Writing Itself

On Roland Barthes

The best poetry will be rhetorical criticism …

—WALLACE STEVENS (in a journal of 1899)

 

I rarely lose sight of myself.

—PAUL VALÉRY, Monsieur Teste

 

 

TEACHER, MAN OF LETTERS, moralist, philosopher of culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean autobiographer … of all the intellectual notables who have emerged since World War II in France, Roland Barthes is the one whose work I am most certain will endure. Barthes was in full flow, incessantly productive, as he had been for over three decades, when he was struck by a van as he started across a street in Paris in early 1980—a death felt by friends and admirers to be excruciatingly untimely. But along with the backward look of grief comes the awareness that confers upon his large, chronically mutating body of writing, as on all major work, its retroactive completeness. The development of Barthes’s work now seems logical; more than that, exhaustive. It even begins and falls silent on the same subject—that exemplary instrument in the career of consciousness, the writer’s journal. As it happens, the first essay Barthes ever published celebrates the model consciousness he found in the Journal of André Gide, and what turned out to be the last essay published before he died offers Barthes’s musings on his own journal-keeping. The symmetry, however adventitious, is an utterly appropriate one, for Barthes’s writing, with its prodigious variety of subjects, has finally one great subject: writing itself.

His early themes were those of the freelance partisan of letters, on the occasions afforded by cultural journalism, literary debate, theatre and book reviews. To these were added topics that originated and were recycled in seminars and from the lecture platform, for Barthes’s literary career was run concurrently with a (very successful) academic one, and in part as an academic one. But the voice was always singular, and self-referring; the achievement is of another, larger order than can be had even by practicing, with thrilling virtuosity, the most lively and many-tracked of academic disciplines. For all his contributions to the would-be science of signs and structures, Barthes’s endeavor was the quintessentially literary one: the writer organizing, under a series of doctrinal auspices, the theory of his own mind. And when the current enclosure of his reputation by the labels of semiology and structuralism crumbles, as it must, Barthes will appear, I think, as a rather traditional promeneur solitaire, and a greater writer than even his more fervent admirers now claim.

 

 

HE ALWAYS WROTE full out, was always concentrated, keen, indefatigable. This dazzling inventiveness seems not just a function of Barthes’s extraordinary powers as a mind, as a writer. It seems to have almost the status of a position—as if this is what critical discourse must be. “Literature is like phosphorous,” he says in his first book, which came out in 1953, Writing Degree Zero; “it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die.” In Barthes’s view, literature is already a posthumous affair. His work affirms a standard of vehement brilliance that is indeed one ideal of a cultural moment which believes itself to be having, in several senses, the last word.

Its brilliance aside, Barthes’s work has some of the specific traits associated with the style of a late moment in culture—one that presumes an endless discourse anterior to itself, that presumes intellectual sophistication: it is work that, strenuously unwilling to be boring or obvious, favors compact assertion, writing that rapidly covers a great deal of ground. Barthes was an inspired, ingenious practitioner of the essay and the anti-essay—he had a resistance to long forms. Typically, his sentences are complex, comma-ridden and colon-prone, packed with densely worded entailments of ideas deployed as if these were the materials of a supple prose. It is a style of exposition, recognizably French, whose parent tradition is to be found in the tense, idiosyncratic essays published between the two world wars in the Nouvelle Revue Française—a perfected version of the NRF’s house style which can deliver more ideas per page while retaining the brio of that style, its acuteness of timbre. His vocabulary is large, fastidious, fearlessly mandarin. Even Barthes’s less fleet, more jargon-haunted writings—most of them from the 1960s—are full of flavor; he manages to make an exuberant use of neologisms. While exuding straight-ahead energy, his prose constantly reaches for the summative formulation; it is irrepressibly aphoristic. (Indeed, one could go through Barthes’s work extracting superb bits—epigrams, maxims—to make a small book, as has been done with Wilde and Proust.) Barthes’s strengths as an aphorist suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the perception of structure. A method of condensed assertion by means of symmetrically counterposed terms, the aphorism displays the symmetries and complementarities of situations or ideas—their design, their shape. Like a markedly greater feeling for drawings than for paintings, a talent for aphorism is one of the signs of what could be called the formalist temperament.

The formalist temperament is just one variant of a sensibility shared by many who speculate in an era of hypersaturated awareness. What characterizes such a sensibility more generally is its reliance on the criterion of taste, and its proud refusal to propose anything that does not bear the stamp of subjectivity. Confidently assertive, it nevertheless insists that its assertions are no more than provisional. (To do otherwise would be bad taste.) Indeed, adepts of this sensibility usually make a point of claiming and reclaiming amateur status. “In linguistics I have never been anything but an amateur,” Barthes told an interviewer in 1975. Throughout his late writings Barthes repeatedly disavows the, as it were, vulgar roles of system-builder, authority, mentor, expert, in order to reserve for himself the privileges and freedoms of delectation: the exercise of taste for Barthes means, usually, to praise. What makes the role a choice one is his unstated commitment to finding something new and unfamiliar to praise (which requires having the right dissonance with established taste); or to praising a familiar work differently.

An early example is his second book—it appeared in 1954—which is on Michelet. Through an inventory of the recurrent metaphors and themes in the great nineteenth-century historian’s epic narratives, Barthes discloses a more intimate narration: Michelet’s history of his own body and the “lyric resurrection of past bodies.” Barthes is always after another meaning, a more eccentric—often utopian—discourse. What pleased him was to show insipid and reactionary works to be quirky and implicitly subversive; to display in the most extravagant projects of the imagination an opposite extreme—in his essay on Sade, a sexual ideal that was really an exercise in delirious rationality; in his essay on Fourier, a rationalist ideal that was really an exercise in sensual delirium. Barthes did take on central figures of the literary canon when he had something polemical to offer: in 1960 he wrote a short book on Racine, which scandalized academic critics (the ensuing controversy ended with Barthes’s complete triumph over his detractors); he also wrote on Proust and Flaubert. But more often, armed with his essentially adversary notion of the “text,” he applied his ingenuity to the marginal literary subject: an unimportant “work”—say, Balzac’s Sarrasine, Chateaubriand’s Life of Rancé—could be a marvelous “text.” Considering something as a “text” means for Barthes precisely to suspend conventional evaluations (the difference between major and minor literature), to subvert established classifications (the separation of genres, the distinctions among the arts).

Though work of every form and worth qualifies for citizenship in the great democracy of “texts,” the critic will tend to avoid those that everyone has handled, the meaning that everyone knows. The formalist turn in modern criticism—from its pristine phase, as in Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarizing, onward—dictates just this. It charges the critic with the task of discarding worn-out meanings for fresh ones. It is a mandate to scout for new meanings. Etonne-moi.

The same mandate is supplied by Barthes’s notions of “text” and “textuality.” These translate into criticism the modernist ideal of an open-ended, polysemous literature; and thereby make the critic, just like the creators of that literature, the inventor of meaning. (The aim of literature, Barthes asserts, is to put “meaning” into the world but not “a meaning.”) To decide that the point of criticism is to alter and to relocate meaning—adding, subtracting, multiplying it—is in effect to base the critic’s exertions on an enterprise of avoidance, and thereby to recommit criticism (if it had ever left) to the dominion of taste. For it is, finally, the exercise of taste which identifies meanings that are familiar; a judgment of taste which discriminates against such meanings as too familiar; an ideology of taste which makes of the familiar something vulgar and facile. Barthes’s formalism at its most decisive, his ruling that the critic is called on to reconstitute not the “message” of a work but only its “system”—its form, its structure—is perhaps best understood thus, as the liberating avoidance of the obvious, as an immense gesture of good taste.

For the modernist—that is, formalist—critic, the work with its received valuations already exists. Now, what else can be said? The canon of great books has been fixed. What can we add or restore to it? The “message” is already understood, or is obsolete. Let’s ignore it.

 

 

OF A VARIETY of means Barthes possessed for giving himself something to say—he had an exceptionally fluent, ingenious generalizing power—the most elementary was his aphorist’s ability to conjure up a vivacious duality: anything could be split either into itself and its opposite or into two versions of itself; and one term then fielded against the other to yield an unexpected relation. The point of Voltairean travel, he remarks, is “to manifest an immobility”; Baudelaire “had to protect theatricality from the theatre”; the Eiffel Tower “makes the city into a kind of Nature”—Barthes’s writing is seeded with such ostensibly paradoxical, epigrammatic formulas as these, whose point is to sum something up. It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.

Less elegant, indeed making a point of dogged explicitness, and far more powerful as an instrument for giving himself something to say, are the classifications that Barthes lays out in order to topple himself into a piece of argument—dividing into two, three, even four parts the matter to be considered. Arguments are launched by announcing that there are two main classes and two subclasses of narrative units, two ways in which myth lends itself to history, two facets of Racinean eros, two musics, two ways to read La Rochefoucauld, two kinds of writers, two forms of his own interest in photographs. That there are three types of corrections a writer makes, three Mediterraneans and three tragic sites in Racine, three levels on which to read the plates of the Encyclopedia, three areas of spectacle and three types of gesture in Japanese puppet theatre, three attitudes toward speech and writing, equivalent to three vocations: writer, intellectual, and teacher. That there are four kinds of readers, four reasons for keeping a journal …

And so on. This is the codifying, frontal style of French intellectual discourse, a branch of the rhetorical tactics that the French call, not quite accurately, Cartesian. Although a few of the classifications Barthes employs are standard, such as semiology’s canonical triad of signified, signifier, and sign, many are inventions devised by Barthes in order to make an argument, such as his assertion in a late book, The Pleasure of the Text, that the modern artist seeks to destroy art, “this effort taking three forms.” The aim of this implacable categorizing is not just to map the intellectual territory: Barthes’s taxonomies are never static. Often the point is precisely for one category to subvert the other, as do the two forms, which he calls punctum and studium, of his interest in photographs. Barthes offers classifications to keep matters open—to reserve a place for the uncodified, the enchanted, the intractable, the histrionic. He was fond of bizarre classifications, of classificatory excess (Fourier’s, for example), and his boldly physical metaphors for mental life stress not topography but transformation. Drawn to hyperbole, as all aphorists are, Barthes enlists ideas in a drama, often a sensual melodrama or a faintly Gothic one. He speaks of the quiver, thrill, or shudder of meaning, of meanings that themselves vibrate, gather, loosen, disperse, quicken, shine, fold, mutate, delay, slide, separate, that exert pressure, crack, rupture, fissure, are pulverized. Barthes offers something like a poetics of thinking, which identifies the meaning of subjects with the very mobility of meaning, with the kinetics of consciousness itself; and liberates the critic as artist. The uses that binary and triadic thinking had for Barthes’s imagination were always provisional, available to correction, destabilization, condensation.

As a writer, he preferred short forms, and had been planning to give a seminar on them; he was particularly drawn to miniature ones, like the haiku and the quotation; and, like all true writers, he was enthralled by “the detail” (his word)—experience’s model short form. Even as an essayist, Barthes mostly wrote short, and the books he did write tend to be multiples of short forms rather than “real” books, itineraries of topics rather than unified arguments. His Michelet, for example, keys its inventory of the historian’s themes to a large number of brief excerpts from Michelet’s prolific writings. The most rigorous example of the argument as an itinerary by means of quotation is S/Z, published in 1970, his model exegesis of Balzac’s Sarrasine. From staging the texts of others, he passed inevitably to the staging of his own ideas. And, in the same series on great writers (“Ecrivains de toujours”) to which he contributed the Michelet volume, he eventually did one on himself in 1975: that dazzling oddity in the series, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. The high-velocity arrangements of Barthes’s late books dramatize both his fecundity (insatiability and lightness) and his desire to subvert all tendencies to system-making.

An animus against the systematizers has been a recurrent feature of intellectual good taste for more than a century; Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein are among the many voices that proclaim, from a superior if virtually unbearable burden of singularity, the absurdity of systems. In its strong modern form, scorn for systems is one aspect of the protest against Law, against Power itself. An older, milder refusal is lodged in the French skeptic tradition from Montaigne to Gide: writers who are epicures of their own consciousness can be counted on to decry “the sclerosis of systems,” a phrase Barthes used in his first essay, on Gide. And along with these refusals a distinctive modern stylistics has evolved, the prototypes of which go back at least to Sterne and the German Romantics—the invention of anti-linear forms of narration: in fiction, the destruction of the “story”; in nonfiction, the abandonment of linear argument. The presumed impossibility (or irrelevance) of producing a continuous systematic argument has led to a remodeling of the standard long forms—the treatise, the long book—and a recasting of the genres of fiction, autobiography, and essay. Of this stylistics Barthes is a particularly inventive practitioner.

The Romantic and post-Romantic sensibility discerns in every book a first-person performance: to write is a dramatic act, subject to dramatic elaboration. One strategy is to use multiple pseudonyms, as Kierkegaard did, concealing and multiplying the figure of the author. When autobiographical, the work invariably includes avowals of reluctance to speak in the first person. One of the conventions of Roland Barthes is for the autobiographer to refer to himself sometimes as “I,” sometimes as “he.” All this, Barthes announces on the first page of this book about himself, “must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.” Under the meta-category of performance, not only the line between autobiography and fiction is muted, but that between essay and fiction as well. “Let the essay avow itself almost a novel,” he says in Roland Barthes. Writing registers new forms of dramatic stress, of a self-referring kind: writing becomes the record of compulsions and of resistances to write. (In the further extension of this view, writing itself becomes the writer’s subject.)

For the purpose of achieving an ideal digressiveness and an ideal intensity, two strategies have been widely adopted. One is to abolish some or all of the conventional demarcations or separations of discourse, such as chapters, paragraphing, even punctuation, whatever is regarded as impeding formally the continuous production of (the writer’s) voice—the run-on method favored by writers of philosophical fictions such as Hermann Broch, Joyce, Stein, Beckett. The other strategy is the opposite one: to multiply the ways in which discourse is segmented, to invent further ways of breaking it up. Joyce and Stein used this method, too; Viktor Shklovsky in his best books, from the 1920s, writes in one-sentence paragraphs. The multiple openings and closures produced by the start-and-stop method permit discourse to become as differentiated, as polyphonous, as possible. Its most common shape in expository discourse is that of short, one- or two-paragraph units separated by spaces. “Notes on …” is the usual literary title—a form Barthes uses in the essay on Gide, and returns to often in his later work. Much of his writing proceeds by techniques of interruption, sometimes in the form of an excerpt alternating with a disjunctive commentary, as in Michelet and S/Z. To write in fragments or sequences or “notes” entails new, serial (rather than linear) forms of arrangement. These sequences may be staged in some arbitrary way. For example, they may be numbered—a method practiced with great refinement by Wittgenstein. Or they may be given headings, sometimes ironic or overemphatic—Barthes’s strategy in Roland Barthes. Headings allow an additional possibility: for the elements to be arranged alphabetically, to emphasize further the arbitrary character of their sequence—the method of A Lover’s Discourse (1977), whose real title evokes the notion of the fragment; it is Fragments d’un discours amoureux.

Barthes’s late writing is his boldest formally: all major work was organized in a serial rather than linear form. Straight essay writing was reserved for the literary good deed (prefaces, for example, of which Barthes wrote many) or journalistic whim. However, these strong forms of the late writing only bring forward a desire implicit in all of his work—Barthes’s wish to have a superior relation to assertion: the relation that art has, of pleasure. Such a conception of writing excludes the fear of contradiction. (In Wilde’s phrase: “A truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true.”) Barthes repeatedly compared teaching to play, reading to eros, writing to seduction. His voice became more and more personal, more full of grain, as he called it; his intellectual art more openly a performance, like that of the other great antisystematizers. But whereas Nietzsche addresses the reader in many tones, mostly aggressive—exulting, berating, coaxing, prodding, taunting, inviting complicity—Barthes invariably performs in an affable register. There are no rude or prophetic claims, no pleadings with the reader, and no efforts not to be understood. This is seduction as play, never violation. All of Barthes’s work is an exploration of the histrionic or ludic; in many ingenious modes, a plea for savor, for a festive (rather than dogmatic or credulous) relation to ideas. For Barthes, as for Nietzsche, the point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure.

 

 

WRITING IS BARTHES’S perennial subject—indeed, perhaps no one since Flaubert (in his letters) has thought as brilliantly, as passionately as Barthes has about what writing is. Much of his work is devoted to portraits of the vocation of the writer: from the early debunking studies included in Mythologies (1957) of the writer as seen by others, that is, the writer as fraud, such as “The Writer on Holiday,” to more ambitious essays on writers writing, that is, the writer as hero and martyr, such as “Flaubert and the Sentence,” about the writer’s “agony of style.” Barthes’s wonderful essays on writers must be considered as different versions of his great apologia for the vocation of the writer. For all his admiration for the self-punishing standards of integrity set by Flaubert, he dares to conceive of writing as a kind of happiness: the point of his essay on Voltaire (“The Last Happy Writer”), and of his portrait of Fourier, unvexed by the sense of evil. In his late work he speaks directly of his own practice, scruples, bliss.

Barthes construes writing as an ideally complex form of consciousness: a way of being both passive and active, social and asocial, present and absent in one’s own life. His idea of the writer’s vocation excludes the sequestration that Flaubert thought inevitable, would appear to deny any conflict between the writer’s necessary inwardness and the pleasures of worldliness. It is, so to speak, Flaubert strongly amended by Gide: a more well bred, casual rigor, an avid, guileful relation to ideas that excludes fanaticism. Indeed, the ideal self-portrait—the portrait of the self as writer—that Barthes sketched throughout his work is virtually complete in the first essay, on Gide’s “work of egoism,” his Journal. Gide supplied Barthes with the patrician model for the writer who is supple, multiple; never strident or vulgarly indignant; generous but also properly egotistical; incapable of being deeply influenced. He notes how little Gide was altered by his vast reading (“so many self-recognitions”), how his “discoveries” were never “denials.” And he praises the profusion of Gide’s scruples, observing that Gide’s “situation at the intersection of great contradictory currents has nothing facile about it …” Barthes subscribes as well to Gide’s idea of writing that is elusive, willing to be minor. His relation to politics also recalls Gide’s: a willingness in times of ideological mobilization to take the right stands, to be political—but, finally, not: and thereby, perhaps, to tell the truth that hardly anybody else is telling. (See the short essay Barthes wrote after a trip to China in 1974.) Barthes had many affinities with Gide, and much of what he says of Gide applies unaltered to himself. How remarkable to find it all laid out—including the program of “perpetual self-correction”—well before he embarked on his career.

(Barthes was twenty-seven, a patient in a sanatorium for tubercular students, when he wrote this essay in 1942 for the sanatorium’s magazine; he did not enter the Paris literary arena for another five years.)

When Barthes, who began under the aegis of Gide’s doctrine of psychic and moral availability, started writing regularly, Gide’s important work was long over, his influence already negligible (he died in 1951); and Barthes put on the armor of postwar debate about the responsibility of literature, the terms of which were set up by Sartre—the demand that the writer be in a militant relation to virtue, which Sartre described by the tautological notion of “commitment.” Gide and Sartre were, of course, the two most influential writer-moralists of this century in France, and the work of these two sons of French Protestant culture suggests quite opposed moral and aesthetic choices. But it is just this kind of polarization that Barthes, another Protestant in revolt against Protestant moralism, seeks to avoid. Supple Gidean that he is, Barthes is eager to acknowledge the model of Sartre as well. While a quarrel with Sartre’s view of literature lies at the heart of his first book, Writing Degree Zero (Sartre is never mentioned by name), an agreement with Sartre’s view of the imagination, and its obsessional energies, surfaces in Barthes’s last book, Camera Lucida (written “in homage” to the early Sartre, the author of L’Imaginaire). Even in the first book, Barthes concedes a good deal to Sartre’s view of literature and language—for example, putting poetry with the other “arts” and identifying literature with prose, with argument. Barthes’s view of literature in his subsequent writing was more complex. Though he never wrote on poetry, his standards for literature approached those of the poet: language that has undergone an upheaval, has been displaced, liberated from ungrateful contexts; that, so to speak, lives on its own. Although Barthes agrees with Sartre that the writer’s vocation has an ethical imperative, he insists on its complexity and ambiguity. Sartre appeals to the morality of ends. Barthes invokes “the morality of form”—what makes literature a problem rather than a solution; what makes literature.

To conceive of literature as successful “communication” and position-taking, however, is a sentiment that must inevitably become conformist. The instrumental view expounded in Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1948) makes of literature something perpetually obsolete, a vain—and misplaced—struggle between ethical good soldiers and literary purists, that is, modernists. (Contrast the latent philistinism of this view of literature with the subtlety and acuity of what Sartre had to say about visual images.) Riven by his love of literature (the love recounted in his one perfect book, The Words) and an evangelical contempt for literature, one of the century’s great littérateurs spent the last years of his life insulting literature and himself with that indigent idea, “the neurosis of literature.” His defense of the writer’s project of commitment is no more convincing. Accused of thereby reducing literature (to politics), Sartre protested that it would be more correct to accuse him of overestimating it. “If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble,” he declared in an interview in 1960. “That’s what I mean by ‘commitment.’” But Sartre’s inflation of literature to “everything” is another brand of depreciation.

Barthes, too, might be charged with overestimating literature—with treating literature as “everything”—but at least he made a good case for doing so. For Barthes understood (as Sartre did not) that literature is first of all, last of all, language. It is language that is everything. Which is to say that all of reality is presented in the form of language—the poet’s wisdom, and also the structuralist’s. And Barthes takes for granted (as Sartre, with his notion of writing as communication, did not) what he calls the “radical exploration of writing” undertaken by Mallarmé, Joyce, Proust, and their successors. That no venture is valuable unless it can be conceived as a species of radicalism, radicalism thereby unhinged from any distinctive content, is perhaps the essence of what we call modernism. Barthes’s work belongs to the sensibility of modernism in the extent to which it assumes the necessity of the adversary stance: literature conceived by modernist standards but not necessarily a modernist literature. Rather, all varieties of counterposition are available to it.

Perhaps the most striking difference between Sartre and Barthes is the deep one, of temperament. Sartre has an intellectually brutal, bon enfant view of the world, a view that wills simplicity, resolution, transparence; Barthes’s view is irrevocably complex, self-conscious, refined, irresolute. Sartre was eager, too eager, to seek confrontation, and the tragedy of this great career, of the use he made of his stupendous intellect, was just his willingness to simplify himself. Barthes preferred to avoid confrontation, to evade polarization. He defines the writer as “the watcher who stands at the crossroads of all other discourses”—the opposite of an activist or a purveyor of doctrine.

Barthes’s utopia of literature has an ethical character almost the opposite of Sartre’s. It emerges in the connections he makes between desire and reading, desire and writing—his insistence that his own writing is, more than anything, the product of appetite. The words “pleasure,” “bliss,” “happiness” recur in his work with a weight, reminiscent of Gide, that is both voluptuous and subversive. As a moralist—Puritan or anti-Puritan—might solemnly distinguish sex for procreation from sex for pleasure, Barthes divides writers into those who write something (what Sartre meant by a writer) and the real writers, who do not write something but, rather, write. This intransitive sense of the verb “to write” Barthes endorses as not only the source of the writer’s felicity but the model of freedom. For Barthes, it is not the commitment that writing makes to something outside of itself (to a social or moral goal) that makes literature an instrument of opposition and subversion but a certain practice of writing itself: excessive, playful, intricate, subtle, sensuous—language which can never be that of power.

Barthes’s praise of writing as a gratuitous, free activity is, in one sense, a political view. He conceives of literature as a perpetual renewal of the right of individual assertion; and all rights are, finally, political ones. Still, Barthes has an evasive relation to politics, and he is one of the great modern refusers of history. Barthes started publishing and mattering in the aftermath of World War II, which, astonishingly, he never mentions; indeed, in all his writings he never, as far as I recall, mentions the word “war.” Barthes’s friendly way of understanding subjects domesticates them, in the best sense. He lacks anything like Walter Benjamin’s tragic awareness that every work of civilization is also a work of barbarism. The ethical burden for Benjamin was a kind of martyrdom; he could not help connecting it with politics. Barthes regards politics as a kind of constriction of the human (and intellectual) subject which has to be outwitted; in Roland Barthes he declares that he likes political positions “lightly held.” Hence, perhaps, he was never gripped by the project that is central for Benjamin, as for all true modernists: to try to fathom the nature of “the modern.” Barthes, who was not tormented by the catastrophes of modernity or tempted by its revolutionary illusions, had a post-tragic sensibility. He refers to the present literary era as “a moment of gentle apocalypse.” Happy indeed the writer who can utter such a phrase.

 

 

MUCH OF BARTHES’S WORK is devoted to the repertoire of pleasure—“the great adventure of desire,” as he calls it in the essay on Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste. Collecting a model of felicity from each thing he examines, he assimilates intellectual practice itself to the erotic. Barthes called the life of the mind desire, and was concerned to defend “the plurality of desire.” Meaning is never monogamous. His joyful wisdom or gay science offers the ideal of a free yet capacious, satisfied consciousness; of a condition in which one does not have to choose between good and bad, true and false, in which it is not necessary to justify. The texts and enterprises that engaged Barthes tend to be those in which he could read a defiance of these antitheses. For example, this is how Barthes construes fashion: as a domain, like eros, where contraries do not exist (“Fashion seeks equivalences, validities—not verities”); where one can allow oneself to be gratified; where meaning—and pleasure—is profuse.

To construe in this way, Barthes requires a master category through which everything can be refracted, which makes possible the maximum number of intellectual moves. That most inclusive category is language, the widest sense of language—meaning form itself. Thus, the subject of Système de la mode (1967) is not fashion but the language of fashion. Barthes assumes, of course, that the language of fashion is fashion; that, as he said in an interview, “fashion exists only through the discourse on it.” Assumptions of this sort (myth is a language, fashion is a language) have become a leading, often reductive convention of contemporary intellectual endeavor. In Barthes’s work the assumption is less a reductive one than it is proliferative—embarrassment of riches for the critic as artist. To stipulate that there is no understanding outside of language is to assert that there is meaning everywhere.

By so extending the reach of meaning, Barthes takes the notion over the top, to arrive at such triumphant paradoxes as the empty subject that contains everything, the empty sign to which all meaning can be attributed. With this euphoric sense of how meaning proliferates, Barthes reads that “zero degree of the monument,” the Eiffel Tower, as “this pure—virtually empty—sign” that (his italics) “means everything.” (The characteristic point of Barthes’s arguments-by-paradox is to vindicate subjects untrammeled by utility: it is the uselessness of the Eiffel Tower that makes it infinitely useful as a sign, just as the uselessness of genuine literature is what makes it morally useful.) Barthes found a world of such liberating absences of meaning, both modernist and simply non-Western, in Japan; Japan, he noted, was full of empty signs. In place of moralistic antitheses—true versus false, good versus bad—Barthes offers complementary extremes. “Its form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full,” he writes about myth in an essay in the 1950s. Arguments about many subjects have this identical climax: that absence is really presence, emptiness repletion, impersonality the highest achievement of the personal.

Like that euphoric register of religious understanding which discerns treasures of meaning in the most banal and meaningless, which designates as the richest carrier of meaning one vacant of meaning, the brilliant descriptions in Barthes’s work bespeak an ecstatic experience of understanding; and ecstasy—whether religious, aesthetic, or sexual—has perennially been described by the metaphors of being empty and being full, the zero state and the state of maximal plenitude: their alternation, their equivalence. The very transposing of subjects into the discourse about them is the same kind of move: emptying subjects out to fill them up again. It is a method of understanding that, presuming ecstasy, fosters detachment. And his very idea of language also supports both aspects of Barthes’s sensibility: while endorsing a profusion of meaning, the Saussurean theory—that language is form (rather than substance)—is wonderfully congruent with a taste for elegant, that is, reticent, discourse. Creating meaning through the intellectual equivalent of negative space, Barthes’s method has one never talking about subjects in themselves: fashion is the language of fashion, a country is “the empire of signs”—the ultimate accolade. For reality to exist as signs conforms to a maximum idea of decorum: all meaning is deferred, indirect, elegant.

Barthes’s ideals of impersonality, of reticence, of elegance, are set forth most beautifully in his appreciation of Japanese culture in the book called Empire of Signs (1970) and in his essay on the Bunraku puppets. This essay, “Lesson in Writing,” recalls Kleist’s “On the Puppet Theatre,” which similarly celebrates the tranquillity, lightness, and grace of beings free of thinking, of meaning—free of “the disorders of consciousness.” Like the puppets in Kleist’s essay, the Bunraku puppets are seen as incarnating an ideal “impassivity, clarity, agility, subtlety.” To be both impassive and fantastic, inane and profound, unselfconscious and supremely sensuous—these qualities that Barthes discerned in various facets of Japanese civilization project an ideal of taste and deportment, the ideal of the aesthete in its larger meaning that has been in general circulation since the dandies of the late eighteenth century. Barthes was hardly the first Western observer for whom Japan has been an aesthete’s utopia, the place where one finds aesthete views everywhere and exercises one’s own at liberty. The culture where aesthete goals are central—not, as in the West, eccentric—was bound to elicit a strong response. (Japan is mentioned in the Gide essay written in 1942.)

Of the available models of the aesthetic way of looking at the world, perhaps the most eloquent are French and Japanese. In France it has largely been a literary tradition, though with annexes in two popular arts, gastronomy and fashion. Barthes did take up the subject of food as ideology, as classification, as taste—he talks often of savoring; and it seems inevitable that he would find the subject of fashion congenial. Writers from Baudelaire to Cocteau have taken fashion seriously, and one of the founding figures of literary modernism, Mallarmé, edited a fashion magazine. French culture, where aesthete ideals have been more explicit and influential than in any other European culture, allows a link between ideas of vanguard art and of fashion. (The French have never shared the Anglo-American conviction that makes the fashionable the opposite of the serious.) In Japan, aesthete standards appear to imbue the whole culture, and long predate the modern ironies; they were formulated as early as the late tenth century, in Sei Shnagon’s Pillow Book, that breviary of consummate dandy attitudes, written in what appears to us an astonishingly modern, disjunctive form—notes, anecdotes, and lists. Barthes’s interest in Japan expresses the attraction to a less defensive, more innocent, and far more elaborated version of the aesthete sensibility: emptier and prettier than the French, more straightforward (no beauty in ugliness, as in Baudelaire); pre-apocalyptic, refined, serene.

In Western culture, where it remains marginal, the dandy attitude has the character of an exaggeration. In one form, the older one, the aesthete is a willful exclusionist of taste, holding attitudes that make it possible to like, to be comfortable with, to give one’s assent to the smallest number of things; reducing things to the smallest expression of them. (When taste distributes its plusses and minuses, it favors diminutive adjectives, such as—for praise—“happy,” “amusing,” “charming,” “agreeable,” “suitable.”) Elegance equals the largest amount of refusal. As language, this attitude finds its consummate expression in the rueful quip, the disdainful one-liner. In the other form, the aesthete sustains standards that make it possible to be pleased with the largest number of things; annexing new, unconventional, even illicit sources of pleasure. The literary device that best projects this attitude is the list (Roland Barthes has many)—the whimsical aesthete polyphony that juxtaposes things and experiences of a starkly different, often incongruous nature, turning them all, by this technique, into artifacts, aesthetic objects. Here elegance equals the wittiest acceptances. The aesthete’s posture alternates between never being satisfied and always finding a way of being satisfied, being pleased with virtually everything.¹

Although both directions of dandy taste presuppose detachment, the exclusivist version is cooler. The inclusivist version can be enthusiastic, even effusive; the adjectives used for praise tend to be over- rather than understatements. Barthes, who had much of the high exclusivist taste of the dandy, was more inclined to its modern, democratizing form: aesthete leveling—hence his willingness to find charm, amusement, happiness, pleasure in so many things. His account of Fourier, for example, is finally an aesthete’s appraisal. Of the “little details” that, he says, make up the “whole of Fourier,” Barthes writes: “I am carried away, dazzled, convinced by a sort of charm of expressions … Fourier is swarming with these felicities … I cannot resist these pleasures; they seem ‘true’ to me.” Similarly: what another flâneur, less committed to finding pleasure everywhere, might experience as the oppressive overcrowdedness of streets in Tokyo signifies for Barthes “the transformation of quality by quantity,” a new relation that is “a source of endless jubilation.”

Many of Barthes’s judgments and interests are implicitly affirmations of the aesthete’s standards. His early essays championing the fiction of Robbe-Grillet, which gave Barthes the misleading reputation as an advocate of literary modernism, were in effect aesthete polemics. The “objective,” the “literal”—these austere, minimalist ideas of literature are in fact Barthes’s ingenious recycling of one of the aesthete’s principal theses: that surface is as telling as depth. What Barthes discerned in Robbe-Grillet in the 1950s was a new, high-tech version of the dandy writer; what he hailed in Robbe-Grillet was the desire “to establish the novel on the surface,” thereby frustrating our desire to “fall back on a psychology.” The idea that depths are obfuscating, demagogic, that no human essence stirs at the bottom of things, and that freedom lies in staying on the surface, the large glass on which desire circulates—this is the central argument of the modern aesthete position, in the various exemplary forms it has taken over the last hundred years. (Baudelaire. Wilde. Duchamp. Cage.)

Barthes is constantly making an argument against depth, against the idea that the most real is latent, submerged. Bunraku is seen as refusing the antinomy of matter and soul, inner and outer. “Myth hides nothing,” he declares in “Myth Today” (1956). The aesthete position not only regards the notion of depths, of hiddenness, as a mystification, a lie, but opposes the very idea of antitheses. Of course, to speak of depths and surfaces is already to misrepresent the aesthetic view of the world—to reiterate a duality, like that of form and content, it precisely denies. The largest statement of this position was made by Nietzsche, whose work constitutes a criticism of fixed antitheses (good versus evil, right versus wrong, true versus false).

But while Nietzsche scorned “depths,” he exalted “heights.” In the post-Nietzschean tradition, there are neither depths nor heights; there are only various kinds of surface, of spectacle. Nietzsche said that every profound nature needs a mask, and spoke—profoundly—in praise of intellectual ruse; but he was making the gloomiest prediction when he said that the coming century, ours, would be the age of the actor. An ideal of seriousness, of sincerity, underlies all of Nietzsche’s work, which makes the overlap of his ideas and those of a true aesthete (like Wilde, like Barthes) so problematic. Nietzsche was a histrionic thinker but not a lover of the histrionic. His ambivalence toward spectacle (after all, his criticism of Wagner’s music was finally that it was a seduction), his insistence on the authenticity of spectacle, mean that criteria other than the histrionic are at work. In the aesthete’s position, the notions of reality and spectacle precisely reinforce and infuse each other, and seduction is always something positive. In this respect, Barthes’s ideas have an exemplary coherence. Notions of the theatre inform, directly or indirectly, all his work. (Divulging the secret, late, he declares in Roland Barthes that there was no single text of his “which did not treat of a certain theatre, and the spectacle is the universal category through whose forms the world is seen.”) Barthes explains Robbe-Grillet’s empty, “anthological” description as a technique of theatrical distancing (presenting an object “as if it were in itself a spectacle”). Fashion is, of course, another casebook of the theatrical. So is Barthes’s interest in photography, which he treats as a realm of pure haunted spectatorship. In the account of photography given in Camera Lucida there are hardly any photographers—the subject is photographs (treated virtually as found objects) and those who are fascinated by them: as objects of erotic reverie, as memento mori.

What he wrote about Brecht, whom he discovered in 1954 (when the Berliner Ensemble visited Paris with their production of Mother Courage) and helped make known in France, says less about the theatrical than his treatment of many subjects as forms of the theatrical. In his frequent use of Brecht in seminars of the 1970s, he cited the prose writings, which he took as a model of critical acuity; it was not Brecht the maker of didactic spectacles but Brecht the didactic intellectual who finally mattered to Barthes. In contrast, with Bunraku what Barthes valued was the element of theatricality as such. In Barthes’s early work, the theatrical is the domain of liberty, the place where identities are only roles and one can change roles, a zone where meaning itself may be refused. (Barthes speaks of Bunraku’s privileged “exemption from meaning.”) Barthes’s talk about the theatrical, like his evangelism of pleasure, is a way of proselytizing for the attenuating, lightening, baffling of the Logos, of meaning itself.

To affirm the notion of the spectacle is the triumph of the aesthete’s position: the promulgation of the ludic, the refusal of the tragic. All of Barthes’s intellectual moves have the effect of voiding work of its “content,” the tragic of its finality. That is the sense in which his work is genuinely subversive, liberating—playful. It is outlaw discourse in the great aesthete tradition, which often assumes the liberty of rejecting the “substance” of discourse in order better to appreciate its “form”: outlaw discourse turned respectable, as it were, with the help of various theories known as varieties of formalism. In numerous accounts of his intellectual evolution, Barthes describes himself as the perpetual disciple—but the point that he really wants to make is that he remains, finally, untouched. He spoke of his having worked under the aegis of a succession of theories and masters. In fact, Barthes’s work has altogether more coherence, and ambivalence. For all his connection with tutelary doctrines, Barthes’s submission to doctrine was superficial. In the end, it was necessary that all intellectual gadgetry be discarded. His last books are a kind of unraveling of his ideas. Roland Barthes, he says, is the book of his resistance to his ideas, the dismantling of his own power. And in the inaugural lecture that marked his acceding to a position of the highest eminence—the Chair of Literary Semiology at the College de France in 1977—Barthes chooses, characteristically enough, to argue for a soft intellectual authority. He praises teaching as a permissive, not a coercive, space where one can be relaxed, disarmed, floating.

Language itself, which Barthes called a “utopia” in the euphoric formulation that ends Writing Degree Zero, now comes under attack, as another form of “power,” and his very effort to convey his sensitivity to the ways in which language is “power” gives rise to that instantly notorious hyperbole in his College de France lecture: the power of language is “quite simply fascist.” To assume that society is ruled by monolithic ideologies and repressive mystifications is necessary to Barthes’s advocacy of egoism, post-revolutionary but nevertheless antinomian: his notion that the affirmation of the unremittingly personal is a subversive act. This is a classic extension of the aesthete attitude, in which it becomes a politics: a politics of radical individuality. Pleasure is largely identified with unauthorized pleasure, and the right of individual assertion with the sanctity of the asocial self. In the late writings, the theme of protest against power takes the form of an increasingly private definition of experience (as fetishized involvement) and a ludic definition of thought. “The great problem,” Barthes says in a late interview, “is to outplay the signified, to outplay law, to outplay the father, to outplay the repressed—I do not say to explode it, but to outplay it.” The aesthete’s ideal of detachment, of the selfishness of detachment, allows for avowals of passionate, obsessed involvement: the selfishness of ardor, of fascination. (Wilde speaks of his “curious mixture of ardour and of indifference … I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last.”) Barthes has to keep affirming the aesthete’s detachment, and undermining it—with passions.

Like all great aesthetes, Barthes was an expert at having it both ways. Thus, he identifies writing both with a generous relation to the world (writing as “perpetual production”) and with a defiant relation (writing as “a perpetual revolution of language,” outside the bounds of power). He wants a politics and an anti-politics, a critical relation to the world and one free of moral considerations. The aesthete’s radicalism is the radicalism of a privileged, even a replete, consciousness—but a genuine radicalism nonetheless. All genuine moral views are founded on a notion of refusal, and the aesthete’s view, which can be conformist, does provide certain potentially powerful, not just elegant, grounds for a great refusal.

The aesthete’s radicalism: to be multiple, to make multiple identifications; to assume fully the privilege of the personal. Barthes’s work—he avows that he writes by obsessions—consists of continuities and detours; the accumulation of points of view; finally, their disburdenment: a mixture of progress and caprice. For Barthes, liberty is a state that consists in remaining plural, fluid, vibrating with doctrine; whose price is being indecisive, apprehensive, fearful of being taken for an impostor. The writer’s freedom that Barthes describes is, in part, flight. The writer is the deputy of his own ego—of that self in perpetual flight before what is fixed by writing, as the mind is in perpetual flight from doctrine. “Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.” Barthes wants to move on—that is one of the imperatives of the aesthete’s sensibility.

 

 

THROUGHOUT HIS WORK Barthes projects himself into his subject. He is Fourier: unvexed by the sense of evil, aloof from politics, “that necessary purge”; he “vomits it up.” He is the Bunraku puppet: impersonal, subtle. He is Gide: the writer who is ageless (always young, always mature); the writer as egoist—a triumphant species of “simultaneous being” or plural desire. He is the subject of all the subjects that he praises. (That he must, characteristically, praise may be connected with his project of defining, creating standards for himself.) In this sense, much of what Barthes wrote now appears autobiographical.

Eventually, it became autobiographical in the literal sense. A brave meditation on the personal, on the self, is at the center of his late writings and seminars. Much of Barthes’s work, especially the last three books with their poignant themes of loss, constitutes a candid defense of his sensuality (as well as his sexuality)—his flavor, his way of tasting the world. The books are also artfully anti-confessional. Camera Lucida is a meta-book: a meditation on the even more personal autobiographical book that he planned to write about photographs of his mother, who died in 1978, and then put aside. Barthes starts from the modernist model of writing that is superior to any idea of intention or mere expressiveness; a mask. “The work,” Valéry insists, “should not give the person it affects anything that can be reduced to an idea of the author’s person and thinking.”² But this commitment to impersonality does not preclude the avowal of the self; it is only another variation on the project of self-examination: the noblest project of French literature. Valéry offers one ideal of self-absorption—impersonal, disinterested. Rousseau offers another ideal—passionate, avowing vulnerability. Many themes of Barthes’s work lie in the classic discourse of French literary culture: its taste for elegant abstraction, in particular for the formal analysis of the sentiments; its disdain for mere psychology; and its coquetry about the impersonal (Flaubert declaring “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” but also insisting in letters on his novel’s “impersonality,” its lack of connection with himself).

Barthes is the latest major participant in the great national literary project, inaugurated by Montaigne: the self as vocation, life as a reading of the self. The enterprise construes the self as the locus of all possibilities, avid, unafraid of contradiction (nothing need be lost, everything may be gained), and the exercise of consciousness as a life’s highest aim, because only through becoming fully conscious may one be free. The distinctive French utopian tradition is this vision of reality redeemed, recovered, transcended by consciousness; a vision of the life of the mind as a life of desire, of full intelligence and pleasure—so different from, say, the traditions of high moral seriousness of German and of Russian literature.

Inevitably, Barthes’s work had to end in autobiography. “One must choose between being a terrorist and being an egoist,” he once observed in a seminar. The options seem very French. Intellectual terrorism is a central, respectable form of intellectual practice in France—tolerated, humored, rewarded: the “Jacobin” tradition of ruthless assertion and shameless ideological about-faces; the mandate of incessant judgment, opinion, anathematizing, overpraising; the taste for extreme positions, then casually reversed, and for deliberate provocation. Alongside this, how modest egoism is!

Barthes’s voice became steadily more intimate, his subjects more inward. An affirmation of his own idiosyncrasy (which he does not “decipher”) is the main theme of Roland Barthes. He writes about the body, taste, love; solitude; erotic desolation; finally, death, or rather desire and death: the twin subjects of the book on photography. As in the Platonic dialogues, the thinker (writer, reader, teacher) and the lover—the two main figures of the Barthesian self—are joined. Barthes, of course, means his erotics of literature more literally, as literally as he can. (The text enters, fills, it grants euphoria.) But finally he seems fairly Platonic after all. The monologue of A Lover’s Discourse, which obviously draws on a story of disappointment in love, ends in a spiritual vision in the classic Platonic way, in which lower loves are transmuted into higher, more inclusive ones. Barthes avows that he “wants to unmask, no longer to interpret, but to make of consciousness itself a drug, and thus accede to a vision of irreducible reality, to the great drama of clarity, to prophetic love.”

As he divested himself of theories, he gave less weight to the modernist standard of the intricate. He does not want, he says, to place any obstacles between himself and the reader. The last book is part memoir (of his mother), part meditation on eros, part treatise on the photographic image, part invocation of death—a book of piety, resignation, desire; a certain brilliance is being renounced, and the view itself is of the simplest. The subject of photography provided the great exemption, perhaps release, from the exactions of formalist taste. In choosing to write about photography, Barthes takes the occasion to adopt the warmest kind of realism: photographs fascinate because of what they are about. And they may awaken a desire for a further divestment of the self. (“Looking at certain photographs,” he writes in Camera Lucida, “I wanted to be a primitive, without culture.”) The Socratic sweetness and charm become more plaintive, more desperate: writing is an embrace, a being embraced; every idea is an idea reaching out. There is a sense of disaggregation of his ideas, and of himself—represented by his increasing fascination with what he calls “the detail.” In the preface to Sade/Fourier/Loyola, Barthes writes: “Were I a writer, and dead, how pleased I would be if my life, through the efforts of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to ‘biographemes’ whose distinction and mobility might travel beyond the limits of any fate, and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion.” The need to touch, even in the perspective of his own mortality.

Barthes’s late work is filled with signals that he had come to the end of something—the enterprise of the critic as artist—and was seeking to become another kind of writer. (He announced his intention to write a novel.) There were exalted avowals of vulnerability, of being forlorn. Barthes more and more entertained an idea of writing which resembles the mystical idea of kenosis, emptying out. He acknowledged that not only systems—his ideas were in a state of melt—but the “I” as well had to be dismantled. (True knowledge, says Barthes, depends on the “unmasking of the ‘I.’”) The aesthetics of absence—the empty sign, the empty subject, the exemption from meaning—were all intimations of the great project of depersonalization which is the aesthete’s highest gesture of good taste. Toward the close of Barthes’s work, this ideal took on another inflection. A spiritual ideal of depersonalization—that is perhaps the characteristic terminus of every serious aesthete’s position. (Think of Wilde, of Valéry.) It is the point at which the aesthete’s view self-destructs: what follows is either silence—or transformation.

Barthes harbored spiritual strivings that could not be supported by his aesthete’s position. It was inevitable that he pass beyond it, as he did in his very last work and teaching. At the end, he had done with the aesthetics of absence, and now spoke of literature as the embrace of subject and object. There was an emergence of a vision of “wisdom” of the Platonic sort—tempered, to be sure, by wisdom of a worldly kind: skeptical of dogmatisms, conscientious about gratification, wistfully attached to utopian ideals. Barthes’s temperament, style, sensibility, had run their course. And from this vantage point his work now appears to unfold, with more grace and poignancy and with far greater intellectual power than that of any of his contemporaries, the considerable truths vouchsafed to the aesthete’s sensibility, to a commitment to intellectual adventure, to the talent for contradiction and inversion—those “late” ways of experiencing, evaluating, reading the world; and surviving in it, drawing energy, finding consolation (but finally not), taking pleasure, expressing love.

[1982]