[Vwoolf] Serendipities on reading: Woolf and Barthes (in Kate Briggs This Little Art)

[Diane Reynolds]

In one of those serendipities, I today read an essay linked to in the Virginia Woolf list by Woolf called “Hours in the Library,” in which she distinguishes two kinds of readers, those who read because they love reading and those because they love learning. I am also reading a remarkable book on translation by Katie Briggs called This Little Art (which invokes Woolf—eg, Woolf’s question, can we say what is written today is better, an advance, over what was written 400 years ago?—and, of course, deals with some of our Trollpe list questions about Tolstoy translations). Briggs book is in a fact a meditation on writing and the creative act, and often invokes Barthes, who Briggs translated, and for whom I have a soft spot. Briggs understands translating and writing as equally creative processes. 

As it happened, the section of Briggs I read today also dealt with reading, and made an almost perfect parallel with the Woolf essay. Briggs ruminates on Iris Murdoch’s first novel, a book about a translator, and an image of dawn in it that particularly struck her, then moves into Barthes. She translated a late series of lectures Barthes gave on reading and writing. He asks why people write and answers because they read.  (Ellen will be interested that one the novels, along with Jane Eyre and Gide’s La Symphonie pastorale that made an impact on Briggs is Clarissa). But then, Barthes asks, why don’t all readers write? Like Woolf, he comes up with two branches of readers (Sontag, Briggs notes, picked up on Barthes fascination with “typologies”—his repeated use of “two facets,” “two ways,” two forms”—does Woolf do this too?—well, at least once!). His two readers are a bit different rom hers— he sees, first, the kind of passionate adolescent reader as a reader alone, and the second kind as those whose love of reading is “tormented by the desire to  do the same, in other words by a ‘lack.’” 

Barthes says that the kind of reading that develops into a passion for writing comes not just from reading, but from particular readings that move us. Would Woolf agree?  Barthes notes that it is not whole books that “sound across a lifetime”  but certain sections, even a single paragraph. For example, for Barthes, it is a paragraph about a heliotrope from Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave—one that Proust also uses. Briggs paraphrases or translates Barthes as saying —and this sounds similar, though not identical, to Woolf’s “moments of being”—that a particular passage produces in him “a sudden dazzle of language, it moves me in pleasure.” He says that it “caresses” him each time he reads it. “We could call this beauty … this deep pleasure. … a kind of luminosity that is eternal and mysterious.” Barthes likens it to falling in love. 

Not only was I struck by the serendipity of reading, quite by accident, both Woolf and Barthes/Briggs on readers and “two reader” types, but with how powerfully I resonated with Barthes on the idea of parts of books, and especially, single passages that resonate with us and produce a “sudden dazzle.". As some know, I have spent the last two years, along with reading new works, revisiting literature of my early youth, in part as part of my quest to discern what constitutes a “literature humane” and it has been a revelatory experience. I have been thinking much about how there are certain passages or vignettes that melt me (as they do Barthes), or that jump out for me, and yes, certain parts in the same work I just never reread. I suppose this a common experience—and different for everyone—and I would love to know what in Austen in particular Woolf returned to again and again. It helps me feel a kinship across time with people like Austen, Woolf, and Barthes who were truly readers in the deepest sense of the word.