Roland Barthes

 

Anti-bourgeois, standing apart from the French academic scene, initially an Existentialist and always anti-essentialist, Roland Barthes (1915-80) came to prominence with the 1957 publication of Mythologies, a ferocious attack on French society. Barthes was a hedonist, and argued for fluidity and plurality, in outlook and social behaviour. Contemporary criticism was ahistorical, he complained, psychologically naive and deterministic, covertly ideological, bovinely content with the one interpretation.

In works which followed, Barthes claimed to have unmasked the pretensions of Romanticism and Realism. If the first overlooked the sheer labour of writing, aiming for an art that conceals art, literature in the second becomes a servant of reality and therefore anti-art. Barthes distinguished the clerkly écrivant (who uses language to express what is already there, if only the contents of his thoughts) from the nobler écrivain (who is absorbed into the activity of writing, labouring away towards new elaborations and meanings). In practice a writer might express both aspects, but the more honest and important writer was the écrivain, whose incessant labours did not adopt the ideologies of the bourgeoisie, but bridged the gulf between intellectuals and the proletariat. Writers worked as everyone else worked, and their efforts should not be smoothed over as inspiration of a favoured spiritual class.

Barthes's flirtation with the scientism of the Nouvelle Critique — that literary criticism should be a scientific discipline, and therefore follow in the steps of structural anthropology and model itself on linguistics — was very brief. By Michelet (1954) Barthes had absorbed the pessimistic and irrational outlook common in the years following W.W.II. He became familiar with the work of Mallarmé (de-realization: the poetics of silence and negation), Kafka (ceaseless struggle with inexhaustible riddles), Blanchot (helplessness and dark pathos of literature) and Bataille (Nietzschean violence and a surrealistic eroticism).

Through these influences Barthes ushered in what is most distinctive of Postmodernism — the indeterminacy, self-irony, and critical vagueness that were fashioned by Derrida into deconstruction Initially at least, Barthes was very much a left-wing intellectual. Hence his interest in myths, which are the products of social groups using an unexamined social code. He excoriated the bourgeoisie in his Mythologies, but by 1960 he was more concerned with writing itself, promoting the priestly écrivain above the subservient écrivant, and in 1963 he extended his stylistic analysis of Michelet to Racine's world of stifled erotic violence. In Sur Racine the plays are studied like primitive societies, their underlying themes and mechanisms receiving a well-publicized Structuralist interpretation.

For Barthes, realism came with a stereotyped moral vision, and all strategies were fair in a war against repressive dogma — including Barthe's use of a crude Freudianism, a far-fetched reinterpretation of the plot, and a bullying of Balzac into meaning what he did not say. More than that, claimed Barthes, the better, writerly (scriptible) texts call for a playful reinterpretation of the signifiers. We should not be bound by what the author said, or thought he was saying, but cede authority to the reader. The New Critics may have dethroned the author's intention, but Barthes is not arguing for close textural reading. Interpretation for him must be creative and individual, for how else can we make ourselves free creatures of impulse?

An expanded article, with references, can be found on TextEtc.

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Roland Barthes

 

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