The Tour!

I gave pretty short shrift to Roland Barthes’ Mythologies  when I “reviewed” it last year. But since the Tour de France is kicking off tomorrow, I thought I’d share an excerpt from the book on just that subject—to give you a taste for his analysis (with a few paragraph breaks inserted for readability):

“The Tour’s geography, too, is entirely subject to the epic necessity of ordeal. Elements and terrain are personified, for it is against them that man measures himself, and as in every epic it is important that the struggle should match equal measures: man is therefore naturalized; Nature, humanized. 

"The gradients are wicked, reduced to difficult or deadly percentages, and the relays-each of which has the unity of a chapter in a novel (we are given, in effect, an epic duration, an additive sequence of absolute crises and not the dialectical progression of a single conflict, as in tragic duration)- the relays are above all physical characters, successive enemies, individualized by that combination of morphology and morality which defines an epic Nature. The relay is hairy, sticky, burnt out, bristling, etc., all adjectives which belong to an existential order of qualification and seek to indicate that the racer is at grips not with some natural difficulty but with a veritable theme of existence, a substantial theme in which he engages, by a single impulse, his perception and his judgement.”

“The dynamics of the Tour itself are obviously presented as a battle, but its confrontation being of a special kind, this battle is dramatic only by its décor or its marches, not strictly speaking by its shocks.

"Doubtless, the Tour is comparable to a modern army, defined by the importance of its materiel and the number of its servants; it knows murderous episodes, national funks, and the hero confronts his ordeal in a Cesarian state, close the divine calm familiar to Hugo’s Napolean (“Gem plunged clear-eyed into the dangerous descent above Monte Carlo”). 

"Still, the very action of the conflict remains difficult to grasp and does not permit itself to be established in duration. As a matter of fact, the dynamics of the Tour knows only four movements: to lead, to follow, to escape, to collapse. 

"To lead is the hardest action, but also the most useless; to lead is always to sacrifice oneself; it is pure heroism, destined to parade character much more than to assure results; in the Tour, panache does not pay directly, it is usually reduced by collective tactics. To follow, on the contrary, is always a little cowardly, a little treacherous, pertaining to an ambition unconcerned with honor: to follow to excess, with provocation, openly becomes a part of Evil (shame to the “wheel-suckers”). 

"To escape is a poetic episode meant to illustrate a voluntary solitude, though on unlikely to be effective, for the racer is almost always caught up with, but glorious in porportion to the kind of useless honor which sustains it (solitary escapade of the Spaniard Alomar: withdrawal, hautiness, the hero’s Catilianism a la Motherlant). Collapse prefigures abandon, it is always horrible and saddens the public like a disaster. On Mount Ventoux, certain collapses have assumed a “Hiroshimatic” character. These four movements are obviously dramatized, cast into the emphatic vocabulary of the crisis; often it is one of them, in the form of an image, which gives its name to the relay, as to the chapter of the novel (Title: Kubler’s Tumultuous Grind). Language’s role is enormous here, it is language which gives the event- ineffable because ceaselessly dissolved into duration-the epic promotion which allows it to be solidified.”

—from Mythologies , by Roland Barthes

Mini Reviews: Pressfield, Barthes and Boyle

Here are some more quick-hit reviews to bring me up to date on my recent reading:

The War of Art , by Steven Pressfield

This is a book for anyone who wants to create something great, or accomplish some secret dream, and has had trouble getting started. “There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't and the secret is this: it's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.” He does a great job of naming the condition, and of helping you identify it in your life. And while I really liked this book as I read it, as I look back after a month or two, I’m hardpressed to remember what it was exactly that I’m supposed to do about it. This could just be a fault of mine, but maybe the solutions he provides aren’t as earth-shattering as the first read led me to believe. I guess I’ll have to take a second pass through it to make sure I didn’t just fall asleep at the wheel. But the good news is that it’s a book that would only take a couple hours to read in the first place. I liked it as a breazy, but well-written, get-your-butt-in-gear book, but it has yet to change my life so I’m going to withhold judgement.

Mythologies , by Roland Barthes

This one was at times fascinating, but at other times bordered on boring and arcane. Barthes is on a mission to uncover the real meanings behind various pop culture phenomena that interested him in the France of the mid 1950s. He might deconstruct the Tour de France, analyze a Marlon Brando movie, pick apart a French governmental policy, explain a recent court case or take a deep look at celebrity marriages. In some sections I found myself saying, “Yes, exactly! Why haven’t I ever seen it that way before.” Take this post I wrote after reading his thoughts on professional wrestling, for example. But on other topics, I found myself shrugging my shoulders and wondering, “Who really cares?” I imagine I would have enjoyed the book a lot more if Barthes and I shared the same cultural milieu, or if he was still around to  turn his attention towards the American culture of our day. But even so, when he wanders into semiology in the second part of the book (in essence, the explanation of his explanations) I quickly lost interest. It’s a pretty interesting literary touchpoint to have, though, so I’m glad that I read it. And I’ll admit that some parts were laugh-out-loud funny.

When the Killing’s Done ,  by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Before picking up this book, I had only read two stories by Boyle, “The Lie” and “ Rapture of the Deep,” both of which were excellent, and neither of which I can find for free online. So no links, sorry. I was excited to see what Boyle can do in long form. And while I can’t say the subject matter of this book was especially gripping (a battle over eradicating invasive species on the channel islands of California) it really is masterfully written and it will transport you into the clashing worlds of both environmental activists and government-employed ecologists. In doing so, Boyle does something pretty amazing: he makes you care almost equally about the protagonist and the antagonist, as he unveils the background experiences and rationale that drives each of them toward collision. I think the narrow focus of the themes keeps it from being a great, universally appealing book, but it’s certainly a good one.

      

Wrestlemania: Roland Barthes vs. "Jeff"

I doubt I would have picked up Roland Barthes’ Mythologies , if I hadn’t loved the heck out of The Marriage Plot  by Jeffrey Eugenides. But I did, so... I did.

Still, I feared I was headed for some hoity-toity philosophy text that I would find extremely hard-to-follow. Imagine my surprise when the first essay jumps right into the seedy world of professional wrestling. He makes some great points about how the petty bourgeois spectacle of wrestling is just the latest evolution of ancient Greek theater:

“There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque [Barthes here refers to characters in neo-classic French plays by Molière and Racine]. Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrong called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.”

Now, I once paid hard-earned money to see the Undertaker and the Ultimate Warrior clash in a so-called “Body Bag Match” in 1991, so this could just be me justifying my junior high dalliances, but I think there’s definitely some truth in what Barthes is saying- maybe wrestling isn't so much about maintaining a veneer of believability, but fills some deeper human need instead.

Of course, this guy would disagree:

Author Look-Alikes: French Heritage Edition

It's Independence Day here in the US. And really, what better day is there to focus on the doppelgangers of some prominent French-speaking writers? (We'll say it's in honor of General Lafayette, d'accord?)

Born to French Canadian parents, Jean-Louis "Jack" Kerouac bears a striking resemblance to Clive Owen.

And with the bags under his eyes and the plump, playful jowels, who can deny that Roland Barthes has got a little Jon Lovitz in him?

Jean-Paul Sartre's prominent laugh lines and funky lips brought Monsieur Buscemi to mind...

Still don't see it? Have a gander at those eyes. Zut alors!

Finally, no single writer has had more artsy, black-and-white publicity stills taken of him than Samuel Beckett. The near flat-top, the sunglasses, the futuristic, otherworldly quality of his portraits- all say one thing to me: This is what an octogenarian Max Headroom would look like, n'est pas?.

Am I wrong?