ROLAND BARTHES

Overview

Roland Barthes was a gifted member of the Parisian intelligentsia, famous for his left-wing attacks on the bourgeoisie in which he blended Existentialism, semiotics and linguistic hedonism. Barthe's thesis that the author is dead — i.e. that writing is beyond the control of the individual author — greatly overstates the case, but introduces an important theme of Postmodernism.

Introduction

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.

Écrivant and Écrivain

The écrivain is a materialist, a worker with language, one who uses its signifiers to create what had not existed before. What he writes comes not from his mind or subconscious, but from the psychic case-history of his body, which is the medium through which language expresses itself. The author is not a self-conscious, crafting entity: that does not exist, or is immaterial. The author is simply the means by which a text emerges, something which we should enjoy as a linguistic spectacle, and not view as a mirror to the world. Certainly the text will lack finality, and possibly shape as well, but it will be authentic, preserving what actually happened. The text which the lover weaves in Barthes's A Lover's Discourse (1978) does not have narrative or purpose but becomes a 'brazier of meaning' as the ambiguous signs of the loved one's behaviour are interpreted. Such behaviour is 'scriptible' — is rewritten by the lover as he reads them, just as we rewrite a text in reading it.

S/Z (1970) was based on an untypical novella by Balzac: 'Sarrasine'. Barthes chopped Balzac's text into 561 units and then dissolved the story further by treating it under five codes: actional, hermeneutic, semic, symbolic and referential. The last code, the references the story makes to 'reality out there', was the most controversial. Barthes argued that this 'reality' was only the glib commonplaces and accepted wisdom of Balzac's own time: not insights but stereotypes. As a Structuralist, he suggested that there was no author but rules, no expression but only technique. In The Pleasure of the Text (1973) Barthes went further. Here the body of the writer (his personal and secret mythology) speaks to the body of the reader — by disconcerting him, rocking his cultural and psychological foundations, bringing him to a crisis in his understanding of language.

Barthes was against doxa, conformism, the status quo. He set no great store by his own work, which was a stick to beat the present and make it more reflective. In writing a text, any text, the writer himself comes undone, remaining only as devices within the text, appearing perhaps in the third person as he does in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975). In his own way, Barthes was a moralist, a hedonistic materialist, arguing that we must surrender our individuality whenever we enter language, which cannot belong to us.

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Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Amelia Noguera Rubio
norua@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press