Rejection and/as Influence

One of the potential drawbacks of the methodology adopted for this book is that it is heavily skewed towards positive experiences with Barthes. If a writer adapts her encounter with a theorist into her poetics, it is unlikely that she finds him inimical to her creative, aesthetic, and political values, or indeed that she is merely bored by him. We have seen some traces of the latter in the correspondence around Language writing; Susan Howe and Carla Harryman, as we have seen from their correspondence, seem to have been fairly bored by Barthes. Although Howe and Harryman's boredom is not one that seems to have generated a great deal of work in the way that, for instance, more enthusiastic encounters with ‘Is There Any Poetic Writing?’ seem to have done, this is not to discount it as a strategy for reading Barthes. Barthes himself is often bored, and yet his work is curiously absent from literary histories of boredom; Neil Badmington suggests that this is because it does not fit into an overarching narrative about boredom and the human condition, but is more situational and bodily. This is a response that, when identified, can be discussed; indeed, boredom for Barthes is part of the definition of the text of bliss, which ‘discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions’. But this jouissant, discomforted reading – which may be our experience of reading certain poetry or even Barthes himself – is ultimately still a positive engagement. How then do we locate those writers who found what Barthes had to say so objectionable that they rejected him entirely?

When I first embarked on this project I imagined I would, somewhere along the way, devise alternatives to the word and concept of ‘influence’. The irony would be too much to bear if it ended up constructing a literary genealogy of the kind that – developments in a broader, more social historicism notwithstanding – still exerts a powerful pull over much thinking about literary history. However, no such alternatives emerged, and against my better judgement I have made some genealogical moves.