Empire of Signs - Roland Barthes
Okay! So I have to admit that that was pretty confusing - though it was a pleasure to read. I tend to like this kind of writing - flowery I guess you could call it - but I’m not quite there in being able to understand such literature... What sensei was saying in class was basically that Barthes was taking elements of Japanese culture that he observed and writing/creating his own fictitious world based on his observations in the foreign country. Like a lot of pieces we’ve read, rawness was a huge part, along with ideas of chopsticks, delicacy, instruments, and presentation not just of food but of bodies as well. Interesting! Ideas that stuck out at me and quotes that I feel are important I noted above!
- “...to descend into the untranslatable, to experience its shock without ever muffling it”
- In Japanese there is a divide between animate and inanimate ... "the very structure of Japanese restores or confines there beings to their quality as product...cut off from...the living thing.”
- There is a sanctuary in the wall of “murmuring” of an unknown language.
- The body is of great importance (gestures, clothing, expression included) for it is the body that has “its own narrative, its own text.”
- Since Japanese food is usually raw - merely cut up - you are the one who composes what you eat by selecting when and how you put something in your mouth.
- “ Japanese food appears to be: a written food, tributary to the gestures of division and selcetion which inscribe the foodstuff, not on the meal tray..., but in a profound space which hierachizes man, table, and universe. For writing is precisely that act which unites in the same labor what could not be apprehended together in the mere flat space of representation.”
- Cut up food and chopsticks relationship - one because of the other and the other because of the other. A lot of control - to choose and carry - in chopsticks.
- Sukiyaki - kind of a metaphor for conversation?
- Tempura is ironic - oily and fried - but still light and lacy - freshness is based on oil freshness
- “It is you who eat, but it is he who has played, who has written, who has produced.”
Okay! So I have to admit that that was pretty confusing - though it was a pleasure to read. I tend to like this kind of writing - flowery I guess you could call it - but I’m not quite there in being able to understand such literature... What sensei was saying in class was basically that Barthes was taking elements of Japanese culture that he observed and writing/creating his own fictitious world based on his observations in the foreign country. Like a lot of pieces we’ve read, rawness was a huge part, along with ideas of chopsticks, delicacy, instruments, and presentation not just of food but of bodies as well. Interesting! Ideas that stuck out at me and quotes that I feel are important I noted above!
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