Barthes and Dyer

I made this link briefly in my own review of Zona. Kevin Breathnach at The New Inquiry:

Other writers have entire books that fit this description. Supposedly a study of the work of Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet ends up becoming an exhibit of Sartre’s own philosophical style. Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard’s examination of the Old Testament story of Abraham, turns out to be a presentation of the author’s own conception of faith. But insofar as it purports to analyze a single modern text, Zona probabaly bears the most striking resemblance to S/Z, Roland Barthes’ line-by-line analysis of Balzac’s Sarrassine. Granted, Dyer doesn’t write as systematically as the great semiotician (nor would we want him to try), but in Gore Vidal’s well-cut description of S/Z as wanting “not to assist either the text or the reader, but to make for his own delectation or bliss a writerly text of his own,” we find a detail that would fit Zona just as well, given one or two minor adjustments. Stitch the initials “S/Z” onto its lapels while we’re at it; let them stand for “Stalker/Zona”.

The link to Barthes is not made arbitrarily. Dyer’s writing has always betrayed both implicit and explicit admiration for Barthes’ work. He has praised his mentor, John Berger, for being “one of the first people in Britain to absorb the implications of what Barthes, Benjamin, and Foucault were saying.” In a review of Louis-Jean Calvet’s biography of Barthes, Dyer lauds him for evolving “a style of punctuation so uniquely his own that, even while holding the printed books in our hands, it feels as if we are reading his handwriting.” Dyer’s best book is his meditation on photography, The Ongoing Moment; by the same measure, Barthes’ best book is his meditation on photography, Camera Lucida, which Dyer just happens to have written a foreword to.

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