Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
Roland Barthes was born in Cherbough, Manche. His father died in a naval
battle in Barthes' infancy, forcing his mother to move to Bayonne. Barthes
spent his early childhood there, until they moved to Paris in 1924 where he attended
the Lycée Montagne, followed by studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand from
1930-34. Life became difficult for them when Barthes mother had an illegitimate
child, for their grandparents refused to give her financial aid, and so she
took work as a bookbinder. Barthes was able to continue his studies at the
Sorbonne, in classical letters, grammar and philology (receiving a degrees in
1939 and 1943 respectively), and Greek tragedy.
Barthes' doctoral studies were hampered by ill health. He suffered from tuberculosis,
spending time in sanatoriums in the years 1934-5 and 1942-46, during the
occupation. He continued to read and write, established a theatrical group, and
in spite of his condition, managed to teach at lycées in Biarritz (1939),
Bayonne (1939-40), Paris (1942-46), at the French Institute, Bucharest, Romania
(1948-49), University of Alexandria, Egypt (1949-50), and Direction Générale
des Affaires Culturelles (1950-52). His teaching career expanded: research
positions with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (1952-59), a
directorship of studies at the École Practique des Hautes Étude (1960-76), a
teacher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (1967-68), and a chair of
literary semiology at Collège de France (1976 to 1980). At this time he was
considered a leading critic of his generation, his book, A Lover's Discourse
(1977), sold more than 60,000 copies in France. His work became known in
popular culture in Europe and America, securing the translation of many of his
books since his death at the age of sixty-four. Such works include: Writing
Degree Zero (1953), Mythologies (1957), Criticism and Truth
(1966), S/Z (1972), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), and The
Rustle of Language (1984).
In his early work, Barthes was a structuralist and semiotician, influenced
by the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure's study of signs and signification. He
preferred not to classify his thought, evident in the range of subject-matter
for analysis in his works, often to provoke the bourgeoisie. He wrote on popular
phenomena from soap-ads to wrestling, articles that originally appeared in Le
Monde, which perhaps inspired him to conflate elements of what had been
perceived as high or low culture. His interest in popular media and events was
due in part to what he saw as an abuse in such phenomena of ideology. Barthes
believed that the starting point for such works did not lay in the author's
intentions of traditional value judgments, but by the texts produced, as
systems unto themselves whose underlying structures form the "meaning of
the work as a whole." His works had a diversity, applying semiotic theory
and/or literary critique, looking to disrupt the French literary establishment,
while other essays focused on more personal issues such as the text, music, love
and photography.
Thus, Barthes works inspired criticism from colleagues. Raymond Picard, a
professor at the Sorbonne and Racine scholar, critiqued what he saw as an
unscholarly and subjective approach of Barthes' study, Sur Racine
(1963), in his essay, Nouvelle Critique ou Nouvelle Imposture?(1965).
Barthes responded with the publication of Critique et Verité in 1966, in
which he argued for a science of criticism over the university criticism,
showing that the latter promulgated critical terms and approaches connected to
dominant class ideology. Terms such as the value of clarity, humanity and
nobility cannot be taken as self-evident for research, but act as a censoring
function for other means. Barthes went so far as to question the extent to
which one can know one's purpose or place of understanding apart from language,
the written in relationship to its contrary in speech, "…for writing can
tell the truth on language, but not the truth on the real…" (from Image-Music-Text,
1977). This strain of structural linguistics in Barthes' thought was developed
in greater detail in S/Z (1970), an analysis of the fiction of Balzac's work, Sarrasine.
Barthes primary thesis in S/Z demonstrates that the power of fiction lies
in the products of artifice in the form of intriguing details, enigmas, and
plausible actions rather than in the imitation of reality. His complex analysis
is not intended to construct a system of classification, he envisions Balzac's
work as the weaving of codes that come together in the reader, in which the
reader makes of them a unity. This runs contrary to the idea of a text as
having an origin in the author; it is thus interpreted as a death of the author
and the birth of the reader. Barthes identified a series of five codes within
the text of fiction that form the network of significations in the reader: the
hermeneutic code (presentation of an enigma); the semic code (connotative
meaning); the symbolic code; the proairetic code (the logic of actions), and
the gnomic, or cultural code, which evokes a particular body of knowledge.
Barthes final book, La Chambre Claire (Camera Lucinda, 1980),
illustrates the close relationship he had with his mother. It was written in
the three years between the death of his mother and his own; the book is a
discussion of the communicating medium of photography. He describes
portraiture, the experience of being before the camera in which his "body
never finds its zero degree, no one can give it to me (perhaps only my mother?
For it is not indifference which erases the weight of the image — the Photomat
always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police — but love, extreme
love)." He points to a ritual magic of photography, disclaiming it as an
art. Perhaps recalling something of Benjamin's writings on photography, he
struggles with the experience of his mother and an image of his ailing mother
(who he was nursing near the time of her death) within him as "my inner
law, as my feminine child… Once she was dead I no longer had any reason to
attune myself to the progress of the superior Life Force (the race, the
species)." Barthes died in a street accident in Paris on March 23, 1980.
All material
herein Copyright © 1997–2008. European Graduate School EGS. All Rights
Reserved. The source code is owned by the European Graduate School and is
protected by copyright laws and international copyright treaties, as well as
other intellectual property laws and treaties. The source code is licensed, not
sold. All right, title and interest in the source code (including any images,
applets, photographs, animations, video, audio, music, and text incorporated
into the source code), accompanying printed materials, and any copies you are
permitted to make herein, are owned by the European Graduate School EGS, and
the source code is protected by United States copyright laws and international
treaty provisions. Therefore, the source code must be treated like any other
copyrighted material.
-
Return to Roland Barthes’ biographies.
-
Return to Roland Barthes’ pag.
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Amelia Noguera Rubio
norua@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press