lifts from the text and again strays, glances about, snags a moment at a horizon, a boundary that does not so much contain a self, an identity, a unity, a center and origin which gazes out and defines that horizon as the horizon is defined by it; rather that horizon suggests a plurality of possible positions within it, positions which allow a number of events to transpire, move near, pass through, impinge on each other, take off from one another, some of which events are that an eye looks, a voice speaks, a hand writes. (RW 117)
In this ontology of the open horizon — which relativizes discourse to rhetoric, refuses closure and the transcendence of history, places the subject back into its object-context, and privileges the active, social self over the passive sovereign self — surely the proper response to Barthes would be to carry Barthes’s project forward. But that project is not the “national literary project, inaugurated by Montaigne” of making self-consolidation into public spectacle. It is, rather, Montaigne’s other project, marginalized by subsequent discursive practices but in fact preceding the rest of Montaigne’s work: the project of reading texts into their own radicalism, of writing the extended essay. It is that project, abandoned by Montaigne, which Barthes and the post-structuralists have begun to take up again — and which Delany carries significantly forward here.
By ordinary standards — by ordinary readerly expectations — these essays, with their intricate formal strategies, their remarkable erudition, and their sheer length, may seem daunting, intimidating, “forbidding.” Yet far more so than the seemingly more “accessible,” monologic works which currently dominate the literary landscape, these essays are, fundamentally, invitations. As we begin them — and indeed as we finish them — we must hold in our minds one of the closing comments of “Reading at Work,” which suggests our place within the discursive space Delany is exploring:
31
See O. B. Hardison, Jr.’s “Binding Proteus,” from
32
Susan Sontag, “Introduction,” from