Reading A Lover's Discourse

Barthes's 1977 book Fragments d’un discours amoureux was literally a ‘bestseller’ when it was first published in France, and its readership in English (as A Lover's Discourse: Fragments) has also been wide and varied. This chapter will take in a broader field of poets and texts, but will still attempt to describe why they take Barthes, in particular, as a point of reference. Describing the text's great virtue as ‘nuance’, Wayne Koestenbaum writes of the ‘bliss – atopical, beside the point – that [Barthes] showers upon anyone willing to take him at his word’. As we have seen, various experimental poets interested in the pleasures and ‘erotics’ of writing turn to Barthes to describe them. So far we have looked at this with texts such as The Pleasure of the Text and Writing Degree Zero, which are more obviously devoted to the study of literature. But when the love poem survives postmodernism and takes on new and diverse forms, A Lover's Discourse becomes an important source for a few.

These are the poets who will be considered in this chapter. The previous three chapters have been dedicated to considering specific engagements with Barthes: that of Forrest-Thomson, that of Silliman and his group, and that which happens in poetry magazines and journals. By contrast, this chapter selects those writers who engage with a particular idea in Barthes – the treatment of love and the emotional life – and uses it as a point of departure. This is not to say that the poets drawn upon in this chapter are not engaged with philosophy, criticism, and ideas. Indeed, the use of Barthes in each of the three main texts under consideration is reflected in overlaps with genres other than poetry: Anne Carson is also a classicist, and her poetry has both essayistic and novelistic tendencies; Kristjana Gunnars is a memoirist and cross-genre writer; and Deborah Levy is best known as a novelist and playwright. However, the key distinction here is that all use Barthes to write about love, not about poetics. Their texts seek to understand love as a set of codes even as they conceive of it as a numen. A Lover's Discourse itself shows that the literature of love is, like the study of poetry in Forrest-Thomson, a ‘garrulous study’ – because it is so difficult to talk about.