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Though he and I worked in the same business — the creation of meaning from scribbles, and the diligent destruction of those meanings in the hopes of finding other meanings hiding behind the first set — I never met Roland Barthes. I went to France, of course, many times, and sometimes saw men on the street who resembled the pictures of Barthes I had seen in magazines. Once in a patisserie I thought I heard the girl say "Monsieur Barthes" to a customer who did, I must say, look quite like Monsieur Barthes. But I am not the kind of man to disrupt another man's morning, and soon enough he and his croissant were gone. I raise the ghost of Barthes not because I am particularly fond of him — I found his work to be glib, and his reputation to be preposterously inflated — but because I think that his ideas are useful for understanding the achievements, however modest, of Ben Greenman. Before I discuss Barthes at greater length, I should mention that Mr. Greenman's new book, Superbad, for which I served as a kind of mentor/guide/editorial Sherpa, has just been published. At least two eagle-eyed readers, one of whom is a young acquaintance of mine whose identity I will protect as a result of certain intimacies that have recently arisen (the pun, while not intended, is no less awful for its origins in happenstance), have noticed that Mr. Greenman's book contains a number of typographical errors. That number is four. When I was first alerted to this fact, I feigned a mixture of surprise and ignorance, screwing my face up into an expression that resembled a surprised, ignorant person. "Really?" I said, stretching the syllables of the word like taffy. "I don't see how that could have happened." But if casual conversations are a place for falsehood, composed prose is a place for truth, and now I can reveal that I not only see how that could have happened, but that I conspired to make that happen. Here I will attempt a more explicit confession: I planted four errors in Superbad. I warned Mr. Greenman in advance. "Don't do it," he said, although with a light tone that belied his interest in the experiment. "I mean it," he added, insincerely. I listened to the undertone rather than the words themselves. I did it. Some readers may perceive this as an act of villainy. For example, the young acquaintance I mentioned earlier, the one whose identity I cannot disclose, was as opposed to the notion as Mr. Greenman. "How could you even think of doing this?" the acquaintance said. "An author works for months, even years, to have a book without errors, and you add four errors back in at the last minute? Isn't that a form of sabotage, or at least vandalism?" I laughed and laughed. Nothing is as humorous as naïveté. Now I will turn to Roland Barthes, the French critic whose work I do not respect but find, nevertheless, useful. Must a man respect a hammer to recognize that it can drive a nail? In Camera Lucida, an extended reflection on photography to which Barthes gave the rather leaden subtite "Reflections on Photography," Barthes distinguishes between two different means of viewing a photograph, and terms them studium and punctum. The studium is a mode of artistic reception that Barthes likens to "likingnot loving." It is, in short, the normal order of things: we observe a work of art, whether a book in our lap or a painting on the wall, with a calm and somewhat analytical affect. We are aware of the world around the work of art as well as the work of art itself. In short, we appreciate. Punctum, though, is something quite different. When a specific detail dislodges itself from the rest of the work and comes at the viewer at dangerous speed — in fact, when it not only comes at the viewer but actually finds its target — that is an incidence of punctum. The word is related to puncture, of course, because that is what art does in these cases. It punctures us. That is Barthes's framework, and though I have taught it for many years to students, and watched them chew the idea like a cow working at cud, I have rarely thought that it was any more than a rather silly way of passing an hour in an undergraduate course I stopped caring about decades ago. Perhaps that is because I have never seen it in full flower. That was my thinking as I sat with the manuscript of Superbad in my office. I was alone, as men often are when the greatest of ideas occur to them. Edison was alone when he thought of the lightbulb. Otto Turner was alone when he thought of the elastic band at the top of a pair of socks. And I was, as I have said, alone, when it came to me that I might insert four typographical errors into Mr. Greenman's manuscript and, rather than harming the work at all, improve it. That I might, furthermore, take a fitfully brilliant but sometimes flatfooted collection of fiction, and surgically implant not just one punctum, but four. This is where Barthes, Mr. Greenman, and I were suddenly, wonderfully, in concert. The typographical errors I inserted span a wide spectrum, from trivial to consequential. However, they all serve the same function: when readers run across them, they stop in their tracks. They reread the sentence that contains the error. They try to puzzle out the correct word, to repair the grammatical or spelling ruptures. The moment before they discovered the error, they were reading at high speed, amused with Mr. Greenman's wit, respectful of his talent, perhaps intrigued by his obvious (and to me somewhat inexplicable) love for women. The moment after the discovery, they are fully engaged, as much creator as the creator himself. I made the four changes, my hand trembling with the tremors of my own brashness and brilliance. Inexplicably, Mr. Greenman was not happy when I announced what I had done. "Are you nuts?' he said. "I told you not to do it. I couldn't have been clearer. If this wasn't a phone call, I would jelly your nose with a tire iron." I laughed and laughed. Threats of violence are almost as humorous as naïveté. Adding to the risibility of Mr. Greenman's anger is the fact that his own work so neatly encodes the distinction between work and error-within-work. When you purchase Superbad, as you peruse it for the errors, as you thrill to your discoveries, please notice that at least a handful of the pieces ("Getting Nearer to Nearism" and "The Theft of a Knife" are the most obvious, but there are others) treat this issue explicitly. If Mr. Greenman claims that he does not udnerstand the value of a mistake, Mr. Greenman is a liar. Next: Day Three
OTHER McSWEENEY'S STORIES:
Ben Greenman Week On a Book Entitled "Superbad" Doctors and Patients By J.B. Orenstein Relatively Safe By Daniel Lazar Clues By Christopher Painter More Grim Stories By Stephany Aulenback |
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