Does no one love Roland Barthes anymore, or was he loved too much? I find a forty-year-old copy of Empire of Signs, which he first published in 1970, filed under ‘Japan’ in the airless, windowless basement of the library. Microfiche and old card files in their wood or metal alphabetised boxes live here too. Books classified in the 900s—maybe they were once on the top floor of the building—now they are in the basement, the back wall of the basement.
The smell of long unopened books, the scent of dust, fraying paper and faded covers, dog-eared corners, rough random underlining, gnomic marginal scribbles to self by numerous, loving readers, broken spines. Forty years ago, this copy was handled until it cracked open.
I start at the back of the book. The small yellow envelope pasted in to hold the now vanished library card, alongside various stamps, stickers, and barcodes for various modes of cataloguing. Once this book lived in the 800s. Someone decided to change it to the 900s—taking it away from Barthes’ other titles and filing it with publications on a country and culture that Barthes did not believe he was writing about. Between 1998 and 2007, when the practice of stamping books with a due date on the lending slip stopped, there were only ten borrowings. Given the physical state of this copy, from 1984 (when it was acquired) to 1998 there must have been many, many more.
The spine is not only cracked, it is held together with both cloth and clear tapes. The cover has been handled so much there are only shadows of what was once depicted. The initials ‘RB’ survive because they are indented, and the faintest outline remains.
This book is forty years old. Forty years is not old, but this copy is physically old, touched by many hands and eyes. My relationship to these words and meanings and objects changes as I do. Sometimes I understand, sometimes not. Meaning, like time, bounces.
In Empire of Signs, inspired by three trips to Japan in the 1960s, Barthes becomes aware of a ‘visual uncertainty’. He writes this in the frontispiece but, it is the rear of the book that interests me most. Barthes’ closing words on page 110 are, ‘…there is nothing to grasp.’
He reflects, ‘The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it: …to know, positively refracted in a new language, the impossibilities of our own....’ I begin a search for Anglophone writing on Barthes by his contemporaries, and for the texts he might have consulted on Japanese thought. I find many lost books. Their traces in the library catalogue evaporate on the shelf, either taken by those who loved to read them, or they had fallen apart and not been replaced, catalogue not updated.
My supposed familiarity with Barthes’ supposed subject is made as precarious by the things that have been eradicated or radically altered (street corners, railways stations, certain buildings, for example) as those which remain precisely the same in every detail as they were when I first visited in 1984.
1984 is the same year the library acquired this copy of Empire of Signs. I fall back on myself. I have almost no knowledge of the language. I must read gestures, inflections, glances. Perhaps this is like reading braille. Though here I am mostly deaf. I do hear the murmuration of immense flocks of humans who do, more or less, understand each other. I am only secure in my alienation. Always newborn. Always not quite able to grasp.
I visit the seventeenth-century Katsura imperial villa where I am forced to watch my feet because the pathways have been precisely designed to be admired and to cause a certain unsteadiness so that my eagerness to see the gardens and buildings is constantly thwarted by the feeling I might fall. I look up to see the view and I am immediately required to look down so as not to stumble. This is an architecture of tantalisingly partial vistas of gardens, pavilions, and the closely detailed ground. Less about the buildings and more about what I can see of the context, the subtle dynamism of the path and view, ever changing, not aiming for stability, for home. Seventeenth-century imperial villas were not constructed for daily life, but a fictive life of poetry, parties, of constant movement, and pleasure.
Then, in 1960, this villa is photographically reconstructed as proto modernist through the excision of certain details, for both ‘Oriental’ and ‘Occidental’ imaginaries. The focus shifts away from context and views out, and firmly into architectural details, including the interior of the main building. An interior I am not allowed to enter except through photographs, architectural plans, and written descriptions. Not being able to go inside, to stand on the moon viewing platform overlooking the lake, to only imagine the quivering reflection of the moon. A building whose exterior walls are uniformly and always blank—opaque white screens.
I have read that it is preferable to look at a reflection, for example, of the moon in water, rather than at the moon itself. A clear, direct view is not required or needed. The clarity modernism demands is only interesting in itself and for its motivations.
The context is always shifting just as I am always about to fall, whether physically or psychically. It does not matter if I am in an imperial garden, a cinema, or on a train. The train, like the cinema secures me for the duration of a journey. I am speeding through a landscape at the mercy of the timetable. I am observing the unspooling of a panorama, punctuated by moments at railway stations. There, whether it is me waiting to dismount, peering through the glass at the platform, or those waiting on the platform to embark looking at me through the glass, there is a moment, nearly a scuffle, certainly some dishevelment. In order to continue the journey those inside and outside the carriage momentarily pass through a space from one realm to another.
I take the train to the library. The indeterminate space of the train, for once not only running but also on time. Racing across the plains to the city, the carriages filled with restless, talkative people. I am trying not to listen to them, I am reading, I am looking out the window at the plains, the railway stations, the only static things as the panorama unfolds, blurs, then the outskirts of the city. The rhythms of people alighting and climbing aboard.
Trains are always surrounded by gritty things: tracks, clinkers, sidings, detritus alongside the tracks where objects small and large are dumped. On the platform I am thrilled by its arrival, approaching slowly, a mechanical capsule to take me somewhere else. Not too fast, as a plane is, and connected to the ground through wheels and tracks, allowing me to give in to reverie, unlike driving. And involuntarily I observe people I have never seen before and will probably never see again.
On the way home on the train, I read Barthes on the density of Tokyo railway stations and their centrality (in an ‘empty’ culture) to local life. This ebb and flow remain unreconciled in Barthes’ book, I think. Deliberately so given his interest in finding his way to a rendezvous, and back again in an environment with no street names or numbers.
Barthes refers to emptiness as form, so he knew how Buddhism understands ‘empty.’ Perhaps ‘openness’ is a more useful translation. If the ‘empty’ is ‘open’ then I can visualise it as something that has continuous form, like a Klein bottle. Glancing out the window, it is dusk. As we whisk past a lone farmhouse, I see the dim light of single bulb under an old fashioned, fluted glass shade, closely followed by a sliver of the moon rising above.
Chris Marker read Empire of Signs because he mentions it in Le Dépays 1982—a photo essay on Japan which he published before his film Sunless 1983 was released. Did they know each other? Marker was six years younger than Barthes but so far, I find no evidence that they did cross paths.
There are overlaps between Empire of Signs and Sunless—the sense of the fragmented self, built from stuttering memories, negotiating unknown terrain, always about to fall. Marker is to the point with his camera, wanting his subjects to look at him. Barthes is oblique, admiring from afar, for example the eyes of a boy—‘Under a porcelain eyelid, a broad black drop: the Night of the Inkwell....’ Both are interested in ornament. Both are seduced by trains and what it means to be transported. Both find themselves displaced, though Marker was the more assiduous traveller. Barthes found pleasure, Marker a kind of melancholic ecstasy—different kinds of sensuousness.
Following his reading of Sei Shonagon and her list of things that quicken the heart, Marker searched for equivalent images to make Sunless. He mentions finding these images, often, in the most ordinary, the banal. For me, the female dancers at the Odori neighbourhood festival in their trance of uniformity in movement is hypnotic. They step neatly yet ecstatically down the street on the front of their wooden geta, hands moving in the air, faces as likely to be composed as rapt. It is possible to be both. The dancers wear hats shaped like half-moons, flat on the sides of the head and low over the eyes but high at the back, exposing the nape of the neck.
At the opening of Sunless, Marker quotes from TS Eliot’s 1930 poem Ash Wednesday, though I prefer the subsequent two lines—‘And what is actual is actual only for one time / And only for one place.’ I have watched Sunless and read Empire of Signs many times. Each time they are different. There is something about continuous form in both that makes me always return to the beginning.