P_I

Reviews
The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, A Life (Toronto, ON: Insomniac Press, 2003). 310 pp.

The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, a Life, Riggins attempts to provide more than a romantic travelogue or eyewitness intellectual history. His book is both biography and autobiography – as well as literary criticism, cultural history, sociological study, and tenderly crafted family album. This is not to say that the book lacks focus; each of these approaches is necessary in its turn, as Riggins celebrates his decades-long relationship with Bouissac, a scholar, novelist, circus aficionado, and reluctant subject….

In a final swipe at the chronological imperative that drives most memoirs, Riggins waits until his final chapter, ‘Stolen Time,’ to tell the story of his inauspicious first weeks with Bouissac. Because we know how strong this relationship has become in spite of these early missteps, the latter become testimony to how far people can come when they refuse to be satisfied with what they think they know about each other. If there is one constant theme throughout the shifts in perspective, time, and place, it is the elusiveness of perfect understanding. Riggins challenges us to confront our failed or partial knowledge of those we love, and to realize that what we have become together has been shaped by who we are, and what we love, apart.”

“As interesting as this book is, even to a reader less fascinated with circuses and/or the making of the reputation of French 19^th century composers, the most exceptional and attractive aspect of the book is the way it is written. None of the writing is in the least chronological. Riggins moves back and forth across time. Some episodes even stand completely alone, without any apparent connection to the context they are embedded in – a fact that makes the work a remarkable yet quite confusing read. Riggins quite intentionally chose this approach. It emphasizes the personal character of the book, but more importantly, his deliberate stirring and even ‘de’construction of expected coherent narrative in the ‘auto’biography illustrates the imperfection and subjectivity of what is generally the source of all history and historiography: memory.”

“I’ve just glimpsed through sections of the book, and find that there’s a lot of fine and vivid detail, both personal and professional. I’m already taken with the sense of humour and the personal narrative line that shows up very clearly. Laughed out loud at ‘You could have played checkers on his coattails as he went out the door.’ The work should prove to be a delightful and enlightening read to many others who have lived through those decades.

…We all know, Stephen, that it is the drive and the authentic heart of a writer that makes the final work worth the reader’s time. I certainly look forward to sharing the world of your printed page.”

“The tales of trying to run a circus in Canada are hilarious, even to someone with no interest in circuses (either the three-ring American extravaganzas or the smaller and sometimes artistic French ones). Early on, Riggins records Bouissac’s explanation for the latter’s fascination with the circus, which ‘for many people is just a synonym for vulgarity and excess. He responded that when he was a child, the circus had embodied a parallel universe, [with] everything denied a little child in a small provincial town in France.’

Riggins is a good observer and writes very well about what he observed. Once I relaxed my expectations of linearity and of anything resembling a chronological narrative or any explanation of how a relationship in which the partners are geographically separated two-third of the time survives, I enjoyed the pieces….

I particularly enjoyed the pontillistic portraits that emerge of Riggins’s ‘surrogate grandmother’ back in Indiana, the more straightforward portraits of his piano teacher, the incisive analyses of Allan Bloom (which goes into the accuracy of his transformation into Ravelstein), the late music of Gabriel Fauré, and of the French style of being open about having a lover of the same-sex but not being defined by a politicized gay identity in the North American manner (corroborating Edmund White’s account in The Flaneur). There are sections I skimmed through, but although I had not intended to read the book this past weekend, I couldn’t put it down until I had reached the end.”

“I first read The Pleasures of Time in the early summer soon after it appeared in print. I have since read it again (something I hardly ever take the time to do!), and have picked it up over and over to savour its wisdom, its gentle yet clever framing, its capacity to distil Paul Bouissac’s semiotic and cultural studies research without, as Riggins so evocatively and effectively puts it ‘…making anyone cross-eyed.’ This is a sociological book that defies categorization. It is an examination of the intertwined lives of two men, of the birth and growth of cultural studies over a critical historical period, of Bouissac’s and Riggins’ wondrous encounters with the unexpected (the title of the penultimate chapter is ‘The Search for the Unexpected’) both intellectually and personally, of their amazing personal intersections with Lévi-Strauss, Foucault (who Riggins interviewed – a rare event indeed!), Sartre and de Beauvoir, Alan Bloom (the list goes on), and of an era of tumult, politically and socially. It is also very much a personal history, a kind of auto-ethnography, of a committed gay relationship and of the transforming and transformative gay world in the late 20^th century. And it is anthropological ethnography as well. It is, in sum, an extraordinary book, a significant book and a book that touches the reader’s heart as well as the reader’s mind.

… This is a book worthy of a wide sociology and anthropology readership. It is a tender study of social change, of couplehood in changing times, and of cultural history from the insider’s perch.”

Susan A. McDaniel, FRSC, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, on-line book reviews, August 2004.

“Stephen Harold Riggins would be content working as an antique market peddler the rest of his life. Instead, the author, with archival tenacity, has transformed his diaries into an exploration of his complex relationship with his partner, author and circus intellect Paul Bouissac. The outcome is The Pleasures of Time: Two Men A Life. Riggins’s analysis of the past is something to behold. Dripping with themes of surrealism and semiotics, he takes the reader on a cultural and intellectual journey through the ‘70s and ‘80s. Whether through conversations with philosophers, touching letters from a juggler or Bouissac’s quest to produce The Circus of the Century, Riggins holds nothing back. He exposes the hearts of his acquaintances and the reader soon takes on the eyes of a surrealist. You’ll find yourself staring at stop signs or anxious for the buskers to arrive. Romantic and inspiring, you’ll want to read passages from this book over and over again.”

“The potential for this project to go wrong, even to fail, was huge. An error of tone, an ax to grind, a simple misunderstanding, could have sent the entire effort into a death dive. The Pleasures of Time is improbably free of the kinds of mistakes that could have easily ruined it. I believe it will stand as a classic of gay studies. The relationship he describes and the parties to it are extraordinary. His attention to detail, and his quiet, deferential tone manage to hold both Bouissac and himself (and the circus, and French intellectual life) in a steady light. It incidentally provides one of the most detailed accounts I have read of the intellectual fervor in the meeting of French philosophy and American social science from the 1960s to today.

…His tendency to direct his analyses uncomfortably close to home … might be unsettling for some readers. Not me. As much as he would resist being read in this way, I think Riggins has a rare distinctive voice.”

“His most recent book, The Pleasures of Time, evokes so many important aspects of what it means to be a public intellectual and how much this is bound up in, as he suggests, ‘private conversations.’ His diarised observations, always impeccably grounded in appropriate theory, evoked for me a similar work by someone, who in many ways, was Riggins’ contemporary, the exceptionally gifted anthropologist Eric Michaels. Michaels wrote a similar, albeit shorter piece as he was dying of AIDS in a Brisbane hospital in the late 1980s and his work with Indigenous communities here and in the United states stands, like Riggins’, as highly significant contributions to the growing volume of writings that have emerged from scholarly engagement with Native communities in Both Canada and Australia.”

“The exquisitely titled biography The Pleasures of Time is a book-length tribute by Stephen Harold Riggins to his long-time partner Paul Bouissac. Their life together takes them to Paris, The Hague, London, Toronto and Loogootee, Indiana….

The French-born intellectual Bouissac became enthralled with the circus, and incorporated his love for it into his writing and his thinking. He studied with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who encouraged Bouissac in his interest in the semiotics and social anthropology of the circus. (Doesn’t the phrase ‘the semiotics of the circus’ just reek of the French intelligentsia? Who else but the French would develop a theory of the circus?)…. Some of the most fascinating passages of the book are anecdotes in the first chapter about Bouissac’s adventures with lions and bears. To dream of running off to join a circus is clichéd; to actually do so eclectic.

… Riggins has captured a moment in gay history and has created an interesting and unique record of it.”

“…While Riggins’s vivid prose does have the quality of a fading and discoloured photograph, and an almost nostalgic musical air, the ‘expertise’ on display is more often that of the casual biographer and literary stylist than of the sociologist or semiotician. Riggins has a remarkable talent for evoking vivid scenes of domestic life, private conversations in cafés, quirky encounters on the street, and bizarre public spectacles while endowing them with broader historical significance and providing them with an almost allegorical meaning. All are culled from an impressively eclectic range of sources….

…Since The Pleasures of Time is a collage of images, musical notes and texts, it demands an effort of looking, listening and reading that exceeds the merely psycho-physiological acts of seeing, hearing and deciphering to produce the kind of ‘shimmering’ that Roland Barthes calls signifying.

If one of the most pleasurable aspects of The Pleasures of Time is its composition in diary-like entries and its pithy, anecdotal style, then one of its most innovative features consists of the way these pieces perform and exemplify the relationship between Riggins and Bouissac and between them and the reader. Since it is impossible to say everything or to spell out anything completely, these relationships are defined as much by what is uttered on the one side as by what remains silent on the other, and thus as much by the significance of the words, images and sounds that articulate these relationships as by the blank spaces, temporal gaps and silences between them. It is characteristic of Riggins’s keen attunement to this unspoken dimension of the production and consumption of meaning and its variations that it structures the whole of his account: from the homely ‘Interlude’ on his childhood in Indiana … to Foucault’s sublime response to the first question of the interview, which alludes to the many forms of silence experienced by those growing up in Catholic France.

All readers of this book will find a point of reflection or place of resonance in the events and situations described, as its ‘allegorical’ structure and construction in pieces encourage the pursuit of daydreams and distracted memories.”