Pointless Stories, Storyless Points Roland Barthes Between “Soirées de Paris” and “Incidents”

Pointless Stories, Storyless Points Roland Barthes Between “Soirées de Paris” and “Incidents” Ross Chambers Un livre inverse peut être conçu: qui rapporterait mille incidents, en s’interdisant d’en jamais tirer une ligne de sens; ce serait très exactement un livre de haikus. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes1 Rosencrantz: Incidents! All we get is incidents! Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action? Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead2 W HEN BARTHES’S INCIDENTS WAS PUBLISHED post­ humously,3 there was a mild outcry in the world of the Paris literati. There are two relatively unremarkable text' in this volume (“ La lumière du sud-ouest” and “ Au Palace ce soir. . .” ); the scandal bore on two others, “ Incidents,” described by the editor as “la notation, le recueil de choses vues et entendues au Maroc, pour l’essentiel à Tanger et à Rabat, puis dans le sud, en 1968 et 1969” (8), and “ Soirées de Paris,” a series of diary-like accounts of his evenings’ insignificant doings that Barthes kept between August 24 and September 19, 1979, just after writing a critical study of the “journal intime” as a genre for Tel Quel and not long, of course, before his untimely death. Because these two texts, especially the latter, are open about the author’s homosexual­ ity, it was felt in some quarters that one of the more reticent of France’s gay male intellectuals had been “outed,” and in a manner thought (not without homophobia) to demean the great man’s memory. I’m inter­ ested, though, in the non-narrative or antinarrative formal qualities of the two texts, which I take to be examples of the episodic, “ cruising” genre of loiterature4; and I want more particularly to look at what they tell us about the kind of intellectual I call “ critical” —the intellectual who doesn’t fit easily into either of the Gramscian categories of the “ organic” or the “ traditional” —when that intellectual is “ on vacation” or “taking time out,” and isn’t, ideologically speaking, on guard. More specifically still, I’ll ask what these two mildly scandalous texts, written ten years apart and relating to rather different life experiences, have in 12 Su m m er 1994 C h a m bers common. What differences connect them? What incidences—interac­ tions, intersections, intrications, mutual interruptions—join them? In the heyday of the British Empire, POSH (standing for Port Out Starboard Home) was a notation used by shipping clerks to indicate the most prestigious passengers on the ships that plied the thin red line pass­ ing through Suez. Without too much artifice, the acronym might be taken as a way of articulating the intrication of at home and out there that defines the various economies—commercial, cultural and in this case sexual—of the colonial enterprise, an intrication that has, if any­ thing, intensified in the so-called postcolonial era. In that sense, we’re all “ posh” ; and in choosing to look at the at home/out there intrication that relates Barthes’s two texts (one supposedly Parisian, the other patently Moroccan), I’m not attempting therefore, to make one of modern culture’s “ poshest” (most prestigious) intellectuals into some kind of scapegoat. I’m looking for a way to describe the texts, and to read their sadly missed author, as paradigmatic. It’s not because they’re exceptional but because of the sense in which they’re ordinary5that these texts—themselves unsystematic explorations of the everyday (the familiar everyday of Paris and the everyday of the Oriental other)—seem interesting and indeed have a certain poignant quality. Not the trivial Barthes nor yet Barthes the cultural icon, but the ordinary Barthes— “ R.B.” —is the fellow I want to spend some time with here. * * * The main genres of gay male narrative tend to be autobiographical, but their thematics is no less characteristically one of encounter. For obvious reasons, gay subjectivity can scarcely regard itself as autono­ mous, or fail to take account of itself as a relational phenomenon, tra­ versed by the complex dynamics of alterity. The coming out story (say Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man or J...