• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 900 0

inscription has a famous double reading: “I [Death] am also in Arcady” is one possibility. But the other—as Erwin Panofsky marvelously demonstrated3—pulls in an opposite direction: “I [the dead shepherd buried in the tomb] once also lived in Arcady.” Either “in the midst of life we are in death” or “death cannot erase the joys and accomplishments of living.” Or, indeed, the pleasures of writing and reading, since the speaking tomb here is gestured toward, and deciphered, by shepherds who trace the letters, carefully, with their fingers. “Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.” There is something shocking, as well as something puzzling, about this apparently dispassionate statement. We might think that only an artist like Mark Tansey would inscribe such a thing on a tomb. The absence of a qualifying word like only or just heightens the shock value: the sentiment seems devoid of pathos. We are used to regarding death as “the thing itself,” rather than as a figure for, much less a displacement of, something else. But in terms of that ambivalent thing called “closure,” too readily applied to an emotional state and a literary and interpretive act, death is a displaced name for a formal predicament. Ending does not end.

Productive Tensions

In her book Poetic Closure, the literary critic and theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith wrote convincingly about the “tensions created by local deferments of resolution and evasions of expectation” that are derived from the experience of art. Writing in 1968, Smith was prescient about developments that were later to take place in the field of cognitive theory, suggesting that terms such as “tension” and “states of expectation” are “likely to appear naïve and become obsolete when the psychology and presumably the physiology of perception are better understood.”4 Such tensions and expectations formed the central argument of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), which in turn provided a narrative arc for Peter Brooks’s argument about narrative in his 1984 Reading for the Plot. Here is Brooks, reading Freud, and envisaging the writing and reading processes as patterns of vital and sexualized tension:

Textual energy, all that is aroused into expectancy and possibility in a text, can become usable by plot only when it has been bound or formalized. It cannot otherwise be plotted in a course to significant discharge, which is what the pleasure principle is charged with doing … these formalizations and the recognitions they provoke may in some sense be painful: they create a delay, a postponement in the discharge of energy, a turning back from immediate pleasure, to ensure that the ultimate pleasurable discharge will be more complete. The most effective or, at the least, the most challenging texts may be those that are most delayed, most highly bound, most painful.5

When it first appeared, Brooks’s influential argument about the structure of plot and the deferral of discharge attracted some attention from feminist scholars who saw the pattern he adumbrated as that of (singular) male orgasm rather than (multiple) female pleasure.6 With or without this physiological substrate, the claim—made by Freud, Brooks, and a number of other theorists of narrative—was that the ending was both desired and withheld, and that the pleasure of waiting, of anticipation and of delay, was part of the pleasure of stories, storytelling, fiction, and plot. Freud’s discussion, which focused in part on what he called the death drive or the death instinct in human behavior, drew the same kind of analogy between the “little death” of sexual orgasm and the Big One.

Roland Barthes makes a discussion of “la petite mort” and the experience of reading literature central to his own literary theory—and his theory of pleasure in and of the text. Here is an extended description by Barthes of what he nicely calls “these dilatory maneuvers, these endlessly receding projects,” which, in his analysis, “may be writing itself.”

First of all, the work is never anything but the metabook (the temporary commentary) of