Roland Barthes

Rick Rylance

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134963362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This comprehensive introductory study considers the full range of Barthes' work - from his early structuralist phase, through his post-structuralist explorations of "Text", to his late writings. In looking at the late work, often of an autobiographical or personal-lyrical nature, Rylance examines the relationship between the critical and the personal, as well as Barthes' relation to developments in feminism and postmodernism. Throughout, Barthes' writings are presented as paradigmatic of many of the major shifts in intellectual opinion in the post-war period. The book is part of a series reflecting the broad spectrum of modern European and American theory. It focuses on those cultural theorists who have had the most significant impact in the 20th century. The series aims to show how modern thinkers differ in their aproaches to interpreting culture, texts, society, language, history, gender and social life. Designed to be accessible to students, each volume in the series the thought and work of often difficult theorists in a clear and informative way, balancing exposition and critique.

1CHAPTER ONE
Barthes hot and cold: early work

Judging by nausea

As is the case with many writers, Barthes’s early work is not easily classifiable in the terms by which he later became best known. None the less, his first two books illustrate the two poles of his analytic imagination, and begin themes which preoccupied him throughout his career. This chapter will therefore raise issues which will be reconsidered as the account of his work develops. The first section will examine Michelet; the second Writing Degree Zero. The third will broaden the scope to look at Barthes’s confrontation with French academic orthodoxy in the celebrated ‘Picard affair’ of the early 1960s.

Throughout this period Barthes is on the radical wing of French intellectual opinion, and his work combatively assimilates new thinking from psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and the radical aesthetics of Brechtian drama and the ‘nouveau roman’ (all of which will be considered as we proceed). This loose and, by later standards, not very shapely ensemble is held together by an axiomatic Leftist politics (the limits of which we will explore in Chapter 2), and a careful response to Sartre’s existential Marxism, the dominant intellectual current of the period in dissident circles. Barthes began with existentialism, and in a sense he ended with it, 2for his final book is a homage to Sartre’s L’Imaginaire. This chapter will therefore situate Barthes’s existentialism, although it is difficult to label the early period ‘existentialist’ in the way we may call later phases ‘structuralist’ or ‘poststructuralist’. His early work has neither the same methodological rigour nor the sustained commitment of these later developments. Instead we see a writer exploring a territory, exuberant and bleak by turns, but always powerfully at odds with orthodoxy.

Writing Degree Zero was Barthes’s first book, but not his first piece of research. A sufferer from tuberculosis, he spent much of his early life, including the war years, in sanatoria. Already a promising scholar, he was sent to clinics with good libraries, and in one of these, with time on his hands, Barthes began his lifelong enthusiasm for the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, author of two dozen books and a twenty-volume history of France. He began in what became his habitual research method: reading slowly, gathering his information on ‘fiches’, index cards, in the method taught in French schools.¹ This was – unwittingly – admirably suited to his subsequent practice: it avoids integrative narrative and argumentative continuity, it dismantles a work into fragments, and it looks forward to the new information age (‘fiches’ were an early way of loading computers). Barthes’s early methods forecast his career.

His book on Michelet, Michelet par lui-même, was published in 1954 in a well-known series of introductory books on celebrated writers, ‘Écrivains de toujours’. The aim of the series is to introduce the subject by way of substantial extracts with commentary. The proper academic apparatus is provided – chronological outline, guide to further reading – and the texts have a nice illustrated finish. Yet Barthes’s Michelet at once appears odd: the chapter titles are disconcerting – ‘Michelet, eater of history’, ‘History, which we so stupidly decline in the feminine’, ‘The Ultra-Sex’, and so on – and his conventional ‘Memorandum’ of details is brusque to the point of irony: ‘ANCESTRY: . . . The Millets of Renwez (Ardennes). A very pious mother’ (Mich, 5). Barthes also begins by telling his readers what they will not find: a précis of Michelet’s life and thought, or an explanation of the one by the other. Instead, he wishes ‘to recover the structure of an existence (if not a life), a thematics, if you like, or better still: an organised network of obsessions’ (Mich, 3). Already, several central Barthesian 3themes are gathered: a prickly syntax and tone which challenges and redefines, a startling casting of a canonical writer as a structure of psychological obsessions, a promise of a quasitechnical method (‘thematics’), and an aggressive existential framework which not only declares a dismissive attitude towards the small change of conventional criticism, but also flaunts his alignment with the radical existentialism of the day.

Michelet, like much of Barthes, sets out to shock. Its lengthy account of Michelet’s sexuality, for instance, was flamboyantly provoking in a period before the publication of the historian’s celebrated intimate journal, and the ‘Écrivains de toujours’ series provided a fine opportunity for a young iconoclast. There is a strong convention – the introductory textbook – to kick against, and Michelet’s reputation prompts a game with critical authority. Meanwhile, the extract-and-commentary format allows Barthes to dramatise the play between text and critical discourse, which he emphasises by printing the two in different typefaces, an innovation for the series. This, and the illustrations, enable him to break up the surface of his book in ways that he used more extravagantly as his career developed. But Michelet’s main concern is a theme which was topical in the Sartrean environment of postwar Paris, and became an abiding preoccupation for Barthes throughout his career: the question of how much freedom Michelet had as a writer. Barthes does not have in mind the empirical constraints of research or publication. His concern is with the more or less unconscious forces which shape Michelet’s writing, because for Barthes all writing is written under powerful personal and ideological pressures which shape it almost independently of conscious choice. Existentially, a writer should, of course, resist these pressures of convention and ideology, which wreck the authenticity of a work. But in the case of a historian like Michelet, Barthes is interested in the ways in which historical events are none the less moulded to express what he calls the writer’s ‘themes’: those consistent patterns which are the bare bones of his ‘existence’.

Barthes defines a ‘theme’ as ‘a critical reality independent of the idea, and of the image’ (Mich, 201). That is, it is an ingredient of the text which shapes it in a way that is almost separate from the explicit meaning or intention. It is a kind of elemental feature, a mixture of style and personal obsession, which organises the discourse’s flow. Themes can be recognised because they are 4repeated, and Michelet’s include his ideological position (starkly presented in the ‘Memorandum’ as the ‘classic credo of the liberal petit-bourgeois around 1840’, Mich, 11) and his methodological preferences as a historian. But Barthes’s special concern is the unconscious psychology of the writing: the way an obsessional interest in a series of substances, properties or processes organises Michelet’s narratives, and therefore shapes the reader’s understanding. Nations, events or persons have for him a quasi-allegorical significance, and exemplify the grand rhythms which run throughout all history. England, for example, is described in terms of angularity or hardness; Germany is fragmentary; but France is smooth and seamless, like the blend of ingredients in a recipe (Mich, 27–30). The historical ‘facts’ do not matter: it is their rhetorical organisation which is significant for Barthes, who detects consistent patterns. When Michelet describes something positively, he reaches for images of blood, viscosity or warmth. When he is being negative, the language emphasises hardness, dryness or blockage.

At a personal level, and more controversially, Barthes argues that Michelet’s writing plays out his sexual obsessions. His descriptions of historical processes are constructed according to deep psychosexual wishes, and Barthes’s selections illustrate how, for instance, Michelet contradictorily juxtaposes idealised visions of the family (an ideological value) with a rampant voyeurism in his physical descriptions of historical ‘characters’: ‘Ripe, pious, sugary, still fresh, plump and lovely’, writes Michelet of the extraordinarily oxymoronic body of Louis XV’s seducer, the Comtesse de Toulouse (Mich, 93). On a larger scale, Barthes suggests that Michelet’s version of the historical process is modelled on a bizarre, diagrammatic sexuality in which Man represents the Idea, and Woman is Instinct. These roles are filled by different agents in different periods, but their procreation brings about the historical event. Michelet’s historiography, therefore, is an endless retelling of this same story with a different cast list. As a form of explanation it is, to say the least, dubious, and indulges a fairly typical piece of nineteenth-century gender-typing. But Barthes’s point is that Michelet is inexplicit about these narratives. They form an unconscious thematic pattern which is assumed in the writing but none the less constructs the reader’s understanding of the world; and this, Barthes argues, is characteristic of all forms of representational 5writing. What Michelet’s writing does so spectacularly is what all such writing does – even historiography, which claims to represent things as they really happened: it provides an interpretation of the world in which details are mere illustration. Barthes’s thinking along these lines responds directly to innovative ways of thinking in postwar historiography, literary criticism and philosophy.

Barthes had worked briefly in this period with the celebrated ‘Annales’ school, which was then overturning French thinking about historical method and the relationship between the written version and actual events.² Like the slightly later ‘history from below’ associated with E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and others in Britain, the ‘Annales’ school (named after their journal) tried to present history as the structure of everyday life. ‘Annales’ history was, therefore, critical of prevailing versions of history, and constructed alternatives. Barthes’s work can be seen in a similar way. His book dismantles the historiographical principles on which Michelet’s work is built by finding within them an alternative dynamic. The whole spread of the work is thus reassembled on thematic rather than chronological lines, and Michelet’s writing is seen to be organised by non-referential elements rather than communicating the ‘truth’ of the past. As we shall see, this idea is crucial for Barthes. For him writing does not convey ‘reality’ as such, it organises constructions of it; thus the metaphors writers use represent the most forceful dynamic of their work. Later, Barthes found support for this view in Nietzsche, but it is a pervasive early argument, and his own metaphorical extravagance (ideal domesticity is like a canal boat, Michelet eats history and aspires to be a lesbian, no less) tries rhetorically to combat it by making the effect spectacular. In terms of literature, this is the beginning of Barthes’s anti-realist aesthetics.

In a sense, Michelet applies the methods of literary criticism to history. This procedure has been adopted subsequently in a more thoroughgoing way by historiographical radicals like Hayden White, who argues that even modern work remains dependent on its rhetorical organisation.³ From a literary point of view, the critical method most prominently used in Michelet is that of the ‘phenomenological’ school associated then in France with critics like Georges Poulet, Jean Starobinski and Jean-Pierre Richard.⁴ Phenomenologists argue that objects cannot be considered 6independently of the consciousness which perceives them, and phenomenological criticism is interested in how writing expresses the particular ways in which a writer constructs the world, or how it organises a reader’s perceptions. Object and consciousness are two sides of the same coin. Literary works, therefore, are not thought of as always having the same meaning, because meaning will vary depending on the consciousness which constructs it. Nor are they able ‘objectively’ to convey reality. In Barthes’s view, for example, Michelet constructs history through his obsessional themes, and Barthes’s role as a critic is to reveal the patterning.

Barthes’s approach is a radical blend of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, but an illuminating comparison can be made with equivalent, but more moderate, projects in Anglo-American criticism, which has also sometimes been influenced by a version of phenomenology. Both J. Hillis Miller’s Charles Dickens: The world of his novels (1958), which is dedicated to Georges Poulet, and John Carey’s The Violent Effigy (1973) provide points of comparison with Barthes’s work in Michelet. Both are about Dickens, whose driven and chaotic nineteenth-century imagination is – interestingly – not unlike that of Michelet. All three books set themselves to discover the ‘unity’ of their subject’s imagination: ‘the original unity of a creative mind’, as Miller puts it, which imposes an ‘impalpable organizing form, constantly presiding over the choice of words’.⁵ Similarly, Carey, who likens Dickens’s imagination to that of archetypal modernists like Sartre and Kafka who influenced Barthes, aims to recover the structure of Dickens’s ‘mode of thought’, his ‘imaginative world’ independent of theories about his ‘inner life’ or his work’s ‘inner meanings’.⁶ What follows in these books is an exploration of the often grotesque shape Dickens gives to a world in which phenomena, like historical events in Michelet, are a function of the verbal imagination which displays them.

Like Barthes, both critics see a radical separation between the world in writing and the world as it is in actuality. It is here, however, that Barthes parts company. For Miller, Dickens’s imagination transcends this separation to provide a different ‘truth’. The novels ‘transform the real world of Dickens’s experience into an imaginary world with certain special qualities of its own’, he argues (Miller, 328). The ‘real world’ for Dickens is one of radical alienation, but his fiction offers ‘something transcendent, something more than one’s own consciousness or than the too solid 7everyday material world’ (Miller, 329). In Miller’s view this is the discovery of ‘a real self’ which lies beyond the everyday self, and is above the latter’s ordinary pressures and limitations. Similarly for Carey, who is less ambitious, the novels create a drama in which Dickens’s corrosive comedy and ‘amoral and unprincipled’ imagination are transformed and controlled (Carey, 9, 175). In both cases what starts out as disorder or alienation is converted into its opposite.

Barthes’s book, by contrast, stresses the untransformable outrageousness of Michelet’s imagination. Miller and Carey are primarily interested in Dickens’s art which – for Miller, at least – explicitly needs to transcend the social world to become authentic. In this Miller follows the tradition of analysis set out by American New Criticism, which generally celebrates literary creativity in these terms. For Barthes, on the other hand, Michelet’s writing flaunts its contradictions, and Barthes is not interested in finding meanings (Miller’s ‘real self’) or effects (the emollient power of comedy in Carey) to transcend this instability. What is primarily of interest to him is the manic scribbling which Michelet’s hapless predicament produces. If Barthes is suspicious of Michelet’s ideology, he revels in a writing which comes from the historian’s desperate attempt to make the world, the self and language cohere after all. Barthes quotes Michelet to the effect that he wanted to find an unalienated language which might speak directly for ‘the People’, and remarks that ‘based on the alliance of the two sexes, the People gradually becomes in Michelet a superior means of knowledge’. What Michelet really desires is ‘the abolition of all contraries, the magical restoration of a seamless world which is no longer torn between contradictory postulations’ (Mich, 187). In other words, Michelet strives to efface the problems his own writing presents, and to pass it off as a neutral medium through which events speak directly. In this he ‘is perhaps the first writer of modernity able to utter only an impossible language’ (Mich, 188).

As a number of commentators observe, Barthes’s Michelet is actually a portrait of the existential intellectual of the 1950s, a writer ‘of modernity’ struggling, in Sartrean fashion, to establish a bond with the collective voice which will overcome his alienation. Barthes’s existentialism will be discussed more fully in the next section, but in Michelet it is both emphatic and problematic. He comments that for Michelet ‘the human body is entirely an 8immediate judgement, but its value is of an existential not an intellectual order. Michelet condemns by virtue of his nauseas, not of his principles’ (Mich, 92). Barthes sees Michelet’s ‘morality of the body’, his ‘tribunal of the flesh’ (Mich, 203), as an inevitable existential and writerly condition. Whatever Michelet wills, his psychology, his historical situation and the nature of language itself force him back to his corporeal and ‘thematic’ preoccupations. Michelet’s involuntary judgemental ‘nausea’ (a carefully chosen Sartrean image) is heavily determined, and Michelet seems doomed to repeat his extravagances without limit. Existentially, therefore, Barthes’s view is pessimistic. The positive will seems a second-order psychological power, and Michelet appears unable to become an agent in the destiny of his own writing. Here Barthes opposes the transcendent view of art which was typical of both the Anglo-American and French critical mainstream in the period.

But Barthes enjoys his Michelet thoroughly. What he takes pleasure in is the bizarre edge to the writing, and he portrays the quixotic historian as heroic in his helplessness, authentic within his inauthenticity. As with several figures in his later work – such as the lover or the man in mourning – Barthes understands Michelet’s predicament with a sometimes unflattering comic sympathy, while he reads him against himself. He relishes the creativity which sprawls across his unalterable predicament, but treats with severe scepticism his claims to truth or knowledge. This playful absorption in the density of writing and phenomena is the ‘hot’ Barthes which is one pole of his work. In the next section we shall see the other: the more analytic Barthes, resisting Sartre’s optimism and finding that the only cure for nausea is a chilly dose of the zero degree.

Solitary style

Writing Degree Zero is a very different book from Michelet. Where Michelet has a Rabelaisian relish for the body and the grotesque, Writing Degree Zero is austere and, in the high Parisian manner, cultivates a cool rem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and a note on words and texts
• Chronology
• Historical and cultural context
• 1 Barthes hot and cold: early work
• 2 Mythography: structuralist analysis and popular culture
• 3 Works and texts: poststructural Barthes
• 4 Selves and lovers: late Barthes
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index