4.10.2006
Michelet (Narrative)
Title
Barthes, Roland. Michelet. New York: Hill and Wang, 1987.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Barthes states that his goal in this totally weird book (way weirder than Electric Animal, by the way) is to "restore this man [Michelet] to his coherence...I have merely sought to describe a unity, not to explore its roots in history or in biography." (3) The way Barthes does this is by elaborating the themes of Michelet's writings - "In Michelet's work, there is a critical reality independent of the idea, of the influence, and of the image: it is the theme." (201) More on these themes later - and interdicts his own discussion with examples from Michelet's writing. It's all very much about materials, metaphors, eating and women. It is weird, I told you. Michelet suffered from migraines, really bad migraines, and this is important in understanding his work - he is a historian who is always dying. "Michelet afflicts himself with the most terrible historical diseases, he takes them on himself, he dies of History the way one dies - or rather the way one does not die - of love...At the same time this death survived and reapeated acts as a nutriment, for it is this death which constitutes Michelet as a historian, makes him into a pontiff who absorbs, sacrifices, bears witness, fulfills, glorifies."(19) Michelet eats history through the vertical style of the tableau: " Contrary to narrative, which reduces the historian's body to the rank of an object, the tableau (the overview) placed Michelet virtually in God's position." (22) The tableau allows for a "series of brief, frequent plunges...Michelet's [sentence] swallows itself - destroys itself."(24) Prose is important to Michelet (not poetry) as it is the "product of a fusion and not a collection." (28) Prose bring unity, not union, which is inferior since to unity which doesn't just bring constiutive parts together, but detroys them in making a "zone of absence, in which everything is once again possible, presented in the incubation of cordial warmth: this is freedom." (ibid) Michelet describes process - he is influenced by Lamark, as opposed to Darwin. He despises suspension, inaction, history is action. Michelet opposes Grace and Justice. Grace is feminine, it is about chance (linked to gambling) and phatasm. The Novel is of grace and deflects from History. History is linked with death: "The historian is not at all a 'reader' of the past, and if he reorganizes History, it is not on the level of ideas, of forces, of causes or systems, but on the level of each carnal death...The historian is an Oedipus (he retrospectively solves human enigmas)...The historian is precisely the magus who receives from the dead their actions, their sufferings, their sacrifices, and gives them a place in History's universal memory."(82) Michelet makes judgements on the body as a humor, immediately. Blood is really important to Michelet: "blood is not at all a sealed biological element, strictly belonging to this or that person who possesses his blood as he might possess eyes or legs. It is a cosmic element, a unique and homogenous substance which traverses all bodies, without losing, in this accidental individuation, anything of its universality. Itself a transformation of the earth (of bread and of the fruits that we eat [at least in the case of the exalted Frenchman]), it has the immensity of an element."(128) Blood is also really important as menstruation as the place of women in/for history for Michelet: "The circular flux is the very archetype of a beneficient fixity which can finally unite in itself movement and identity. Thus, Woman begins where History ends. History knows only a linear, two-phase dialectic, it is Grace or Justice, narcosis or combat, and its only movement is that of a kind of savage and jerky fecundation...Which means that Historic Time, straight as a wire, but thereby fugitive, irreplacable, is set in opposition to the Circular Time of stars, seas, and women, the time of rest and eternity." (149) Ok, so riffing of this gender stuff (see the note in Other Thoughts) Michelet believes the People to be also outside of History as Woman is: "the People is not a collection of determined classes, it is an element defined by its double sex, its power of incubation, i.e., ultimately, its potential of warmth." (186) The People is an element.Ok so I said I'd get back to theme. For Michelet, theme is iterative. "the theme resists History." (201) "The theme is in effect substantial, it brings into play an attitude of Michelet's with regard to certain qualities of matter: the historical object can always be reduced to the disgust, the attraction, or the bewildermint it produces."(202) The theme is a system. The theme is reducible. Finally, "it is not excessive to speak of a veritable hermenuetics of the Micheletist text. We cannot read Michelet in a linear fashion, we must restore to the text its strata and its network of themes: Michelet's discourse is a kind of cryptogram, we must make it into a grid, and this grid is the very structure of the work. It follows that no reading of Michelet is possible if it is not total: we must resolutely locate ourselves within the closure."(206)
Keywords
Dying, Theme, Tableau, Grace, Justice, History, Warmth
Other Thoughts
"the narrative is always conducted toward a display, an epiphany, and the tableau is never closed, its goal is an anxiety, the historian's reprise of a humbled incarnation." (23)
"For Michelet the historical mass is not a puzzle to reconstitute, it is a body to embrace. The historian exists only to recognize a warmth."(81)
"All history depends in the last instance upon the human body."(87)
"History is male, Syria is female. But in erotic terms, there is only a spectator and his spectacle; Michelet himself is no longer either man or woman, he is nothing but Gaze; his approach to woman compels him to have no specifically virile characteristic."(153)
Barthes, Roland. Michelet. New York: Hill and Wang, 1987.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Barthes states that his goal in this totally weird book (way weirder than Electric Animal, by the way) is to "restore this man [Michelet] to his coherence...I have merely sought to describe a unity, not to explore its roots in history or in biography." (3) The way Barthes does this is by elaborating the themes of Michelet's writings - "In Michelet's work, there is a critical reality independent of the idea, of the influence, and of the image: it is the theme." (201) More on these themes later - and interdicts his own discussion with examples from Michelet's writing. It's all very much about materials, metaphors, eating and women. It is weird, I told you. Michelet suffered from migraines, really bad migraines, and this is important in understanding his work - he is a historian who is always dying. "Michelet afflicts himself with the most terrible historical diseases, he takes them on himself, he dies of History the way one dies - or rather the way one does not die - of love...At the same time this death survived and reapeated acts as a nutriment, for it is this death which constitutes Michelet as a historian, makes him into a pontiff who absorbs, sacrifices, bears witness, fulfills, glorifies."(19) Michelet eats history through the vertical style of the tableau: " Contrary to narrative, which reduces the historian's body to the rank of an object, the tableau (the overview) placed Michelet virtually in God's position." (22) The tableau allows for a "series of brief, frequent plunges...Michelet's [sentence] swallows itself - destroys itself."(24) Prose is important to Michelet (not poetry) as it is the "product of a fusion and not a collection." (28) Prose bring unity, not union, which is inferior since to unity which doesn't just bring constiutive parts together, but detroys them in making a "zone of absence, in which everything is once again possible, presented in the incubation of cordial warmth: this is freedom." (ibid) Michelet describes process - he is influenced by Lamark, as opposed to Darwin. He despises suspension, inaction, history is action. Michelet opposes Grace and Justice. Grace is feminine, it is about chance (linked to gambling) and phatasm. The Novel is of grace and deflects from History. History is linked with death: "The historian is not at all a 'reader' of the past, and if he reorganizes History, it is not on the level of ideas, of forces, of causes or systems, but on the level of each carnal death...The historian is an Oedipus (he retrospectively solves human enigmas)...The historian is precisely the magus who receives from the dead their actions, their sufferings, their sacrifices, and gives them a place in History's universal memory."(82) Michelet makes judgements on the body as a humor, immediately. Blood is really important to Michelet: "blood is not at all a sealed biological element, strictly belonging to this or that person who possesses his blood as he might possess eyes or legs. It is a cosmic element, a unique and homogenous substance which traverses all bodies, without losing, in this accidental individuation, anything of its universality. Itself a transformation of the earth (of bread and of the fruits that we eat [at least in the case of the exalted Frenchman]), it has the immensity of an element."(128) Blood is also really important as menstruation as the place of women in/for history for Michelet: "The circular flux is the very archetype of a beneficient fixity which can finally unite in itself movement and identity. Thus, Woman begins where History ends. History knows only a linear, two-phase dialectic, it is Grace or Justice, narcosis or combat, and its only movement is that of a kind of savage and jerky fecundation...Which means that Historic Time, straight as a wire, but thereby fugitive, irreplacable, is set in opposition to the Circular Time of stars, seas, and women, the time of rest and eternity." (149) Ok, so riffing of this gender stuff (see the note in Other Thoughts) Michelet believes the People to be also outside of History as Woman is: "the People is not a collection of determined classes, it is an element defined by its double sex, its power of incubation, i.e., ultimately, its potential of warmth." (186) The People is an element.Ok so I said I'd get back to theme. For Michelet, theme is iterative. "the theme resists History." (201) "The theme is in effect substantial, it brings into play an attitude of Michelet's with regard to certain qualities of matter: the historical object can always be reduced to the disgust, the attraction, or the bewildermint it produces."(202) The theme is a system. The theme is reducible. Finally, "it is not excessive to speak of a veritable hermenuetics of the Micheletist text. We cannot read Michelet in a linear fashion, we must restore to the text its strata and its network of themes: Michelet's discourse is a kind of cryptogram, we must make it into a grid, and this grid is the very structure of the work. It follows that no reading of Michelet is possible if it is not total: we must resolutely locate ourselves within the closure."(206)
Keywords
Dying, Theme, Tableau, Grace, Justice, History, Warmth
Other Thoughts
"the narrative is always conducted toward a display, an epiphany, and the tableau is never closed, its goal is an anxiety, the historian's reprise of a humbled incarnation." (23)
"For Michelet the historical mass is not a puzzle to reconstitute, it is a body to embrace. The historian exists only to recognize a warmth."(81)
"All history depends in the last instance upon the human body."(87)
"History is male, Syria is female. But in erotic terms, there is only a spectator and his spectacle; Michelet himself is no longer either man or woman, he is nothing but Gaze; his approach to woman compels him to have no specifically virile characteristic."(153)
# posted by SMRT : 11:21 PM
