Barthes's Early Works

The second of three essays intended to accompany Roland Barthes by Mireille Ribière (Philosophy Insights, Humanities-Ebooks, Kindle edition, 2010).

Barthes’s Early Works

by Mireille Ribière

1946: ‘The Onset of Productive Life’

Barthes’s return to Paris in February 1946 marked, as he put it, the ‘onset of productive

life.’1 By 1947 he was fully recovered, and the next twelve years saw the publication of his first

three majors books – Writing Degree Zero (1953), Michelet (1954) and Mythologies (1957) – as

well as scores of reviews, prefaces, editorials and full-length articles on theatre. Barthes’s

sanatorium years appear to have served as a long, protracted period of intellectual and literary

gestation, leading to an intense and exuberant period of activity, during which he managed to

establish himself as journalist, critic and essayist with a clear allegiance to the more radical left

wing of intellectual political opinion. The diversity of Barthes’s early publications remains

somewhat baffling today, although, with hindsight, we can see the emergence of themes and

concerns that are now considered as hallmarks of his work.

Barthes’s output from the late 1940s to the late 1950s is all the more remarkable when one

considers the material difficulties he was experiencing at the time. For a man in his thirties with

qualifications in French and Classics, and practically no professional experience, career prospects

other than teaching were extremely limited. Feeling that he would always be regarded with

suspicion by the education authorities on account of his former illness, Barthes abandoned the

idea of becoming a secondary school teacher. Consequently he experienced a long period of

professional uncertainty and financial insecurity. In the autumn of 1948 he left Paris for

Bucharest, where his friend Philippe Rebeyrol, then cultural attaché in Romania, had offered him

a post of assistant librarian at the French Institute. A year later, the diplomatic relations between

the two countries became strained, and Barthes was sent to Egypt as a language assistant at the

1 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), translated as Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes by Richard Howard, Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977, p. 4.

M. Ribière Barthes’s Early Works 2

University of Alexandria – an unremarkable experience were it not that he worked alongside

Algirdas Julien Greimas who introduced him to theoretical linguistics. At the end of the academic

year 1949–1950, Barthes returned to Paris where Philippe Rebeyrol’s contacts had secured him a

desk job in the Cultural Department of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The work was

mainly concerned with the award of honorary doctorates and the organisation of teachers’

conferences and not particularly demanding; but Barthes found it frustrating as it did not leave

him enough time and energy to pursue his writing career. He resigned in November 1952 when

he was offered a post of research fellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre

National de Recherche Scientifique or CNRS) to write a doctoral thesis in lexicology focusing on

‘The Vocabulary of Economic and Social Policy from 1825 to 1835’. This appointment coincided

with a period of intense activity as theatre critic and journalist. Barthes made little progress on his

thesis and, as a result, his two-year contract was not renewed in 1954. It would be another year

before he gained a new fellowship at the CNRS, this time in the sociology department.

In his biography of Barthes, Louis-Jean Calvet suggests that ‘the disruption of his

university education […] can be viewed, paradoxically, as a stroke of luck. […] He was forced to

find an alternative route, one that eventually allowed him, after much struggle, to become Roland

Barthes.’2. There is nothing paradoxical about viewing Barthes’s misfortune as a blessing in

disguise. True, those driven by an over-riding desire to achieve can, and sometimes do, turn their

unfavourable circumstances to their advantage and, in overcoming the hurdles in their way, make

themselves. There is no evidence, however, that Jean-Paul Sartre’s or Michel Foucault’s

respective literary and intellectual development were impaired by their studying at the École

Nationale Supérieure. Calvet’s remark is surprisingly reminiscent of the romantic notion that art

is born out of strife, and close to the views of those who would keep artists in their garrets and

leave theatres without funding.

Barthes’s missed educational opportunity remained a sore point. In 1977, at what many

would consider his moment of triumph, Barthes started his inaugural lecture at the Collège de

France by reminding his audience that, although his career had been academic, he was ‘without

the usual qualifications for entrance into that career’: Barthes suggested that the venerable

establishment ‘where science, scholarship, rigor and disciplined invention’ reigned had elected in

2 Jean-Louis Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography, translated by Sarah Wykes, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 69.


him ‘a patently impure fellow’.3 One obvious consequence of Barthes’s disrupted education was

that he did not fit the institutional mould and was at odds with prevalent academic discourse. This

may explain his successive failed attempts to write a doctoral thesis, including – even before his

unsuccessful lexicology project, which, of his own admission, foundered on methodological

problems – one on Jules Michelet. All was not lost, however, since his work on Michelet

eventually appeared in book form, as would later his academic study of fashion.

Michelet (1954) – An Anachrony

Barthes’s Michelet was published in 1954 following the success of Writing Degree Zero

the year before. Barthes’s study of Michelet’s work dated back to his sanatorium days, and had

occupied him for several years during and after his illness. In that sense, there was something

anachronistic about its publication as a

book in 1954 and, for many years to

come, it would stand as unique among

Barthes’s publications. Except for

Barthes’s acute awareness of the

importance of History, Michelet did not

have the theoretical focus of Writing

Degree Zero [which will be discussed in

the next section] and, on the surface,

had little in common with the articles

Barthes was writing at the time about

literature, the theatre and contemporary

cultural myths.

Jules Michelet, portrait by Thomas Couture

3 ‘Leçon’ (1978), translated as ‘Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France’, in A Barthes Reader, edited with an introduction by Susan Sontag, Vintage, 1993 (2000), p. 457–458.


In a 1971 interview,4 Barthes explains that he first read Michelet at the suggestion of

Joseph Baruzi, a musicologist and scholar interested in the philosophy of history, whom he had

met as a student before the war. Baruzi was a highly cultured man who was well-read outside the

mainstream and who had the ability to sense the ‘enigmatic’ within the ‘outmoded’.5 Jules

Michelet (1798–1874) was a major figure of the French Romantic movement, who had been at

the forefront of intellectual life in the nineteenth century. His political ideas were particularly

influential among the radical and socialist leaders who took part in the upheavals of 1848;

notably the Paris popular uprising of June 1848, which was brutally repressed by the elite

bourgeoisie that had been wielding power since the 1789 French Revolution. In addition to his

life’s work – a History of France in 23 volumes (1833–1867) – Michelet’s publications included

an impassioned History of the French Revolution in seven volumes (1847–53) and a visionary

Introduction to Universal History (1831), as well as smaller books on more personal themes –

nature, love, womanhood. His approach to historiography was highly subjective and his beliefs –

a mixture of sentimentalism, socialism, anticlericalism and Republican idealism verging on the

mystical – were imparted with rich eloquence. With the introduction of scientific methods into

the study of history towards the end of the nineteenth century, Michelet’s work was bound not to

fare well. Indeed the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which by 1974 had altogether

dropped his entry,6 was already introducing Michelet as the ‘most stimulating, but most

untrustworthy (not in facts, which he never consciously falsifies, but in suggestion) of all

historians.’ By the time Barthes started reading Michelet and took to him, Michelet’s highly

subjective interpretation of history, sympathetic approach to his subject and dithyrambic style

were long outmoded. Yet it was precisely those aspects that fascinated Barthes.

Barthes was not interested in Michelet’s political ideas, which he described as unoriginal,

adding that Michelet’s defence of republican and democratic institutions was largely shared by

the liberal petty bourgeoisie of mid-nineteenth century France.7 Barthes was essentially interested

4 Roland Barthes , ‘Réponses’ (1971), Œuvres complètes, Paris, Seuil, 1993–95, vol. 2, p. 1312. 5 Ibid. 6 It is worth noting that Michelet’s entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica has now been fully reinstated, and that he fares better in the current edition online than Barthes himself. 7 Roland Barthes, Michelet (1954), translated as Michelet by Richard Howard, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987, p. 11.


in Michelet the man of letters, whose writings he admired for their ‘baroque strength’.8 Barthes

was fascinated by Michelet’s total dedication to both history and writing, manifest in his intense,

personal involvement in his narratives. Barthes was also particularly sensitive to those aspects

that would eventually lead to a positive re-evaluation of Michelet’s work: his desire to re-create

the past in all its material, existential, experiential reality; to exhume the dead and the nameless in

order give them a voice; and thus conjure up the totality of human experience. For Barthes, it was

the imaginative dimension of Michelet’s work which had led to its dismissal in the name of

scientific rigour, that made him relevant: however inaccurate or biased, his writings showed that

knowledge, and in this case enquiries into the past, fulfilled a deep-seated psychological need, the

need to project oneself into the past and dream of a past life.9

The Michelet project had begun, as mentioned earlier, as a collection of approximately

1,000 index cards carrying observations and quotations. When Barthes was commissioned by

Éditions du Seuil to write a book on Michelet for their ‘Écrivains de toujours’ series, all he

needed to do was to decide on an appropriate order for these notes and elaborate on them.

‘Écrivains de toujours’ was an illustrated, pocket-size series aimed at a wide readership, which

had proved extremely successful since its launch in 1951. The originality of the series rested on

the fact that it consisted of a biographical essay and a thematic overview of the work of the writer

under scrutiny, illustrated by extensive extracts from their work, hence the subtitle ‘par lui-

même’ (‘by himself’). Barthes obediently adhered to the overall format of the series, but his

approach to his subject was somewhat novel. The foreword warns the reader that, contrary to

expectations, the book is not offering an overview of Michelet’s thought and life, and ‘still less

an explanation of the former by the latter’. Instead it focused on those themes – words and

images – that are repeated throughout Michelet’s prolific and diverse œuvre in order to try and

recover, through a kind of psycho-sexual approach, ‘the structure’ of Michelet’s existence, or

‘better still an organised network of obsessions’.10 Barthes readily acknowledged that Michelet’s

œuvre was the product of a particular period in history, but ‘first of all’, he added, ‘we must

restore to this man his coherence. […] I have sought to describe a unity, not to explore its roots in

8 Ibid. 9 ‘Une “histoire de la civilisation française”: Une mentalité historique’ (1960) [book review of Histoire de la civilisation française (1958) by G. Duby and R. Mandro], in Roland Barthes, Œuvres complètes, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 887. 10 Roland Barthes, Michelet, op. cit., p. 3.


history or in biography.’11 Michelet’s ideas and opinions might have changed during his lifetime

and been widely shared by the nineteenth century liberal middle-classes, but the way he related

personally to history was both idiosyncratic and constant. What Barthes deemed characteristic

about Michelet’s recurrent themes was that they implied a physical, bodily response to his subject

matter, epitomized in Barthes’s choice of title for the first chapter of Michelet, ‘Michelet, Eater of

History’: ‘he burrows into the heart of historical substance, feeds on it, grows in it.’12 Even

Michelet’s migraines are ‘historical’: ‘Fits of nausea, dizziness, oppression do not come only

from the seasons, from the weather; it is the very horror of narrated history which provokes

them.’13

Michelet’s portrayal of historical characters and events, as analyzed by Barthes, is

particularly revelatory in this respect. Louis XVI (born 1754–guillotined 1793) is described as

pale and swollen, and Napoleon (1769–1821), yellow and waxy, all attributes that discredit both

the French monarchy and the Empire:

Louis XVI, portrait by A.-F.Callet Napoleon, portrait by David

11 Ibid., p. 3. 12 Ibid., p. 18. 13 Ibid., p. 19.


Conversely, Joan of Arc (1412–1431) – like the People and the Revolution – is presented as a

seed for the future.14 Thus, the historical figures conjured by Michelet ‘have virtually no

psychology’, writes Barthes, ‘and if they are condemned, it is not on account of their motives or

their actions, but by virtue of the attraction or revulsion attached to their flesh.’15 For Michelet,

the present and the past are constituted of either harmful or beneficial substances, and the

reactions these provoke provide the basis for his system of values: ‘Good is determined by virtue

of its seamless, fluid, rhythmic nature, and Evil as a consequence of its dryness and its

discontinuity.’16

It was this emphasis on physicality in Michelet’s work that led early commentators to link

Barthes’s approach to a recent wave of criticism inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s enquiries into

the literary mind, which related poetic symbols to the traditional four elements – fire, water, earth

and air – and studied them from a psychoanalytical perspective.17 Barthes would explain later that

this was a misconception:18 his was a personal approach born out of his playing with quotations

and notes on index cards, and essentially the product of years of relative isolation. Yet, as we can

see, Barthes’s concerns were not altogether removed from those of his contemporaries, even

when he was at his most personal. There was also something almost premonitory in Barthes’s

interest in Michelet. As the idea that historical research should encompass all aspects of human

experience, including the daily concerns of ordinary people, – instead of focusing merely on

political figures and international relations – gained ground in the 1950s, Michelet’s notion of

‘total history’ acquired new relevance.

For many years, however, Barthes’s readers did not quite know what to make of his

obvious fascination for Michelet – the only writer whose work he claimed to have read in its

entirety. Michelet’s florid style was indeed, as we shall see later, a far cry from the ‘neutral’ form

of writing and the minimalist dramaturgy that Barthes championed in the 1950s. For the

following twenty years, this book, which was after all a biography of sorts, seemed so much at

14 Ibid., p. 36. 15 Ibid., p. 92. 16 Ibid., p. 203. 17 Gaston Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), Water and dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (1942), Earth and reveries of will (1948). 18 Roland Barthes, ‘Réponses’ (1971), Œuvres complètes, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 1312.


odds with Barthes’s concerns that it was considered as quite apart from the main thrust of his

thinking. This ceased, however, to be the case after 1975, when Barthes published his own

Roland Barthes in the same series as his book on Michelet. From then on Michelet par lui-même

came to be considered as a key to the late Barthes, and perhaps one of his most important books.

As always in such circumstances, the case may have been somewhat overstated, but there is no

doubt that Barthes’s Michelet exhibited some of the characteristic features of Barthes’s later

writings: on the formal side, a rejection of the linear approach afforded by chronology in favour

of the fragment; and from the thematic point of view, an emphasis on the link between writing

and the body, between literary imagination and corporeal experience.

Writing Degree Zero (1953) – the ethics of form

Michelet remained, with Empire of Signs, Barthes’s favourite book among his own

writings, and his interest in the nineteenth century historian never diminished. When he was

asked to revisit Michelet to mark the centenary of his death in 197419, Barthes argued his

continued relevance and stressed the need to read him anew. In his emphatic homage to Michelet

in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1977, Barthes also recalled the key role that

Michelet had played in his intellectual development: ‘It is my joy to encounter in this place the

memory or presence of authors dear to me and who teach and have taught at the Collège de

France. First, of course, comes Michelet through whom, at the start of my intellectual life, I

discovered the sovereign place of History in the study of man, and the power of writing20’.

‘History’ and ‘writing’: these two words also lie at the heart of Writing Degree Zero,

which had appeared in 1953 year and whose success had made it possible for Michelet to be

published by Le Seuil. In the 1950s Le Seuil was not the major publishing house that it has since

become. Gallimard, the leading publishers at the time, had been approached, but had rejected

Writing Degree Zero. As was the case for the book on Michelet, the idea for Writing Degree Zero

dated back to the 1940s. Barthes had first described the flat, descriptive, neutral form of

expression adopted by Albert Camus in The Outsider as ‘colourless writing’ in an article

19 ‘Michelet aujourd’hui’ (1973), Œuvres complètes, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 1312 and ‘Modernité de Michelet’ (1974), ibid, vol. 3, p. 41–43. 20 ‘Leçon’ (1978), translated as 'Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France' in A Roland Barthes Reader, op. cit., p. 458.


published in 1944 by the students’ review of Saint-Hilaire-de-Touvet, Existences21. Then, having

come across the concept of ‘degree zero’ in the work of Danish linguist Viggo Brøndal, Barthes

coined the phrase ‘writing degree zero’ to refer to that particular style, and used it, to striking

effect, in August 1947 as the title of his first article for Combat. Long associated with Albert

Camus, Combat had been the underground Paris newspaper of the French Resistance movement

and became the most respected French daily newspaper after the war. Barthes had submitted his

article at the invitation of Maurice Nadeau, then editor of its ‘literary page’, whom he had met in

July 1947 at the instigation of Georges Fournié, his Trotskyist friend at Leysin. While sharing a

holiday with Nadeau and his family that summer, Fournié and his wife had invited Barthes for the

day with the express purpose of introducing him to Nadeau. In his Memoirs,22 Nadeau describes

Barthes as an attractive man ‘with light coloured eyes and a beautiful gaze’, whose reserve

suggested hidden strengths and had won him over. This encounter proved decisive for Barthes. It

marked the beginning of his journalistic activities – a useful source of additional income – and of

his long-term collaboration with Maurice Nadeau. He provided Barthes with an invaluable

opening onto the vibrant journalistic scene of the post-war period, which enabled him to make

new contacts and friends, and to contribute to the intense debate about the place of literature in

post-war French society. Following the banning of all newspapers that had been complicit with

the Nazi occupation, a range of newspapers and magazines committed to building a ‘just

economic order in a free society’ had sprung up. Barthes’s first article for Combat was about

Camus’s The Outsider. Soon Barthes was writing articles and book reviews for other independent

publications, such Esprit, and his fruitful collaboration with Nadeau continued for many years.

Indeed, another four chapters of Writing Degree Zero first appeared as articles in Combat in

1950.

The book was widely and favourably reviewed, and soon the phrase ‘degree zero’ became

common currency. Writing Degree Zero was in many respects a breakthrough, and Barthes’s

brilliant, eager, clear prose a revelation. Writing Degree Zero was an attempt to reconsider the

issue of political commitment in literature as discussed by Jean-Paul Sartre in What Is Literature?

21 ‘Réflexions sur le style de L’Étranger’(1944), Œuvres complètes, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 60–63. 22 Maurice Nadeau, ‘Un souvenir de Montmorency : Roland Barthes’ in Grâces leur soient rendues, Paris: Albin Michel, 1990, p. 312.


(1948) from a Marxist point of view.23 Barthes’s opening chapter is significantly entitled ‘What is

writing?’24

Barthes saw literature primarily as a linguistic construct and he established a clear

distinction between language, style and writing (écriture). He defines language as ‘the undivided

property’ of all men and women, our common inheritance as social beings at a particular point in

history; far from being the prerogative of writers, language consists of a set of norms, such as

grammatical rules, within which the writer has to work. Style is also a given: writers have no

more freedom when it comes to style than they have with language, for it is the result of a

biological or biographical impulse, another ‘reflex response involving no choice’; contrary to

language, which is social, style is personal: ‘imagery, delivery, vocabulary, spring from the body

and the past of the writer’; it is made up of the kind of themes and personal obsessions that

Barthes identified in Michelet’s work. In contrast to both language and style, modes of writing

(écriture) are presented as the only area where the writer is able to exercise choice: whereas

language is a set of boundaries delineating a field of action, and style as an inner necessity,

writing is an act and, as such, belongs to the realm of intention. Writing, as defined by Barthes, is

where the personal meets the social; where writers commit themselves and can affirm their

ethical, social and political values, hence the notion that it is ‘an act of historical solidarity.’

Where Sartre conceived of written language as a transparent medium, a pure instrument in

the service of ideas, and focused on the subject-matter of works of literature, Barthes saw it as

opaque, and placed the issue of commitment at the level of form in the broadest sense of the term,

in all its material, linguistic manifestations. Where Sartre, in his discussion of the place of

literature in contemporary society, had been essentially concerned with the relationship between

writer and readership, Barthes focused on the act of writing as a constant struggle to cleanse

literary form from past ideological associations and reinvigorate it.

In a significant chapter entitled ‘The triumph and break-up of bourgeois writing’,25

Barthes charted the emergence and decline of a classical mode of writing which stood as the

universal model in France until the industrial revolution and the social and political upheavals of

23 For further details about Sartre and Barthes, see Chapter 6 of Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes. Structuralism and After, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1982. 24 Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953), translated as Writing Degree Zero by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, London: Jonathan Cape, 1967, p. 31–38. 25 Ibid., p 47–51.


1848. These events confirmed the emergence of three distinct social classes still very much in

evidence when Barthes was writing: the bourgeoisie (or upper middle-classes) empowered by the

1789 revolution; the petty bourgeoisie (or lower middle classes) that embodied a degraded

version of bourgeois values; and finally the proletariat (or working classes). The decline of

classical French writing in the mid-nineteenth century was seen by Barthes as proof that this

particular type of écriture was the result of specific historical circumstances, and that it was not

as self-evident, natural and inevitable as it originally claimed to be. It was not reflecting reality in

the only possible way; it was emphatically moulding reality in the interests of the dominant

classes – the lawyers, merchants, politicians etc. –, with which writers readily identified and

whose aspirations and self-confidence they echoed in their work. The rise of modern capitalism

and the beginnings of socialism from the 1830s onwards undermined such identification, and as

writers felt the need to redefine their position in relation to dominant ideology, numerous new

forms of writing appeared. The political significance of the new literary works was not simply

derived from their content or the authors’ stated political allegiances, but from their formal

characteristics: Barthes saw each mode of writing as the ‘initial act whereby the writer

acknowledges or repudiates his bourgeois condition.’26

In the ensuing review of the new modes of writing that had appeared in the previous

hundred years, Barthes singled out the ‘neutral’, or degree zero of writing, as an ideal form.27 The

use of the perfect tense, first-person narrative and essentially descriptive stance inaugurated in

1942 by The Outsider seemed to be the perfect example of what the neutral could be. It was,

suggested Barthes, the very antithesis of the nineteenth-century naturalist novel, which claimed to

represent ‘the real’ but whose characteristics – notably the choice of a linear, retrospective third-

person narrative in the past historic tense from the point of view of a distant, all-knowing narrator

– were, in fact, the height of artificiality. Realist novels could be described as reactionary in

themselves because, irrespective of their content – which might be overtly critical of

contemporary society –, they did not question conventional notions of cause and effect; they were

written in such a way as to comfort the reader, thus creating a false sense of security and

ultimately reinforcing the established social and political order. Even more scathing, in this

respect, was Barthes’s attack on the hackneyed style, laden with metaphors (‘Joy sang in his

26 Ibid., p. 51. 27 Ibid., p. 52–73.


muscles, his fingers danced, light and powerful,’ quoted Barthes) and peppered with elements of

popular speech, that was practised by contemporary French communist writers in the name of

social realism: unable to create forthwith a free writing, suggested Barthes, they kept ‘alive a

bourgeois writing which bourgeois writers [had] themselves condemned long ago’. For him, the

neutral was also distinct from attempts to practice art for art’s sake that use an overwrought

narrative style that plainly flaunts an aesthetic of artificiality or, in the case of poetry, disrupt

poetic language to the point of disintegration. While the neutral mode of writing, as described by

Barthes, aimed to dissociate itself from the habitual clichés and ‘disengage’ literary language

from a history to which it did not subscribe, it did not seek to escape the responsibility of form in

literature. The adjectives used by Barthes to describe this ideal ‘colourless writing freed from all

bondage’ to pre-defined, ideologically tainted forms – ‘free’, ‘innocent’, ‘honest’, ‘pure’,

‘pristine’, ‘fresh’ – bore witness to the notion of écriture as the ‘ethics of form’ but inevitably

pointed to its ephemeral nature. For writing as Freedom is ‘a mere moment’: soon ‘the writer,

taking his place as a “classic”, becomes the slavish imitator of his original creation, society

demotes his writing to a mere manner and returns him a prisoner of his own myths.’28 Hence the

tragedy of literary writing and the utopian nature of Barthes’s yearning for the neutral.

If Writing Degree Zero is remembered at all today, it is more often than not because of its

striking title and Barthes’s later achievements. Many French readers only remember it as a book

on the use of the past historic tense in French literature. True, its narrow focus on nineteenth and

twentieth-century literature limits its scope. There is also something undoubtedly dated in

Barthes’s copious use of the word ‘bourgeois’ to refer both to the establishment and their values,

and to rail against the degraded form of those values embodied in petty bourgeois ideology.

Barthes himself commented in 1971 that it was simplistic on his part to label classical literature

‘reactionary’, and that even literature that is extremely conservative in its form and content is

never completely reactionary.29 In the course of the same interview, he also explained that he was

more ‘comfortable’ with Michelet than with Writing Degree Zero because the history of writing

that he was outlining in the latter was modelled on a conventional view of history, later

28 Ibid., p. 65. 29 ‘Interview: A Conversation with Roland Barthes’, Sign of the Times (1971), in The Grain of the Voice, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 141.


questioned by his contemporaries, notably Michel Foucault.30 At the time, however, despite his

pessimistic view of how little room for manoeuvre the modern writer had to assert his freedom

and political commitment, Barthes’s emphasis on the material, linguistic aspect of the

relationship between history and literature, and his scrutiny of how things signify, as opposed to

what they signify, was breaking new ground. Until then, as Michael Moriarty points out, literary

history was ‘a history of authors and of texts, linked with contemporary events or a vague

“background”, the relations of which to literary production were never properly theorized.’31 Not

satisfied with Sartre’s history of the relationship between writer and readers, and, before him,

Paul Valery’s history of the function of literature, Barthes went much further by showing that

representing the social realities of a given period or expressing social and political views is far

from being the only way for a writer to make a stand, and that form is, in the strongest possible

sense, not immaterial. Subsequently, a number of Marxist thinkers did explore the relationship

between ideology and literature. Curiously though, in the current debate on post-colonial

literature where it would seem to be most relevant, there is hardly any trace of Writing Degree

Zero’s legacy.

Barthes’s discussion of language, style and écriture reveals concerns that will reappear

time and time again in his work and can be considered as his own themes or obsessions. Nearly a

quarter of a century after the publication of Writing Degree Zero, for instance, Barthes gave his

second series of lectures at the Collège de France the title ‘Le Neutre’.32 But in the short term, his

concern with ‘commitment’, and the place of art in a new society, focused more closely on a

collective art form – contemporary theatre and the techniques of the stage – where his critique of

realism and his longing for unencumbered and non-alienated forms found fertile ground.33

30 Ibid., p. 135. 31 Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes, Polity Press, 1991, p. 43. 32 Le Neutre, translated as The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978) by Rosalind Krauss, Columbia University Press, 2005. 33 For further details, see Mireille Ribière, ‘Barthes and the Theatre’ to be shared on <academia.edu>.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Barthes Reader, edited with an introduction by Susan Sontag, Vintage, 1993 (2000).

BARTHES Roland, The Grain of the Voice, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. —, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978), Rosalind Krauss (transl.), Columbia University Press, 2005. —, Michelet, Richard Howard (transl.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. —, Œuvres complètes, Paris, Seuil, 1993–1995, 3 vols. —, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (transl.), Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. —, Writing Degree Zero, Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (transls.), London: Jonathan Cape, 1967. CALVET Jean-Louis, Roland Barthes: A Biography, Sarah Wykes (transl.), Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.

LAVERS Annette, Roland Barthes. Structuralism and After, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1982. MORIARTY Michael, Roland Barthes, Polity Press, 1991.

NADEAU Maurice, Grâces leur soient rendues, Paris: Albin Michel, 1990. RIBIÈRE Mireille, Roland Barthes, Humanities-Ebooks (Philosophy Insights), Kindle edition, 2010.

Barthes's Early Works

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Transcript of Barthes's Early Works