15,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a central figure in the thought of his time, but he was also something of an outsider. His father died in the First World War, he enjoyed his mother's unfailing love, he spent long years in the sanatorium, and he was aware of his homosexuality from an early age: all this soon gave him a sense of his own difference. He experienced the great events of contemporary history from a distance. However, his life was caught up in the violent, intense sweep of the twentieth century, a century that he helped to make intelligible. This major new biography of Barthes, based on unpublished material never before explored (archives, journals and notebooks), sheds new light on his intellectual positions, his political commitments and his ideas, beliefs and desires. It details the many themes he discussed, the authors he defended, the myths he castigated, the polemics that made him famous and his acute ear for the languages of his day. It also underscores his remarkable ability to see which way the wind was blowing D and he is still a compelling author to read in part because his path-breaking explorations uncovered themes that continue to preoccupy us today. Barthes's life story gives substance and cohesion to his career, which was guided by desire, perspicacity and an extreme sensitivity to the material from which the world is shaped D as well as a powerful refusal to accept any authoritarian discourse. By allowing thought to be based on imagination, he turned thinking into both an art and an adventure. This remarkable biography enables the reader to enter into Barthes's life and grasp the shape of his existence, and thus understand the kind of writer he became and how he turned literature into life itself.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 1309
Ähnliche
Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Bibliographical note
Foreword by Jonathan Culler
Prologue: The death of Roland Barthes
Notes
Introduction
The voice
‘Life’
Notes
1 Setting off
A father dead at sea
The mother as replacement father
Notes
2 ‘Gochokissime’
From the seaside. . .
. . . to the heart of Paris
Notes
3 His whole life ahead of him
The years of apprenticeship
Elective affinities
Notes
4 Barthes and Gide
The beginning and the end
Music on the large scale and the small
Homosexuality
Journal
Notes
5 His whole life behind him
From Antiquity to Greece
From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic
From the Atlantic to behind the lines
Notes
6 New vistas
The body and its illness
‘At the sanatorium, I was happy’
The first texts
Notes
7 Sorties
Far from the sanatorium
‘Nadeau, to whom I owe that capital thing, a debut . . .’
Far from Paris (1). Bucharest
Far from Paris (2). Alexandria
Modes of writing: the Ministry and ‘Degree Zero’
Notes
8 Barthes and Sartre
The argument about responsibilities
Childhood and history
An invitation to the imaginary
Notes
9 Scenes
Liquidations
Theatre
The year 1955
Theatricality
Notes
10 Structures
The sign
The École
Structure
The house
Notes
11 Literature
Encounters
Literary criticism
Barthes explains himself
The year 1966
Thinking the image
Notes
12 Events
Absences
The book on May: ‘Sade, Fourier, Loyola’
Changes
Cut-ups
Notes
13 Barthes and Sollers
Friendship
Everyone’s off to China
Notes
14 The body
The eye and the hand
Taste
Hearing and vision
Loving loving
Notes
15 Legitimacy
The professor
The Collège de France
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
The colloque de Cerisy
Notes
16 Barthes and Foucault
Parallel lives
An accompaniment
Two styles
Notes
17 Heartbreak
1977
Love
Death
The Mourning Diary
Notes
18 ‘Vita Nova’
15 April 1978
New life?
Clarity
The end
Notes
Image credits
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
ii
iii
iv
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
In memory of my mother, Colombe Samoyault-Verlet
Barthes
A Biography
Tiphaine Samoyault
Translated byAndrew Brown
polity
First published in French as Roland Barthes. Biographie, © Éditions du Seuil, 2015 This English edition © Polity Press, 2017
This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess Programme.
This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0565-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Samoyault, Tiphaine, author.Title: Barthes : a biography / Tiphaine Samoyault.Other titles: Roland Barthes Biographie EnglishDescription: English edition. | Cambridge ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2016] | Previously published by Seuil : Paris, France in French as Roland Barthes. Biographie, c2015. | Includes bibliographical references and indexes.Identifiers: LCCN 2016018321 (print) | LCCN 2016027065 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509505654 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1509505652 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781509505685 (mobi) | ISBN 9781509505692 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Barthes, Roland. | Linguists--France--Biography. | Critics--France--Biography.Classification: LCC P85.B33 S3613 2016 (print) | LCC P85.B33 (ebook) | DDC 410.92 [B] --dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018321
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
This book came into being in response to a powerful and persuasive suggestion from Bernard Comment. I owe a great deal to his detailed knowledge of Barthes’s work, to his close and generous rereadings, and to his encouragements. May he be, at the threshold of this book, the first to be thanked.
The help and support of Éric Marty and Michel Salzedo have also played a decisive role. This biography would never have seen the light of day without their trust, without the dialogues I enjoyed with them, or without the numerous documents they made available and gave me permission to consult. I am extremely grateful to them. Thanks in particular to Éric Marty for certain very valuable suggestions.
A biography cannot be written in isolation. It draws on information conveyed by both books and word of mouth; it is inscribed within a memory, in both its insights and its omissions. I would like to begin by thanking all those who have talked to me about the Roland Barthes they knew, and granted me interviews: Jean-Claude Bonnet, Antoine Compagnon, Jonathan Culler, Régis Debray, Michel Deguy, Christian Descamps, Pascal Didier, Colette Fellous, Lucette Finas, Françoise Gaillard, Anouk Grinberg, Roland Havas, Julia Kristeva, Mathieu Lindon, Alexandru Matei, Jean-Claude Milner, Maurice Nadeau, Dominique Noguez, Pierre Pachet, Thomas Pavel, Leyla Perrone-Moisés, Georges Raillard, Antoine Rebeyrol, Philippe Sollers and François Wahl.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the critics and scholars whose work has constituted an indispensable and valued basis for my understanding of Barthes’s life and work: first and foremost, Louis-Jean Calvet and Marie Gil, who wrote biographies of Barthes before me; also, Cecilia Benaglia, Thomas Clerc, Claude Coste, Alexandre Gefen, Anne Herschberg Pierrot, Diana Knight, Marielle Macé, Patrick Mauriès, Jacques Neefs, Philippe Roger, Susan Sontag and Marie-Jeanne Zenetti.
I would like to thank, in their several institutions, the people who generously helped me with my research: Marie-Odile Germain and Guillaume Fau in the manuscripts department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Nathalie Léger and Sandrine Sanson at the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition contemporaine and all the staff at the Abbaye d’Ardenne who welcomed me on several occasions.
At the Éditions du Seuil, Flore Roumens followed the book as it took shape, with all her talent and enthusiasm; Jean-Claude Baillieul made several essential and detailed corrections. My warmest thanks to both of them.
To all those of my friends who kept me company during my progress on the book, I would also like to express my gratitude, especially: Bertrand Hirsch, Maurice Théron and Damien Zenone, and also Marie Alberto Jeanjacques, Christine Angot, Adrien Cauchie, Charlotte von Essen, Thomas Hirsch, Yann Potin, Zahia Rahmani, Marie-Laure Roussel and Martin Rueff.
Bibliographical note
Quotations from Barthes’s works are mainly taken from existing English translations. Where there is no translation published, references are to his complete works in French: Oeuvres complètes, new edition by Éric Marty, 5 vols (Paris: Seuil, 2002). These cover Barthes’s books, shorter texts and interviews from 1942 to 1961 (vol. I), 1962 to 1967 (vol. II), 1968 to 1971 (vol. III), 1972 to 1976 (vol. IV), and 1977 to 1980 (vol. V). References to the Oeuvres complètes follow the format OC, volume number (as roman numeral) and page number – e.g.: OC V, pp. 634–5.
Archives are quoted in accordance with the French system; i.e. the class number of the Roland Barthes archive in the manuscript department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), followed by the number of the dossier consulted – e.g. BNF, NAF 28630. Some documents have the former class number from the IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine), where the archives were held until 2012.
The provenance of other unpublished documents is indicated in the notes.
Foreword by Jonathan Culler
In 1979 Wayne Booth called Roland Barthes ‘the man who may well be the strongest influence on American criticism today’. Booth did not mean this as a compliment, I hasten to add. He was complaining about the nefarious temptations to which he thought American criticism was succumbing. If Barthes bore the blame, it was because he had done more than anyone else, first, to convey the idea that literary criticism necessarily involves literary theory: conceptions of what a literary work is, how it functions and what readers do with it. And second, with his essays in Mythologies on other cultural practices, from wrestling and ads for detergents to the creation of images that become mythic – Einstein’s brain or Greta Garbo – he had helped to bring into being what we now call Cultural Studies, in which literary study risked being submerged.
The Barthes who first became known to English and American readers in the 1960s presented himself as a semiologist or analyst of cultural sign systems, in the lively brief essays of Mythologies, which are still fun to read today, or in compact essays on works and authors, from La Bruyère to Brecht and Robbe-Grillet, some published in the Times Literary Supplement and collected in Critical Essays, that discussed literature as a practice designed to upset cultural stereotypes by experimenting with language. (The task of literature, he wrote, is not to ‘express the inexpressible’ but to ‘unexpress the expressible’, a tantalizing idea.) As the author of short essays with snappy punchlines, he was the most accessible of those French thinkers, grouped together first as ‘structuralists’ and then as ‘poststructuralists’, who were transforming the study of culture. But while thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida pursued ongoing, coherent projects through a series of writings, Barthes was different. He enjoyed announcing the importance of some new mode of investigation or angle of approach, but he was quick to turn his back on the systematic projects he had himself championed – such as semiology or narratology – and write something quite different, in which he often mocked his previous declarations. His most popular books in the US and the UK are his early Mythologies and his last book, Camera Lucida, reflections on photography centred around a single photograph of his mother. Other unconventional books include A Lover’s Discourse, which he calls not an analysis but a simulation of the ways a lover thinks and talks about the vexed relation to the beloved, and The Empire of Signs, about ‘Japan as I imagine it’, an alternative to western culture. He is hard to pin down, hard to associate with any particular theory for very long. In some ways, he is both the archetypal structuralist, with his writings on semiology and narratology, and the model poststructuralist, with his rejections of systematizing projects, his love of the fragment and his increasing evocations of the personal and affective dimensions of thought. And the range of interests reflected in his writings is particularly remarkable.
Barthes is a very accessible yet mysterious figure, whose life and projects are splendidly revealed in this magisterial biography, admirably translated by Andrew Brown, himself an authority on Barthes. Tiphaine Samoyault, writer (essayist and novelist) and literary critic, has had access to a lifetime of letters, diaries and notes, and has made good use of them in reconstructing for us the projects, engagements and resistances of this singular figure, whose life always seemed in various ways marginal, until he was elected to a professorship at the Collège de France, the nation’s most distinguished institution.
Son of a naval officer, who was killed in action before Roland’s first birthday, Barthes was raised by his mother, with whom he lived until her death in 1977. ‘His formative problem’, he writes of himself, ‘was money, not sex’, as they scrimped to buy shoes or schoolbooks. Then he contacted tuberculosis, and two lengthy stays in a sanatorium in the Alps prevented him from following normal studies for an academic career and also made him miss being involved in the Second World War, which was formative in different ways for most Frenchmen of his generation. Finally, from 1946 to 1962, Barthes lived by short-term measures with no clear direction or assured job – his time as a cultural affairs officer in Romania, which Samoyault describes in detail for the first time, was probably the most interesting – until eventually he got a position at an academic institution in Paris. One result of these uncertain situations was his readiness to accept almost any sort of writing commission, from prefaces for book club selections to interviews with Playboy. This habit continued after the need for these little jobs had vanished, as if, although complaining all the while, he needed the challenge, the intellectual stimulation of an odd commission. In the five volumes of his collected works, the occasional pieces outweigh the published books and reinforce the impression that Barthes was above all a writer – driven by a desire to write in order to, as he once put it, ‘construct the intelligibility of our time’. He was above all responsive to the conflicting, often clashing cultural forces of the past and present. ‘The full meaning of Barthes’s intellectual enterprise’, writes Samoyault, ‘the full dramaturgy of his career, lies in the way he was always listening to the languages of his period, their difference and the exclusions they impose.’
Tiphaine Samoyault seems to have all Barthes’s writing at her fingertips, which is a great boon for readers who might want to follow up this or that intriguing essay. What she gives us is not a biography that places his books in a chronological sequence and summarizes them, but an analysis of his projects in their intellectual context, accompanied by a narrative where no important details are ignored. She begins, in an eloquent and often elegiac Prologue, with the drama – and the puzzle – of Barthes’s death (in March 1980, on his way back from a lunch with presidential candidate François Mitterrand, he was hit by a van and suffered injuries first judged not serious but that, given the weakness of his lungs, led to his death). Samoyault rightly judges that a detailed evocation of the man Barthes had become, and his situation in these final weeks, will be particularly engaging, especially since several of his friends wrote about his death in lightly disguised novels. She judiciously sifts through the many writings on Barthes to give us the main assessments of his career, before turning to the life itself and its unusual circumstances. But while providing detailed narratives of key moments in Barthes’s life, such as the tense, close-fought contest for election to a chair at the Collège de France, she aims above all to let us see how Barthes develops his projects and negotiates the French intellectual scene, and she chooses to explore his very different relations, some more intellectual, some more personal, with a series of major figures – Gide and Sartre, both important influences – and also his contemporaries – Foucault (who led the campaign to elect him to the Collège de France), Lévi-Strauss (who declined to direct his doctoral thesis), and Sollers (novelist and editor, to whom Barthes was very loyal). Samoyault’s biography thus gives us a shrewd, focused and personalized account of forty years of French intellectual life.
One of the mysteries of Barthes is that someone with such broad interests should have found so little joy in life, especially once he had reached a pinnacle of success. Can this be linked to another curious fact, that someone would be attracted to literature who has so little interest in plots and characters (he perversely takes the notational style of the haiku as a model for thinking about novels)? Samoyault allows us to see that what drives him above all is a desire to write that is not connected with imagining scenarios of action, endings, outcomes: when not constrained by a particular commission, he tended to write fragments. I particularly admire her willingness to offer theories and propose explanations without attempting to attribute them to Barthes himself, as biographers so often do (‘doubtless he imagined that . . .’, or ‘he told himself that . . .’). She stresses the radical, transformative character of many of his projects, set against the rather melancholy figure of the man: ‘We need to register the violence of the oeuvre, in its striking contrast with the gentleness of the person (all the eye-witness evidence is in complete agreement here) and the relative insignificance of the life.’
This unusual biography explores a whole range of issues and problems that Barthes tackled, and analyses a series of intellectual enterprises and their significance, including his late flirtations with the idea of writing a novel, or at least of thinking and writing about literature as if he were going to write a novel. I myself have always been a partisan of the early, structuralist Barthes, who championed the idea of a poetics that would not interpret literary works but would explore the signifying systems and conventions that make them possible, and who offered a host of new ideas about literature; and I have always regretted that he would move on so quickly, abandoning one promising enterprise after another. But Samoyault’s probing and illuminating biography convinces me that the affective, often sentimental Barthes, driven above all by a desire to write, who valued writing above its arguments, is not only a figure of great interest but, ultimately, the true Barthes.
Jonathan Culler
Jonathan Culler is the author of Barthes: A Very Short Introduction, as well as Structuralist Poetics, On Deconstruction and Theory of the Lyric.
Prologue: The death of Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes died on 26 March 1980. Lung problems from which he had suffered in his youth flared up again after his accident; in addition, he went down with a iatrogenic infection of the kind that is regularly contracted in hospitals and can prove fatal. This was probably the immediate cause of his death. People tend to remember, however, that he died after being knocked down on a pedestrian crossing in the rue des Écoles, by a dry-cleaner’s van coming from Montrouge. This is also true. On 25 February, he was returning from a luncheon organized by Jack Lang: this may or may not have been linked to the presidential elections that were due to be held just over a year later. Lang, the future Minister of Culture, wanted to see François Mitterrand surrounded by significant artists and intellectuals. Or else it was Mitterrand who liked this idea and who entrusted Lang with the task of organizing regular meetings. It was nearly 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Barthes had walked from the rue des Blancs-Manteaux over the Notre-Dame bridge and up the rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève; he was now in the rue des Écoles, not far from the corner with the rue Monge. He continued down the pavement on the right, almost as far as the Vieux Campeur store that sells hiking equipment. He was just about to cross over to the pavement on the left – he was heading to the Collège de France, not to teach, but to settle the details of his forthcoming seminar on Proust and photography: he would be needing a projector. A car with a Belgian registration number was double-parked, so his visibility was limited. But he stepped into the road and this is when the accident happened. The van was not travelling very fast, but fast enough, and the impact was violent. Barthes lay unconscious on the road. The dry cleaner stopped, the traffic was halted, the ambulance and police (there was a station on the Place Maubert nearby) soon arrived. On the victim they could find no ID, just his membership card for the Collège de France. They went over there to find out more about him. Someone (certain witnesses claimed it was Michel Foucault, but it was actually Robert Mauzi, a professor at the Sorbonne and a longstanding friend of Barthes) confirmed Barthes’s identity. Michel Salzedo, his brother, was informed, as were his friends Youssef Baccouche and Jean-Louis Bouttes. They went to La Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital where Barthes had been taken. They found him shaken but lucid. He had sustained several fractures, but apparently nothing serious. They returned home somewhat reassured.
That morning, Barthes had been preparing for his luncheon invitation. As on every other day, he carried out his morning’s work at his desk, this time writing a paper that he was to give at a conference in Milan the following week. It was a piece on Stendhal and Italy to which he had given the title ‘One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves’. His ideas were close to the lectures he had just finished at the Collège de France on the ‘preparation of the novel’: he was discussing Stendhal’s shift from keeping a diary to writing a novel. While Stendhal had been unable to communicate his passion for Italy in his diaries, he succeeding in doing so in The Charterhouse of Parma. ‘What has happened – what has transpired – between the travel journals and The Charterhouse, is writing. Writing – which is what? A power, probable fruit of a long initiation, which annuls the sterile immobility of the amorous image-repertoire and gives its adventure a symbolic generality.’1 Barthes typed out the first page and the start of the second. Then he got ready, perhaps not entirely sure what had led him to accept this luncheon invitation. His interest in the signs of the social world and people’s behaviour in it had already led him to attend a similar luncheon with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in December 1976, at the home of Edgar and Lucie Faure, and some of his friends had been critical of what they saw as his pandering to right-wing politicians. Now, however, his own leanings and those of his friends and acquaintances made it seem more natural for him to go. But he told Philippe Rebeyrol, then ambassador in Tunisia, that he felt he was being dragooned into Mitterrand’s electoral campaign. Who were his fellow guests? Philippe Serre, a former MP for the Popular Front, was not at home, but he had lent his apartment for the occasion, since Mitterrand’s place in the rue de Bièvre was too small for this kind of invitation – in any case, it was more Danielle Mitterrand’s home than that of the future French President. The composer Pierre Henry, the actor Danièle Delorme, the director of the Paris Opéra Rolf Liebermann, the historians Jacques Berque and Hélène Parmelin, Jack Lang and François Mitterrand himself were all there. There were perhaps other guests whose names have not been recorded. As was to be expected, Mitterrand was a great admirer of Mythologies, but he had probably not read anything else by the intellectual who on this occasion was sitting at his table. The meal was a highly entertaining occasion, sprinkled with jokes, pithy comments on the history of France, and witty remarks that roused gusts of laughter. Barthes contributed little to the conversation. The guests went their separate ways at around 3 o’clock. Barthes decided to walk to the Collège de France. He had plenty of time; Rebeyrol had returned from Tunis the previous day, and Barthes and he were due to meet, but not until the end of the afternoon. And it was while he was making his way to the Collège that the accident happened.
Barthes regained consciousness at La Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. His brother and his friends were there. Agence France Presse issued a first bulletin at 8.58 p.m.: ‘The lecturer, essayist and critic Roland Barthes, aged 64, was on Monday afternoon the victim of a traffic accident in the 5th arrondissement, rue des Écoles. Roland Barthes was taken to the hospital of La Pitié-Salpêtrière, as we were informed by the authorities there, though at 8.30 p.m. they had still given no information on the writer’s state.’ The following day, another bulletin issued at 12.37 p.m. was much more reassuring: ‘Roland Barthes is still hospitalized at La Pitié-Salpêtrière, where, we have been told, he is under observation and in a stable condition. His publisher has stated that the writer’s state is giving no cause for alarm.’ Was this an attempt on François Wahl’s part to minimize the gravity of the situation, as Romaric Sulger-Büel has stated, and Philippe Sollers continues to claim?2 Did the victim’s condition deteriorate in a gradual but surprising fashion? The narratives seem to indicate that both elements played a part. Initially, the doctors were not particularly concerned, but it could be that they did not sufficiently take into account the gravity of their patient’s lung problems. When he found breathing difficult, he was subjected to intubation. He was then given a tracheotomy, which weakened him further. Sollers gives a more dramatic version of the accident in his novel Women, in which, under the name of Werth, Barthes appears just after the accident, bruised and battered, surrounded by all the apparatus of intensive care: ‘A tangle of wires . . . Tubes . . . Switches . . . Red and yellow flickers . . . .’3 For many of those present, there was shock at the brutality of the event, but also a feeling of necessity. It was as if, ever since his mother’s death, he had gently been allowing himself to slip away. ‘I can still see Werth at the end of his life, just before his accident . . . His mother had died two years before . . . The great love of his life, the only one . . . He let himself drift more and more into complications with boys; that was his penchant, and it suddenly grew more marked . . . He thought of nothing else, though he dreamed all the time about breaking off, abstinence, beginning a new life, the books he ought to write, a fresh start . . . .’4 He gave the impression that he was at the end of his tether, no longer able to respond to all the requests being made of him. Even his friends and acquaintances who were tactful enough not to refer to his dependence on boys insist on how he felt crushed by the weight of demands, letters, telephone calls. ‘He couldn’t say no. The more things were a burden to him, the more he felt obliged to do them’, is Michel Salzedo’s sober view of the matter. The retrospective hypothesis that he gradually let himself die after the traumatic death of his mother has been occasionally put forward: it is either an exaggerated bit of psychologizing, or else the narrative needed to tie up a life’s loose ends and give it a definite shape. That the tiredness from which he was suffering was partly the result of his grief and also had all the characteristics of depression is highly likely. But Barthes definitely did not believe in some sort of heaven where he would see his mother again. He was not now deliberately allowing himself to die, even if his intensely poignant gaze, as witnessed by his friend Éric Marty, conveyed such despair ‘as if he were the prisoner of death’.5 Even if you do not give all the external signs of a grim struggle with illness and death, you are not necessarily abandoning yourself to the respite they might bring. As Michel Foucault told Mathieu Lindon when they talked about Barthes’s death, people do not realize how much of an effort is necessary to survive in hospital: ‘letting yourself die is the neutral state of hospitalization’.6 You have to fight to survive. ‘He added, in support of his interpretation, that people had imagined something quite different for Barthes: a long and happy old age, as for a Chinese sage.’ And yet the impression with which he left Julia Kristeva was that he had decided to let himself fade away, as she described it in The Samurai, where she depicts herself as Olga and Barthes as Armand Bréhal. And Kristeva still thinks so today. The man with whom she had had such a strong bond, who had admired her so greatly, who had been the president of the jury at her thesis defence, whom she had accompanied on the trip to China in 1974, would no longer talk to her. She thought repeatedly of his voice. His eyes seemed to express abandonment and his gestures farewell. ‘There’s nothing more convincing than a refusal to go on living when it’s conveyed without any hysteria: no asking for love, just a deliberate rejection, not even philosophical, but animal and final, of existence. You feel like a moron for clinging, yourself, to the bustle called life that the other is relinquishing with such indifference. Olga loved Armand too much to understand what made him go with such gentle but unquestionable firmness, but she could only respect his carelessness, his last-ditch nonresistance. But just the same she told him she loved him very much, that she owed her first job in Paris to him, that it was he who had taught her to read, that they’d go on another trip together, to Japan perhaps, or India, or the Atlantic coast, the wind on the island is marvellous for the lungs, and Armand could sit in the garden with the geraniums.’7 The lack of air, the sense of being sucked into death, is also evoked by Denis Roche in his very fine ‘Lettre à Roland Barthes sur la disparition des lucioles’ (‘Letter to Roland Barthes on the disappearance of the fireflies’), where he writes: ‘[T]he first thing I hear is that you have fallen onto your face, which is now no more than one big wound; a friend we have in common relates his visits to the hospital and tells me he found intolerable the gesture you had when you waved at the tubes through which life was continuing to reach you, a gesture that seemed to say: “go on then, let’s unplug them, it’s not worth it any more”.’8 Like Franco Fortini at the same time, Denis Roche thought of the death of Pasolini, which Barthes had imagined, a few months earlier, turning into a novel: ‘A novel depicting righters of wrongs. The idea of starting it with a sort of ritual murder (exorcising violence “once and for all”): looking for Pasolini’s murderer (he’s been freed, I think).’9 Roche cannot fail to think of the Pasolinian dimension of this death, where we are immersed ‘in the dark gleam of the finally discovered sex of death’. He links it to photography, pointing out that Camera Lucida contains only full-face portraits; and he also links it to the appearance-disappearance of the fireflies, one July evening in Tuscany: light-extinction . . . light-extinction . . . light-extinction. . .
In the text he was typing out on the day of the accident, Barthes had described a daydream he had had a little time previously, on the grey, dirty and twilit platform of the Milan railway station. This was in January, barely a month earlier, for an award presented to Michelangelo Antonioni. On 27 January, Dominique Noguez had come to collect Barthes at the railway station and had driven him to the Hotel Carlton (‘the brand new, sterile décor of a luxury American hotel, huge and empty: Tati + Antonioni . . . – indeed, this is where Antonioni is staying, too’).10 In his diary, Noguez evoked the ‘true lover of cities – of cities at night – already seeking, as it were, to get his bearings, to gauge the favours the cities will bestow on him, to prepare – who knows? – the escapade he will embark upon no sooner than we have left him.’ But Barthes had got no further than his dream of setting off on a long journey. He had needed to change trains at Bologna, and had seen a train leaving for the far south, for the Puglia region. On every carriage he had read the inscription ‘Milano–Lecce’: ‘I began dreaming: to take that train, to travel all night and wake up in the warmth, the light, the peace of a faraway town.’11 This image of a long journey revealing what lay at the end of the tunnel was not just the fantasy of a death. It was also a transition from the greyness of the everyday to the light, figuring the passage from a glum, banal life to a transfigured life, to the vita nova, to the life-as-work-of-art. It involved the opposite movement to that of the fireflies: extinction-light . . . extinction-light . . . extinction-light . . . and is thus connected with what Denis Roche says about photography in the homage he wrote for his deceased friend: that it is an interruption in the flow of the single sentence, a little break that means the great caesura of death could be avoided; photos are ‘like so many postilions of memory, a gentle aerial bombardment that precedes each of us in the flow of his endless sentence, beyond the death of others (Pasolini’s death points to your own, Pound’s death to mine, identifying belatedly the date of another indication on his tomb), a gentle and damp bombardment indefinitely resumed in the open framework of loved faces, seen full face, obsessed by their mouths superimposed upon others, the dampness within them, sinking forever into the more general dampness of the tomb.’12 You fall on your face, and you can photograph people full face, but it is not so easy to look death in the face.
Barthes died on 26 March 1980, at 1.40 p.m., in La Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, next to the Gare d’Austerlitz. The doctors did not name the accident as the immediate cause of death, which was brought about by pulmonary complications ‘in a patient who was particularly handicapped by a state of chronic breathing difficulties’, and this is why, on 17 April, the Public Prosecutor’s Department decided not to bring proceedings against the van driver. Barthes had drawn his last breath. Two days later, his body was placed in a coffin and shown to a hundred or so friends, students and well-known figures in a hasty ceremony that took place in the yard behind the morgue. ‘The stunned group which I joined was made up to a large extent of young people (few of those in their midst were famous; but I did recognize Foucault’s bald cranium). The plaque on that wing did not have the university denomination “Lecture Theatre”, but said “Salle de reconnaissances” (Mortuary Chamber).’13 They did not even feel able to carry out that secular imitation of religious ritual that consists in reading out texts or uttering emotional and celebratory homages to the deceased. Some thought that Barthes’s body looked small. Others said a few brief words, such as Michel Chodkiewicz,14 who had succeeded Paul Flamand as general director of Éditions du Seuil in 1979. Others present included: Michel and Rachel Salzedo, Philippe Rebeyrol and Philippe Sollers, Italo Calvino and Michel Foucault, Algirdas Greimas and Julia Kristeva, François Wahl and Severo Sarduy, André Téchiné, who had given Barthes the (minor) role of William Thackeray in his film The Brontë Sisters in 1978, and Violette Morin, together with Barthes’s friends from the rue Nicolas-Houël, where he had spent so many evenings, just opposite the Gare d’Austerlitz. Some then took the train to Urt for his burial. One was Éric Marty, who describes the strange journey of those who took the train because they had loved this man. ‘All I remember of what happened down there was the pouring, crazy, violent rain and the icy wind that enveloped us, huddled like a little herd of animals at bay, and the immemorial sight of the coffin as it was lowered into the grave.’15
There were many homages. Le Monde published several of them. A few days after Barthes’s death, Susan Sontag’s very fine text on the writer’s relation with joy and sadness, and on reading as a form of happiness, came out in The New York Review of Books. The man whose age you could not really guess had often appeared in the company of much younger people without trying to pretend he was young himself: this was appropriate, as ‘his life’s chronology’ was ‘askew’. His body seemed to know the meaning of the word ‘repose’. And there was always something a little hidden in his personality, ‘always that undercurrent of pathos – now made more acute by his premature, mortifying death’.16 As Kristeva would later do, Jean Roudaut, in La Nouvelle Revue française, evoked Barthes’s voice, the rhythm of his phrases, his way of arranging the minims and the crotchets, and his love of music, a love that was evident in the grain of his voice. Roudaut described his way of smoking little Partagas cigars. Above all, he talked about his changing opinions of his own life and work. ‘It was of no importance to him to be well known; but, through what made him well known, to be recognized. And the aspect of his texts that has the most gravity is the way a lived experience makes a theory tremble: a voice seeks its body before, belatedly, it slips into the poignant I of the last books. If one writes in order to be loved, writing has to reflect what one is; there must be within it a trace of that lack, that place where, even if it is empty, the appeal to the other is made.’17 Barthes or the ambiguities: where was he when he was present? What would his absence mean? Death reveals to others entire swathes of emptiness or lack that the life chosen and displayed can no longer conceal. This voice that sought a body – how would it continue to echo? Several people combined a homage to Barthes with a review of Camera Lucida, notably Calvino. The immobility of the face is death, hence Barthes’s resistance to having his photograph taken. The book became a text full of premonitions, marked by a longing for death. If this interpretation appears a little circumstantial, and as such needs to be treated with caution, it does suggest a truth in which Camera Lucida plays a part. Barthes’s inner solitude was indeed at that time echoed by a social isolation, a sense of being marginalized. The huge sales of A Lover’s Discourse, the vogue for his courses at the Collège de France, were not without negative effects. He was shunned by certain intellectuals, who saw the development of his autobiographical narrative, his inclination towards the novel and photography, as a compromise that seemed to some to smack of a desire for worldly success. At the same time, he had to suffer the distance and even disdain of many non-academic critics. The book by Burnier and Rambaud, Le Roland-Barthes sans peine (Roland Barthes Without Tears)18 did actually bring him to the edge of tears; the ringing declaration in his inaugural lecture, ‘language is fascist’, in 1977, had contributed to tarnishing his image among philosophers and militant theorists, who rebuked him for yielding to the siren song of fashion, while they also denounced him for his political indifference or perhaps, quite simply, his difference. In particular, his last book, into which he had poured so much of himself and which was the tomb he had designed for his mother, one that he could share with her, met with a lukewarm reception. His remarks on photography were not yet taken seriously. At least, there was felt to be a lack of theoretical clout in them, and people did not dare to tackle the more intimate aspects of the book directly. Indifference as a response to such a display of private feelings is always painful, and any writer may lose the will to live as a result. Even if not all of them actually die, they are all affected.
What did Barthes die of? The question is still, as we can see, an open one, in spite of the apparently definitive clinical diagnosis. Jacques Derrida preferred to emphasize the plurality of the ‘deaths of Roland Barthes’. He wrote: ‘Death inscribes itself right in the name, but so as to immediately disperse itself there, so as to insinuate a strange syntax – in the name of only one to answer as many.’19 Further on, he described this plural in more detail: ‘The deaths of Roland Barthes: his deaths, that is, of those close to him, those deaths that must have inhabited him, situating places and solemn moments, orienting tombs in his inner space (ending – and probably even beginning – with his mother’s death). His deaths, those he lived in the plural [. . .], this thought of a death that begins, like thought and like death, in the memory of language. While still living, he wrote a death of Roland Barthes by himself. And finally his deaths, his texts about death, everything he wrote, with such insistence on displacement, on death, on the theme of Death if you will, if indeed there is such a theme. From the novel to the photograph, from Writing Degree Zero (1953) to Camera Lucida (1980), a certain thought about death set everything into motion.’20 This death in life was doubtless there from the start, and it made it difficult to be Barthes’s contemporary. Or else it implied living in a different time zone. Derrida, who makes this suggestion, says that he got to know Barthes mainly when they were travelling, sitting opposite one another in the train to Lille or side by side across the aisle in the plane to Baltimore. This heterogeneous contemporaneity could also be read in Proust, in the captions Barthes gave to certain photos or in his last lectures. As he wrote: ‘I am only the imaginary contemporary of my own present; contemporary of its languages, its utopias, its systems (i.e., of its fictions), in short, of its mythology or of its philosophy but not of its history, of which I inhabit only the shimmering reflection: the phantasmagoria.’21 Something of death invaded his life and impelled him to write. Something of the death of the work had found its way into the last moments of the course he was giving. On 23 February 1980, Barthes had resigned himself to abandoning the attempt to make the end of the course coincide with the real publication of the Work whose progress he had been following with his students. ‘Alas, as far as I’m concerned, there’ll be no question of that: I’m unable to pull any Work out of my hat, and quite obviously certainly not this Novel, whose Preparation I wanted to analyse.’22 And he then acknowledged, in notes written in November 1979, that his desire for the world had been so profoundly affected by his mother’s death that he was far from sure that he would write any more. Georges Raillard says that, a few days earlier, he had driven Barthes to the École polytechnique to contribute to one of the courses he was teaching at the time. That afternoon, driving Barthes back to the rue Servandoni, he asked him what was, after all, an unexceptional question from one teacher to another: ‘What do you plan on teaching next year?’ To which Barthes replied: ‘I’ll show some photos of my mother, and remain silent.’
Almost a year earlier, on 15 January 1979, he had given the subtitle ‘Banal and Singular’ to one of the entries in his column in Le Nouvel Observateur: ‘A runaway car crashes against a wall on the eastern ring road round Paris: the fact is (alas) banal. Neither the cause of the accident nor the five occupants of the car, all young, and almost all dead, can be identified: this is singular. Such singularity is that of what one might call a perfect death, in that it frustrates twice over what might appease the horror of dying: knowing who and from what. Everything comes down not to nothingness but to something even worse: to nullity. This explains the kind of intense chronicling which our society elaborates around death: necrologies, annals, a history, everything that can name and explain, afford a purchase to memory and to meaning. How generous is Dante’s Inferno, where the dead are called by their names and discussed according to their sins.’23 Death needs more than a magazine column: it calls out for a narrative.
Death, indeed, is the only event that resists autobiography. It justifies the activity of biography, as it is someone else who writes it. If the statement ‘I was born’ is autobiographical only in the second degree, because our existence attests to it, because there are such things as identity papers, because we have been told that it occurred, and in such and such a way, it is still possible to say ‘I was born’: ‘I was born in’, ‘I was born to’, ‘I was born by’. It is not possible to say ‘I died in’, ‘I died of’, ‘I died by’. Someone else must say it for us. If ‘I was born’ is autobiographical only in an oblique or mediated way, ‘I died’ or ‘I am dead’ constitutes the impossible limit of all uttering, since death cannot be spoken in the first person. Barthes was fascinated by all the fictions that managed to get round this impossibility, hence his obsession with the Edgar Allan Poe short story ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, in which the eponymous hero says, at the end, ‘I am dead’. Barthes comments: ‘The connotation of the phrase (I am dead) is of an inexhaustible richness. Of course there exist any number of mythic narratives in which the dead speak; but it is to say: “I am alive”. There is here a true hapax of narrative grammar, a staging of speech impossible as speech: I am dead.’24 In the case of this death under hypnosis, the voice that makes itself heard is the intimate voice, the profound voice, the voice of the Other.25 Biographical reason (or unreason) is doubtless here, in the way the Other, the third person, takes over the narrative of death. This is also what fascinated Barthes in Chateaubriand and his Life of Rancé: the fact that both of them, the author and the man whose life he was writing, both dwelt on life’s withdrawal in its second half, the former because he felt, in the course of his long old age, that life was abandoning him, and the latter because he was deliberately abandoning life: ‘for one who voluntarily abandons the world can readily identify himself with one whom the world abandons: the dream, without which there would be no writing, abolishes any distinction between active and passive voices: abandoner and abandoned are here merely the same man, Chateaubriand can be Rancé.’26 This state of death without oblivion, where one is nothing more than time itself, can be experienced very early on, thanks to two tendencies both of which Barthes himself knew at a very young age: boredom and memory, for memory can offer life a complete system of representations. These tendencies protect from the anguish of death, against which writing tirelessly struggles. Indeed, one fragment from the Urt diary in 1977 is entitled ‘The fictitious does not die.’ Literature is there to protect you from real death. ‘Of any historical character (or person), that is, anyone who has really lived, I can immediately see only this: that he is dead, that he has been struck down by real death, and this always seems cruel to me (a feeling that is difficult to express because it is matt, a feeling of anxiety at death). Conversely, a fictitious character is one I can always consume with euphoria, precisely because, not having really lived, he cannot really be dead. We must avoid at all costs saying that he is immortal, as immortality remains trapped within the paradigm, it is merely the opposite of death, it does not undo its meaning, the wrench it inflicts; it is better to say: not touched by death.’27 Sometimes, however, even in literature, the wrench still occurs. These are the moments when the death of a character makes it possible for the most intense love that can exist between two people to be expressed: the death of Prince Bolkonski while talking to his daughter Maria in War and Peace; and the death of the Narrator’s grandmother in In Search of Lost Time. ‘Suddenly literature (for it is literature that matters here) coincides absolutely with an emotional landslide, a “cry”.’28 It turns pathos, so often decried, into a force of reading; it expresses the naked truth of that for which it provides consolation.
Death leads to writing and it justifies the narrative of a life. It begins the past over again, it summons new forms and figures into being. It is because someone dies that we can undertake to relate their life. Death recapitulates and reassembles. This is why I have begun this Life with the story of a death. While it breaks away from life, and in a certain way is life’s opposite, death is at the same time identical with life as story. Both are the remainder of a person, the remainder that is at the same time a supplement that does not replace anything. ‘All those who have loved a dead person survive the wound opened by his death, by keeping him present, alive. Memory then takes the place of an omnipresent time; the cut-off past and the impossible future blur into the intensity of a permanence where I, in remembering, am affirmed in, through and at the expense of the dead person.’29 These words of Julia Kristeva’s were written while she was still in mourning for Barthes, and they express the extent to which this life story is unwarranted: it is not a duty of memory but a constraint of survival. It occupies the place left vacant by the death. In many respects, this limit of all biography is even more of a problem in the case of Barthes. He is the one who discourages the enterprise of biography for reasons that he himself laid down and for others that, while they do indeed depend on him, impose themselves almost in spite of him. For the death of a writer is not part of his life. One dies because one has a body, whereas one has written only in order to suspend the body, to lessen its pressure, to lighten its weight, to mute the unease that it arouses. As Michel Schneider writes, in Morts imaginaires: ‘So we must read the books that writers have written: this is where their deaths are related. A writer is someone who dies all his life, in long sentences, in little words.’30 The death of a writer is not really the logical conclusion to his existence. It is not the same as the ‘death of the author’. But the death of a writer makes both the life of the author and an examination of the signs of death laid out in his oeuvre possible. This death is neither death-as-sleep, ‘where the motionless escapes transmutation’, nor death-as-sun, whose revealing virtue ‘discloses the style of an existence’,31 as Barthes puts it in his study of Michelet: it is a death that lies at the start of every new entrance.
‘Drive more slowly, you might run over Roland Barthes.’
Notes
1
. ‘One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves’, in Barthes,
The Rustle of Language
, translated by Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 296–305 (p. 305).
2
. In Sollers’s view, François Wahl and his colleagues at Éditions du Seuil did not want to tell the truth about Barthes’s condition because the connection that journalists would inevitably have made between the luncheon with Mitterrand that Barthes had just left and his accident might have overshadowed the forthcoming electoral campaign. Interview with the present author, 3 September 2013.
3
. Philippe Sollers,
Women
, translated by Barbara Bray (London: Quartet, 1991), p. 123.
4
. Sollers,
Women
, p. 116.
5
. Éric Marty,
Roland Barthes, le métier d’écrire
(Paris: Seuil, Fiction & Cie, 2006), p. 102.
6
. Mathieu Lindon,
Ce qu’aimer veut dire
(Paris: POL, 2011), p. 242.
7
. Julia Kristeva,
The Samurai
, translated by Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 302–303. It is very moving to read in parallel today the overlapping accounts of Barthes’s death in Sollers’s
Women
and in this novel by Kristeva. The pseudonyms are not identical, but Werth and Bréhal are tangibly two images of one and the same man, the products of the affection and personalities of the authors composing them. The image is more ambiguous in Sollers, more endearing and fragile in Kristeva.
8
. Denis Roche, ‘Lettre à Roland Barthes sur la disparition des lucioles’, in
La Disparition des lucioles: réflexions sur l’acte photographique
(Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1982), p. 157.
9
