Word Grain

WITH THE SUBJECT is oneself, what is there to say. Roland Barthes believes that "very often, you know, in interviews...a somewhat sadistic relationship is established between the interviewer and the interviewee, where it's a question of ferreting out some kind of truth...I only know that it's a rather traumatic experience that provoke in mean "I have nothing to say response."

The trauma is hardly in evidence in The Grain of the Voice, a collection of interviews that appeared in various journals from 1962 to 1980; what is in evidence is the voice of Roland Barthes, preserved and displayed: "We have embalmed our speech like a mummy, to preserve it forever." Yet an important difference exists--no death has occurred, nor will it ever. The voice, though disembodied, continues to speak, familiar, reassuring, exasperated and sometimes exasperating.

Ironically, or perhaps only to be expected, the questions of the interviewer, often appallingly inane, come to us as interruptions, unsolicited intrusions. We resent the seemingly gratuitous impetus, the impulse that prompts the question: we hold our breath as if for an expected blow. Barthes' voice moves ahead, seeks us out, and it is this trajectory that abort, itself, fails when the other voice, harse, discordant, "somewhat sadistic," breaks in. If there is place for the reader, the privileged spectator in this staging without a stage, it lies in the crying of the question, "how do you know when he has finished?"

Yet, in the most successful interviews (e.g. "The Advective is the Statement of Desire" and "On the subject of Violence"), the speech seems to approach the rhythm of conversation while avoiding its customary banality. A fine tactical maneuvering, an interplay of voices prevents the interview from slipping into the atrophy of an artificially into the atrophy of an artificially sustained monologue it moves it advances, it retreats. The finest moments leave the reader, the eavesdropper, the innocent voyeur, with a mingled sense of horror and satisfaction at the audacity with which Barthes engages in verbal fencing: (from Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 10 77)

Roland Barthes, we see very little of you, and you rarely speak in public; aside from your books, we know almost nothing about you

R B. Supposing that to be true, it's because I don't much like interviews I feel trapped between two dangers either one enunciates positions in an impersonal manner, leading people to believe that one considers oneself a "thinker" or else I constantly say "I" end up accused of egotism.

Or, best of all: "There was a time when intellectuals considered themselves to be the "salt of the earth...'" R.B.: 'For my part, I'd say that they are more like the refuse of society..." Even when faced with questions of the more tasteless kind, annoying to us precisely because we feel that we must remain, somehow, on the "side" of the interviewer, Barthes pirouettes and slips away, polished, elusive, unnameable.

THE COMPLETE fulfillment of this desire this greedy expectation which engenders such questions as. "So, then the lover who speak is really you, Roland Barthes?" (Playboy. 9 77), would result in a "perversion" of sorts. As it is, we remain disengaged but eventually innocent, legitimate spectators rather than accomplices, "Perversion," Barthes says, "quite simply, make one happy": though this may be a principle of "bliss," a certain "pleasure" lies with this chaste silence. "Your question is a good one, not because I have an answer ready, but because it touches on something absorbing to me."

"It isn't criticim, it's a biography Beautiful done," Barthes remark on George Painter's Proust in another interchange. Yet another is a sense ion which biography, or seeds of biography which rest in the interstices of these questions and answers constitutes a type a protocriticism--not so much a voyeuristic attempt to divine the "real" writer behind the text, to pry into the realm of his "personality" in the hopes of somehow catching him "off-guard," but, in the senses, rather, of a self-reading, a reading of the body of one's own writings, the writing of one's own body. "Do you need your books? What I mean is, do you reread them?" R.B.: "Never, I'm too afraid..."