Puzzling
I haven’t yet emerged from the reverie prompted by my discussion of Roland Barthes earlier this week. I don’t want to dig too deeply into semiotics today, but it did trigger another set of associations for me, one that felt like it was worth pursuing.
When I was in college, and first taking the courses that would cement my status as an English major, I remember taking English 11 from George Soule. Professor Soule would later gain some small amount of fame on Jeopardy—the year I graduated, he appeared on and won the Seniors Tournament! A few years earlier though, he was responsible for the second course in the Brit Lit sequence, which I took as a sophomore (I think?). The only thing I remember about the course was getting a B- on my final paper for the course, and the only thing I recall about that paper was Prof. Soule’s final comment, which I’m certain that he intended as a criticism of my work. He told me that I treated poems like puzzles.
It was a weird moment, to be so clearly seen on the one hand, and yet on the other, to be emphatically told that this was wrong. I have always been one of those rare “math brain, humanities major” people, but I’m not sure that “math brain” even quite covers it. I’ve talked before about my love for crosswords, and when i was growing up, I used to devour books of logic problems (and don’t even get me started on Games Magazine, RIP). The more I think on it, the more I’m convinced that my fondness for math in my early years was a subset of the deep appeal that puzzles have had for me throughout my life.
So it’s no wonder that I was drawn to structuralism, semiotics, and the early work of Roland Barthes. His book S/Z was a tour de force analysis that, quite literally, took Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine” and broke it down into 561 “lexias,” or units of meaning (usually about a sentence or two), and then reassembled it by explaining the codes through which each of those lexias operated in the story. His overarching thesis was that realist or naturalist fiction was no less artificial (and/or mediating) than any other literary style. Not only did I end up drawing on that same approach for the essay I submitted to graduate schools, but one of the codes (“proairesis”) ended up playing a vital role in the invention chapter of my book. Roland Barthes made it all right for me to treat poems as puzzles.
I wrote on Tuesday about how Barthes’ thought changed over the course of his career, and I think that, ultimately, S/Z was one of the hinge points for that change. I may be projecting my own attitudes onto him here, but I believe that, having written an entire book that painstakingly revealed the puzzly underpinnings of literature, Barthes arrived at a place where he understood that while we can treat poems as puzzles, we shouldn’t make the mistake of treating poems only as puzzles.
The problem with reducing literature (or really any sort of art) to the component elements through which it generates its meaning is simple: art doesn’t have a “solution” the way that a crossword or a jigsaw puzzle does. I’m not sure I want to reduce this to the cliché that works of art are more than the sum of their parts, but there’s something to that. In one of Barthes’ final books, Camera Lucida, he discusses photography in terms of the studium and the punctum. The studium is the vast body of cultural knowledge that allows us to understand how color works, how perspective can shape our understanding and reaction to a picture, how framing and focus contribute to our reception, etc. But punctum is the thing about a specific photo that “pierces” or “strikes,” that can’t be explained, that which is personal to a single viewer.
Semiotics, in some sense, then, is an analytic method that gets at the relation between a work of art and the studium from which it emerges. It explains that work in terms of the features that all of us can recognize, understand, and appreciate. What semiotics can’t ever tell us is what that work means or why it matters to me. Last week, I wrote that “Our thoughts vibrate with frequencies that aren’t entirely under our command, and we never have as much control over language as we think we do,” and what I was articulating, however unintentionally, was that writing isn’t reducible to studium—there are always puncta lurking, circulating, haunting our texts, and we never know when (or whom) they will leap out to strike.
As I’ve gotten deeper into the work I’m doing for my next book, it’s become clearer to me how much I need to reckon with irony. Ian Bogost wrote in Play Anything that irony is the “rhetorical strategy of saying (or doing) one thing but meaning another,” but perhaps you see the problem: language always means another. There’s a productive, collaborative, generative version of this, and I think that that’s what Barthes was getting at in his late career, in his discussion of writing. In his autobiography, he explains that
What I write about myself is never the last word. Open to these different futures, my texts are disjointed, no one of them caps any other; the latter is nothing but a further text, the last of the series, not the ultimate in meaning: text upon text, which never illuminates anything.
For me, and I suspect for many of us who embraced blogging at one time or another, this is utopian. I love when someone takes something I’ve written and riffs on it in a way that connects it to something new or prompts to see my own work in a different light. It’s also why so many of my posts here end up starting by referencing something that I’ve happened across that week. But I’m not doing so in order to have the “last word”; rather, I’ve got more words, and sharing them is an invitation for others to supply yet more words of their own.
But there’s an uglier side to irony as well, enough so that Bogost calls it “the great error of our age,” and I’m not sure I’d disagree. I got at this a little bit on Tuesday, the degree to which pervasive irony is corrosive. If we become so accustomed to bad-faith discourse (“thoughts and prayers,” e.g.) that we simply see it everywhere, it becomes impossible to hold ourselves or others accountable, leading to a tyranny of the shameless, those for whom saying one thing and meaning another is as natural as breathing itself. As we’ve learned in recent years as the various species of irony (trolling, knighting, sea lioning, gaslighting) have proliferated, the slope gets pretty slippery.
But that’s for another day. While I was working on this post, and back through some of the ideas that I’ve inherited from Barthes, it occurred to me that a healthy portion of my skepticism and wariness regarding generative AI writing tools is coming out of that same place. I’m not sure that I want to take this detour, but I do see the signs. We’ll find out.