Haiku, A Looking Bird is my haijinx column aimed at an exploration of works in haikai poetics bi-monthly.
The first essay published today is as follows:
The Breach of Meaning?: Roland Barthes’s View of Haiku
By Chen-ou Liu
The brevity of the haiku is not formal; the haiku is not a rich thought reduced to a brief form, but a brief event which immediately finds its proper form.
The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
– Roland Barthes
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Since the publication of the book, Barthes’s view of haiku has been well received among haiku critics and poets, as well as his readers of literary theory and criticism.
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Generally speaking, both Hass and Sekine capture the key notions of Barthes’s view of haiku described in Empire of Signs: relating haiku to the Zen project of confounding the fixed categories of language, and reading it as a breach of meaning, an exemption from the Western compulsion to commentary. These notions are widespread and inscribed on the minds of haiku poets and readers, but what do they really mean in the contexts of Empire of Signs, his other writings, and his view of Zen Buddhism? Furthermore, does his view of haiku help deepen our understanding of the poetics of haiku? In the following passages, I’ll try to answer these questions in this introductory essay.
