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Incidents

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Published posthumously in 1987 as a series of uncollected texts seven years after Barthes' death, "Incidents" unfolds an intriguing bricolage of observations, memories and homoerotic desires in a journal-like fashion.With "The Light of the Sud Ouest" Barthes traces back his childhood years to the rustic french countryside anchored between the Pyrenees and the "Silver Coast" of the Atlantic Ocean. Writing the country as a literary body, Barthes portrays his marking adolescent years in sensuous details. His "royal road" of childhood is paved with memorable fragrances, meteorological peculiarities of the Southwest, the charming splendors of the little villages in the Bearn region, and the natural and rich Basque countryside. The powerful images and oberservations evoked in "Incidents," the second text in this compilation, unmasks stunningly Barthes' most inner and profound desires. The random fragments of the text from various cities and regions of Morocco exhibit Barthes' homoerotic lust in an affectionate and passionate manner. The overt, sometimes emotionally charged segments reveal his love for the Moroccan people, the richness of its language diversity, and for young men. The reader turns into critc when strolling through the text and is incited to assemble the various fragments of perceptions that unveil not only Barthes' love for men, but also his sensitive insight into the "Maghreb" region. The reader will be seduced by descriptions of the terrace cafes overlooking the "Djemmaa el Fna" square in Marrakech or the oriental "savoir-vivre" in the souks. "Soirees de Paris," a chronological journal kept in Paris, depicts Barthes' emotionally charged evenings in Paris during the August and September of 1979. From his attraction to young hustlers to intellectual writers like Jean Genet, "Soirees de Paris" comprises the language of a sometimes sad, desperate, but motivated author/critic during the last stages of his life. Since his publication of the "Death of the Author" in 1968, Barthes performs with "Incidents" a framgentary, open-spaced text requiring the reader's participation to be fully appreciated. The performance of a discontinuous text invites the reader to actively engage in one of the most ardent and passionate journals and descriptions of one of the most influential critics of this century. "Incidents" offers compelling individual histories and insights into Barthes' intriguing life.

Recently, I was reading "Incidents" and the beauty of one particular statement blew me away. In the essay called "The Light of the Sud-Ouest" Barthes says: "For to read a country is first of all to percieve it in terms of the body and of memory, in terms of the the body's memory"... "That is why childhood is the royal road by which we know a country best. Ultimately, there is no Country but childhood's". That struck me as unbelievably beautiful. Each of the 4 essays in this tiny volume has at least one or 2 such beautiful tidbits. Unlike much of the convolution in Barthes other works, This book is easy to read, easy to understand, and simply lovely prose.