My boy Barthes

"Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills , grants euphoria; the text that comes form culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading" (Barthes 110, 1973).

"Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language" (Barthes 110, 1973).

- At first, reading these 3 and a half pages, I was very confused. To be honest I still am a little confused. I have had to read paragraphs over and over. It is quite funny as I sit here not knowing what most of these words mean but also kind of sad. What I think Barthes is trying to say is that people read to fill themselves with pleasure and not to challenge their minds. To not make their minds uncomfortable. That culture has created a "text of pleasure" that goes with culture and everything that you know. But on the other hand the "text of bliss" challenges those ideals. But reading a  "text of bliss" does not necessarily make it fun. It is not what we want to read but sometimes is what we need to read.

I have grappled with this concept for a while now, reading and re-reading. I hope I do know sound wrong, but the concept of "the text of pleasure" is a hard one to grasp beneath what I am saying.

"Thus, what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading" (Barthes 109, 19873).