Far Out With Roland Barthes

D.A. Miller, who has raised coyness to a critical art form, continues to practice it delightfully in Bringing Out Roland Barthes, where he approaches the French critic at that intersection of gay politics/identity/community/practice and literary criticism that has emerged in the past few years as queer theory. He sets out to articulate the present-but-never-explicit links between gay sexuality and Barthes's tests, and in doing so "proposes an album of moments...in what journalism might call my 'homosexual encounter' with Roland Barthes."

The album is inspired by Incidents, a collection of Barthes's late writings recently translated by Richard Howard, packaged together with Bringing Out Roland Barthes in matching bindings, bound together back-to-back with a wide paper band that depicts the two authors' eyes. Barthes gazes out, solemn, from one side of this literary package; Miller smiles impishly from the other. Just as it is hard to tell which book to read first--is the Miller an introduction or a commentary to the Barthes?--it is impossible finally, to say where the encounter between these two men begins or what its outcome might be.

Like Bringing Out Roland Barthes, Incidents is also an "album," consisting largely of excerpts from two journals kept by the French critic, lovingly chroncling loveless encoutners with hustlers and half-requited crushes on younger men. Miller defers his thoughts on Incidents until the end of Bringing Out Roland Barthes, but the "snapshots" in his album might be seen as responding to Barthes's pre-AIDS world by focusing on distinctly post-AIDS aspects of U.S. gay male culture. One of the book's finest moments is its discussion of gym culture and the erotic ethic of display that underpins and surrounds it (not, perhaps, originary to the epidemic, but unquestionably inflected by it). Any pursuer of the well-muscled male body, of any sexual orientation, would do well to read the "Two Bodies" section--which includes Miller's inimitable exposure of the sexual politics behind boxer shorts and tighty-whities.

The "Two Bodies" section also provides a neat example of the structuring of the Barthes/Miller encounter. Beginning with either an anecdote from Barthes's work, or one from his own experience as a gay man, Miller then finds some underlying gay male project or condition of which this incident is a manifestation, and moves to the alternate side of the encounter to find its manifestation there. In "Two Bodies" the "gay male cultural project" is that of "resurrecting the flesh" in a culture that closets, isolates and armors male flesh rather than expose it for communal display, and Barthes participates in this project when "without at all failing to insist on the body's material lovability, [he] is moved to conceive this body in its most embarrassed state."

When Barthes reports feeling "bludgeoned" by a feeling of exclusion at a wedding ceremony, in an incident that Miller relates at the beginning of his section of "The Novelesque," Miller ties this to an exclusionary heterosexual, accomplished through the near-synonymity of the oedipal drama and marriage with the traditional novel. That is, queer lives might in fact be consisered queer exactly because they don't conform to these stories, and Miller suggests that "gay fabulation...has been inseparable from a series of experiments needing to tamper with the most deeply imprinted aspects of traditional narrative form." Barthes enters this series of experiments with a narrative practice that Miller joins him in naming "the novelesque without the novel." The technique is characterized by an "indifference to overall architechtonics," and a choice to pursue "an incident dislodged from the teleology of plot."

Incidents is, of course, an exercise in the novelesque, but one which nonetheless arrives at a sense of closure in its last piece, "Soirees de Paris." Barthes concludes with the sad understanding that he will give up his pursuit of boys, to be left only with the consolation of hustlers. Miller reads "Soirees" as an exercise in nursing a broken heart, a prolonging of mourning for the reassurance of knowing the heart can still feel enough to mourn. The analogy to the epidemic that Barthes died too soon to know is obvious but lopsided--the constant mourning that AIDS has brought to gay male communities would seem to overflow the edges of a broken heart. This is the gay condition that has no corresponding manifestation in Barthes's work, and the one to which Miller leaves us searching for a way of responding.