Roland Barthes Structuralism and After ANNETTE LAVERS Methuen & Co. LtdFirst publish in 1982 by Methuen & Co. Ltd 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE © 1982 Annette Lavers Typeset in Hongkong by Graphicraft Typesetters Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Lavers, Annette Roland Barthes: structuralism and after. 1. Barthes, Roland I. Title 840’ .9 P85.B33 ISBN 0-416-72380-2To K., with love and gratitudePON PR aun 10 11 12 13 14 15 Contents All chapter titles are quotations from Barthes. Part I Criticism begins with compilation Where to begin? The structuralist debate A narrative with a hero He is a writer, who wants to be one Part II Something beyond language The network (synchrony) The voyage (diachrony) The responsibility of forms Part Ill A euphoric dream of scientificity Everything, then, can be a myth? Homo significans Both diffident and rash It is the path that makes the work, or, Between things and words Part IV The science of literature is literature In those days, intellectual history was going very fast A whole landscape in a bean The starred text The body under the body 13 25 32 45 47 66 84 101 103 128 133 151 165 167 178 196 204I Il Appendix Structuralism Semiology, the sign, relations and functions Synchrony, diachrony, the subject and society The units of language and the organization of meaning Notes Biography Bibliography Index 217 217 219 228 231 240 266 268 295Abbreviations These abbreviations refer to books by Barthes; articles by him are designated by their date (see Section I of Bibliography) except in the case of those included in Image-Music-Text, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, New Critical Essays and Le grain de la voix, which are designated by name, so as not to lengthen the Bibliography. Page numbers refer to the English translations when they exist, except in the case of Lecon. C4, 8, etc. Communications special issues CV Critique et vérité E Essais critiques ES L'Empire des signes ET The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies G Reprint of Degré zéro and Eléments de sémiologie, Gonthier, 1965 GV Le Grain de la voix IMT — Image-Music-Text rE Lecon inaugurale au Collége de France M Mythologies MI Michelet NEC Nouveaux essais critiques PT Le Plaisir du texte R Sur Racine RB Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes 5 Eléments de sémiologie SE Sollers écrivain SFL Sade, Fourier, Loyola SM Systeme de la Mode 5Z S/Z 7 Interview by Jean Thibaudeau, in Tel Quel, 47, winter 1971 Z Le Degré zéro de l'écritureAcknowledgements I should like to thank Frank Kermode, for supplying part of the original impetus for this study and for many stimulating comments in conversa- tion and seminar; Giulio Lepschy, who did not consider interdisciplinary interest ‘an unwarrantable breach of privacy’, for his many criticisms and suggestions — any remaining errors are of course purely my own; Jonathan Culler, for his acute and constructive observations; Jacqueline Lesschaeve and Francois Wahl at Le Seuil for bibliographical help; Janice Price, John Whitehead, Beverley Brown and Mary Cusack for their help and enthusiasm; my mother and my father, for their tireless co-operation in tracing material which helped me build a more balanced picture of a particularly confusing period; my husband, whose constant support went far beyond what a mere dedication can acknowledge; all the friends and students with whom I discussed the topics examined in this book when they still had a pioneering flavour, in the Sixties (which, we all know, include the Seventies); and The Times Literary Supplement for allowing me to use some paragraphs which originally appeared as reviews of most contemporary French thinkers. My greatest debt must lie with Roland Barthes, and not only from an intellectual point of view which will be obvious enough. His open- mindedness and generosity with commentators and translators were proverbial. The theses put forth here, which often conflicted with what I have called the ‘authorized version’, were communicated to him during the years when this account of his career took shape against a changing ideological backcloth. Little did I know then that I would have to rewrite it in the past tense.The author and publisher would like to thank the following for per- mission to reproduce copyright material: C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. for one diagram from The Meaning of Meaning, first published in 1923; the Estate of Roland Barthes, Jonathan Cape Ltd and Hill & Wang, Inc. for one diagram adapted from Mytho- logies (translated by Annette Lavers) and two diagrams adapted from Elements of Semiology (translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith), both of which were first published in French by Editions du Seuil in 1957 and 1964 respectively.C’est un garcon sans importance collective, c'est tout juste un individu.... Céline. (Epigraph of Sartre’s Nausea.) C’est qu'un homme n’est jamais un individu.... Ainsi l'histoire nous fait universels dans la mesure exacte ot nous la faisons particuliére....’ Sartre.Part I Criticism begins with compilation1 Where to begin? ‘Life and times’ Roland Barthes is generally acknowledged, even by those not conversant with his books, as one of the leading figures of the French intellectual scene. Yet although his work would make far less sense cut off from its context, none of his contemporaries, perhaps, has managed to remain so essentially singular. Indeed, it may well be in the tension between the collective and the individual that the key to Barthes can best be found. This book accordingly has a dual focus: it concerns itself with the various doctrines propounded by Barthes in the course of his career, chiefly in the fields of sociology and literary criticism; but it also attempts to place these doctrines as part of an existential search and the shaping of a self-image. To use a distinction which Barthes is fond of making, the first is the subject of the book, and the second is its object. There exists a familiar framework for the study of such masters of art or thought — their ‘life and times’. Like many such traditional frame- works, it has much to recommend it: the modern reformulation of the long-term aim of the social sciences as a ‘science of the subject and of history’ shows that such a perspective is to some extent unavoidable. Unfortunately, in the case of Barthes this approach runs into a number of theoretical and practical difficulties. To start with, it so happens that a major tenet of his theory of literature is that there is no automatic link between the work and either the ‘life’ or the ‘times’. Such a link is intuitively assumed by everybody, but establishing it is a different matter. It is well known that Proust objected to certain types of biographical criticism which he saw as giving no clue as to the nature of the deeper creative self. And Barthes’s comment on George Painter's biography of Proust himself was that such books teach us not that an author's work is illuminated through knowing all its ‘sources’ in real life but, on the contrary, that a writer (and here Barthes also speaks for himself) experiences His life throtigh the prism of his future work, seeking4 Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After obstinately in fragmented episodes the concrete embodiment of essences he already divines (1966a; see also Proust 1954 and Painter 1959). Still, a psycho-biographical reading need not always be so reductive: we are all ‘thought-experiments’ for one another. Theoretical considerations aside, a second reason for not launching forthwith into a biographical sketch is that such an approach has one indispensable condition, that the life should be known; and that of Barthes is not. Or rather, what is known is mostly known through Barthes himself, which automatically trades its explanatory status for something that itself needs to be explained. The first biographical material, in a short book on his work by Mallac and Eberbach (1971), was supplied by him and concerned only his public life. A second source was the interview he granted the novelist Jean Thibaudeau in the same year (by far the most interesting and the most revealing he ever gave) and which appeared in the periodical Tel Quel, in the first of a series of special issues various French reviews devoted to Barthes. Critics also use a book diversely referred to as Barthes par Barthes or Barthes par lui-méme (‘Barthes by himself’) — the only one actually written by the author concerned in a series published by Le Seuil and paradoxically known as ‘So and So by Himself’. Written on Barthes’s own suggestion to his publisher, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes takes us to a third reason for being cautious. The first page tells us that all that follows must be read as if it concerned a character in a novel; the pronouns alternate (as previously in The Pleasure of the Text) between T, ‘he’, and ‘R.B.’, rendering the possibilities of self-revelation. This makes these texts, above all, literary texts, aspects of a certain genre — partly autobiography and partly autoportrait — which is currently the object of intense theoretical interest. What is more, they are part of Barthes’s later work and, as we shall see, chronology is especially signi- ficant in his case. But it also supplies a fourth reason for postponing a discussion of biographical elements: readers of Barthes by Barthes were surprised to find the author denigrating the major part.of his own work. Obviously, these so-called ‘admissions’ should have been situated in their psychological and intellectual context; one cannot make use of the facts they contain in isolation, for they concern a new system. Regrettably, literary criticism did not rise to the occasion, and Barthes’s autobio- graphical works have mostly been taken at face value. The reader of the present volume is therefore referred directly to the biography and bibliography appended at the end of this study; biographical elements will be mentioned in the main text only when they are relevant to a particular matter. And now, what of Barthes’s ‘times’? My initial, loose, description, for those who have not read him, was as a literary critic and a sociologist.” To the initiated, the inadequacy of such typecasting will immediately be