Analysis Of The Sublime By Roland Barthes

In his short book, Roland Barthes enabled a conversation about how and why we engage with a text. It establishes and outlines two categories of text and yet the two classifications of pleasure and bliss are still unable to fully remove themselves from the other. One cannot find bliss in the text without first finding pleasure. It seems to be more of a two-step process to achieving bliss through a text rather than it instantly becoming a blissful text. It is not a dismissal of the classifications or of Barthes’ ideologies, rather it is the notion that the two can only exist in a symbiotic relationship: one cannot exist without the other. It is first an identification or realization of pleasure then a transition into blissful action. However, …show more content…
Burke establishes that the Sublime can produce pleasure. The Sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction (Burke). Burke’s notions of pleasure and the Sublime can easily be seen as conducive to Barthes’ ideologies of texts of pleasure and bliss. However, it still establishes that a moment with the Sublime is the unconscious end goal of texts of bliss. Barthes wrote, “The text you write must prove to me that it desires me,” (p 6) which creates a connection between the reader and the text opening the door for an encounter with the Sublime. Edmund Burke’s idea of Sublime embodies desire as well as Barthes’ clear attachment to desire through pleasure and bliss of texts. Additionally, it is helpful to note Immanuel Kant’s definition of the Sublime and how that definition partners with the general notion of aesthetics pertaining to Barthes. Kant identifies the object of the Sublime is the idea of reason and total freedom (Burnham) which enables a clandestine moment with the Sublime then furthering the notion that the Sublime cannot be pre-ordained and is above a text of bliss in the hierarchy. A text that enabled a personal moment with the sublime for myself as well as the subsequent pleasure and bliss within the text is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was a moment with the sublime that inspired horror. As per Barthes’ requirements she was avant-garde a she created the genre of science fiction, and in her writing which then enabled a sublime experience for the reader. Sir Frank Kermode suggests that the Sublime is a heightened pleasure (p 6) and thus nearly impossible to achieve, as noted in his book Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of