I'll never be an evaluator of fiction determining which books are "good" and which are "bad," so this will not be a review, but it will be a series of thoughts, or fragments, on reading Alexis Hall's Glitterland.
As I read Glitterland over the weekend, a romance
that captures the complexity of mental health, I was struck by the ways in
which the narrative explores and expresses anxiety, depression, mania. What was
so striking is the seeming impossibility of putting to words the poetics of
depression and anxiety. What sorts of words does one use to describe the
overwhelming nature of depression, which often leaves quite as impression?
To speak about
depression and anxiety is to confront a linguistic register that is at once
inexpressible and entirely expressible, as Roland Barthes says about trying to
“write love,” which is “to confront the muck
of language: that region where language is too
much and too little, excessive
(by the limitless expansion of ego,
by emotive submission) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes
and levels it” (A Lover’s Discourse
99).
Little did I
know that by the novel’s close, the depressed, anxious hero would indeed call
upon Roland Barthes, by name, on a variety of occasions – indeed, more
particularly, the author, Alexis Hall, quotes from Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse in the novels close,
as we work towards the declaration of love: "Roland Barthes argued" the hero explains, "a phrase as commonly used as the one I think we're discussing is essentially a meaningless signifier." The literary critic might well be ready to declare to the novel, "I love you!"
The novel
directs its attention at the literary critic--it might well be that Glitterland is itself A Lover's Discourse between an author and reader. I had imagined a reading of Glitterland informed by Roland Barthes –
this in and of itself is not terribly impressive, I’ve long felt that if
Popular Romance Studies were to develop a list of “Required Reading” that Barthes’
A Lover’s Discourse would be included
– but what is interesting, to me, is what we do with an author who almost
pre-empts his critics and explicitly tells the critic-reader about Roland
Barthes.
The
quotations from Roland Barthes, it must be admitted, are well known; a quick search online
shows them listed on numerous websites of quotations. Hall, however, does more than
merely quote Barthes. Hall provides a biography: “Barthes. French literary
critic. Gay. Perhaps overly fond of his mother. Prone to nervous breakdowns.”
All
of this, of course, could be found from an encyclopaedia entry on Barthes, or Wayne
Koestenbaum’s introduction to A Lover’s
Discourse, in which Koestenbaum speaks of Barthes’s “matrophilia.” And in A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes will speak
of a wanting “maternity and genitality.” In Mourning
Diary, Barthes writes, “You have never known a Woman’s body! I have know
the body of my mother, sick and then dying.”
While I can
imagine any number of ways to negate the presence of Barthes, to suggest that
the author of the book is not a Barthesian, I cannot help but admit that my own
initial reaction was that Barthes was present. Perhaps Alexis Hall and I share
a love for Barthes, and while I’ve theorized romance in terms of Barthes, Hall
has written romance alongside Barthes (much like The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides).
But what is a
literary critic to do when an author openly names a precursor, his
protagonists’s “hero” as Roland Barthes? Is Alexis Hall teasing his
critic-reader? Am I now to complete a Barthesian reading of the novel? Am I
over-reading the novel if I insist upon a Barthesian reading that extends far
beyond A Lover’s Discourse? I am
quite certain that I see much more than A
Lover’s Discourse in the novel. Is there something to be said about the way
Barthes speaks of “shimmer” (a word that appears a handful of times in the
novel) while Hall speaks of “glitter” (a word Barthes uses in The Preparation of the Novel, “writing
as a tendency means the objects of writing appear, glitter, disappear)? What about notions of fragmentation,
brokenness, shattering alongside Barthesian jouissance?
Or, the juxtaposition between pleasure
(used 24 times in the novel) and bliss
(seven times)? Or the way the novel tries to teach its reader about punctum rather than studium, or the writerly
versus the readerly text (even though
the novel won’t use these terms)?
If as Susan
Sontag suggested, “interpretation is
the revenge of the intellect upon art,” has Alexis Hall
managed to get the last laugh?
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. New York:
Hill and Wang, 2010.
- - -. Mourning
Diary. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
- - - . The
Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
- - - . The
Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at Collège de France
(1978-1979 and 1979-1980). Ed. Nathalie Léger. Trans. Kate Briggs. New
York: Columbia UP, 2011.
Hall, Alexis. Glitterland. Hillsborough, NJ: Riptide Publishing, 2013.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. “Foreword: In Defense of
Nuance” in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
by Roland Barthes. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays.
New York: Picador, 1966.
In 2013 it sometimes seems as though when it comes to historical romances, only a duke will do. In contemporaries it helps if a hero's got fifty shades of greenbacks.
