A Lover's Discourse [revisited]

Against the setting of A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes’s romantic compilation of anxious and blissful literary (and spoken) expressions of love, I propose to discuss instances of potential ‘lover talk’ analyzing them in terms of emotive evocation and semantics. The examples to be examined are of two kinds: an advertising billboard, containing a verbal message, and a traditional handcrafted artifact, containing a subtle message of persuasion in its design. The Zulu [one of South Africa’s indigenous ethnic groups] have a rich oral narrative tradition which translates into visual form in the case of the handcrafted necklace pieces which lovers send to each other, appropriately called ‘love letters’. In another realm of South African life, daring advertising billboards stake territory on street sides, and the perceiver from another culture is moved by the content of the message. The advertising billboard and a handmade necklace are far-removed from literary discourse (or are they?) but are worth examining because of the emotions they evoke through metonymy and symbolism. One contains a spelled out proposition presented graphically; the other supposedly contains a message that is not decipherable in the habitual code of written or spoken word. In discussing these two instances, I wish to kindle thought about the emotive aspects of such culturally, hierarchically, and spatially diverse approaches to communication: one, a public large-scale proclamation, directed at the literate perceiver-consumer, the other, a token of private “writing”.
The discourse represented in the billboard befits the solitude Barthes discusses. It is, however, reported discourse from the part of the lover’s object, but all the same unwarranted and uncalled for, and definitely not personable, or genuine. It is not intimate, but it warrants no response, whereas the Zulu necklace, artsy and personal, represents a mechanism tied up in old traditions and authority, and refers to a conventional and demarcated interaction in a social group. ”. The mutual affinity of these ‘discourses’ and their affinity to the theme of emotion, are discussed. Has the lover’s discourse “...no recourse, but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation.”? * *Roland Barthes: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.