Reaching the tortoise
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In August 1977 Roland Barthes noted in his journal that literature was like religion for him. He never cloistered himself in the written word, however, and an interest in the visual arts also runs through his work. Some of his contributions to that field, including his two texts on Cy Twombly, have been available in English for years, but until now there was no published translation of all except you, his study of the drawings of Saul Steinberg.
Barthes dated this little-known text December 23, 1976, but it remained unpublished until 1983, three years after his death, perhaps because, as Deirdre Bair reported in Saul Steinberg: A biography (2012), both Steinberg and Barthes appear to have been dissatisfied with the project.
The book is not a conventional account of Steinberg’s art. Instead all except you approaches its subject via forty-eight short observations – Barthes calls them "fragments" – that consider, among other things, the relationship between abstraction and representation; connotation; metamorphosis; intertextuality; repetition; and Steinberg’s troubling of the distinction between drawing and writing.
It is often difficult to know which pieces by Steinberg Barthes has in mind – his descriptions of the works are brief, cryptic and unaccompanied by illustrations. This is not to berate the publisher of the translation. The original French edition contained only nine images, and the version reprinted in Barthes’s Oeuvres complètes included just one: all except you has always been exceptionally enigmatic.
Alongside his translation of Barthes’s words, Joe Milutis provides a commentary that is critical, illuminating, playful, self-reflective and sometimes puzzled. ("Again, I cannot find or imagine what drawing Barthes is describing. The Impertinence of Barthes – another trope?", he writes in response to a fragment titled "Im-pertinence".) Milutis also reveals the official dating of the text to be inaccurate: a reference to the rediscovery in Paris of the medieval sculpted heads of the Kings of Judah means that at least part of the book was written in 1977.
In the penultimate fragment Barthes worries about his achievements. "I feel like I haven’t said anything", he writes, adding that he "ran after the being of this art", but found that Steinberg remained ahead of him and that the drawings are "inexhaustible". "I cannot catch up […] I am Achilles, who is never able to reach the tortoise", he declares. Yet this predicament, he concludes, is "the very definition of reading, as long as the philologists don’t get involved". We might add that it is also the very definition of reading Barthes on Steinberg, even when a careful translator is involved.
The post Reaching the tortoise appeared first on TLS.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/all-except-you-roland-barthes-book-review-neil-badmington/