Book 55 - Roland Barthes "A Lover's Discourse"

Book 55 - Roland Barthes "A Lover's Discourse" (Vintage)






Love has been written and sung about since our species first learned to produce language, and its effects on the emotions, the heart, the personality, and the body have been studied, recorded, analyzed, and celebrated from the dawn of history. What interests Barthes more than these, however, is the effect of love on the mind, on the intellect, specifically that part of the mind that produces language. For Barthes, love exists as an outpouring of language: “I’m so in love!” “I love you so much!”, “I love him”, “I love her” etc. Love exists, then, in its most developed form, as an ejaculation, as discourse produced by the lover, whether mental or uttered. What Barthes does is to focus on this discourse, but in such a way as to enact it rather than to analyze it.

Book 56 - Joanna Moorhead "The Surreal Life Of Leonora Carrington"

Joanna Moorhead "The Surreal Life Of Leonora Carrington" (Virago)





The chatty style makes it an easy read about a long and eventful life but it’s lacking deeper examination of Leonora Carrington’s career. I ended up ambivalent about her as a person – on the one hand cheering someone who let nothing hold her back from what she wanted to do, but on the other hand, finding her lack of empathy and concern for others problematic. She came from a life of money and privilege and seemed happy to use others for her own ends with no regard for their feelings, taking money and aid from the family she affected to despise, selling off a house, and leaving France when her lover was interned as an “enemy alien”, marrying a man who could get her into Mexico only to leave him to live with her artistic friends as soon as she was comfortably settled in the country (though in this story he’s not overly attached anyway), and a host of other things large and small.

On the whole, I wanted a deeper understanding of her as an artist, her motivations and inspirations, but then, as it says towards the end of the book she believed it was up to the viewer to interpret her work and refused to comment on it herself - in which case I’ll say I find it a little cartoonish and nowhere near as gripping and nightmarishly inventive as the sublime Dorothea Tanning. Sorry Leonora!