Longer Views by Samuel R. Delany Read Free Book Online Page B

miscommunication and misinterpretation. What is revealed is the discursive form of the two characters’ mutual misunderstanding, the structure of their inability truly to meet. True, we do get a vision from the fictive Crane of that utopian space where complete communication can occur. But what we are left with, finally, is a vision of two men who communicate only imperfectly and incompletely, who quickly retreat to opposite sides of the bridge—all on an achingly beautiful day charged with subversive possibilities, but pervaded by the tragicomic order of discourse.
IV
    For the reader positioned comfortably within the traditional discourse of the modern essay, the origins of which I began this Introduction by positing, it may come as a surprise to learn that the earliest essay Montaigne wrote which would eventually appear in the
Essais
was, in fact, an extended essay, entitled “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Sebond had written a
Natural Theology
whose principal thesis is that the natural landscape is one gigantic text—literally a second book of God, which Man in his post-lapsarian state has lost the ability to read. Montaigne attempted to defend Sebond’s thesis by doing an extended close reading of both Sebond’s text and those of its detractors. Over the course of that extended reading, however, Montaigne manages to argue himselfinto a state of near-total skepticism: by the end of the “Apology,” Montaigne has arrived at an image of a landscape-text that is opaque to analysis and in constant flux. 31
    After that first, long work, Montaigne’s remaining essays generally restrict their focus to the concerns of the subject. We no longer see extended analytical attention paid to texts. We no longer see the topics under consideration dissolve into indeterminacy and undecidability. Instead we see meditations in which the sovereign self is the authoritative ground for analytical inquiry. Does this shift in focus trace the inevitable course toward the subject which any work aspiring toward “universality” must take? Or is this shift to be read as a restricting of horizons—a retreat from the vagaries of a mysterious reality, a mysterious play of language, towards seemingly more stable certainties?
    Yet when Montaigne occasionally contemplates the effectiveness of using his own self as an anchor for his meditations, he finds that it, too, begins to dissolve under extended scrutiny: “I am unable to stabilize my subject: it staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness . . . I am not portraying being but becoming . . . If my soul could only find a footing I would not be assaying myself but resolving myself” (CE 907–8).
    Even at the origin we have posited for it, then, the essay is a contestatory site, a turbulent confluence of—at the very least—the medieval Book of Nature and the more-recently-emerged Renaissance Book of the Self.
    With this point in mind, let us return to Barthes for a moment.
    In her Introduction to the essay collection
A Barthes Reader
, Susan Sontag notes that a major feature of Barthes’s prose is its “irrepressibly aphoristic” quality. 32 She goes on to say: “It is in the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making” (BR xii). Yet doesn’t this characterization of the aphoristic style—not far, after all, from Barthes’s own characterization, or indeed from the root meaning of the word—suggest that Barthes’s style is at odds with his message?
    It would seem to depend on where we posit the metaphysical ground of our argument. For Sontag, looking specifically at his later, more autobiographical work, “Barthes is the latest major participant in the great national literary project, inaugurated by Montaigne: the self as vocation, life as a reading of the self” (BR xxxiii). If we