French social and literary critic, whose writings on semiotics made structuralism one of the leading intellectual movements of the 20th century. In his lifetime Barthes published seventeen books and numerous articles, many of which were gathered to form collections. His ideas have offered alternatives to the methods of traditional literary scholarship. Barthes’ writings have had a considerable following among students and teachers both in and outside France.
Roland Barthes was born in Cherbough, Manche. After his father’s death in a naval battle in 1916, Barthes’ mother Henriette Binger Barthes moved to Bayonne, where Barthes spent his childhood. In 1924 she moved with her son to Paris, where Barthes attended the Lycée Montaigne (1924-30) and Lycée Louis-le-Grand (1930-34). “Not an unhappy youth,” Barthes later recalled, “thanks to the affection which surrounded me, but an awkward one, because of the solitude and material constraint.” In 1927 Henriette gave birth to an illegitimate child, Michel Salzado, Barthes’ half-brother. When Barthes’ grandparents refused to give her financial help, she supported her family as a bookbinder. At the Sorbonne Barthes studied classical literature, Greek tragedy, grammar and philology, receiving degrees in classical literature (1939) and grammar and philology (1943).
In 1934 Barthes contracted tuberculosis and spent the years 1934-35 and 1942-46 in sanatoriums. During the Occupation he was in a sanatorium in the Isère. Numerous relapses with tuberculosis prevented him from carrying out his doctoral research, but he read avidly (“What else did you have to do except read?”), started to do a little writing, founded a theatrical troupe, the Groupe Théâtral Antique, and cofounded the magazine Théâtre populaire. While in the mountain village of Touvet, he wrote an article, ‘Notes sur André Gide et son Journal’, which was published in 1942 in Existences, the student magazine of the Sanatorium des Estudiants de France at Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet, saying in the opening of the notes that “incoherence seemst to me prefetable to a distorting order”. Barthes was a teacher at lycées in Biarritz (1939), Bayonne (1939-40), Paris (1942-46), at the French Institute in Bucharest, Romania (1948-49), University of Alexandria, Egypt (1949-50), and Direction Générale des Affaires Culturelles (1950-52). In 1952-59 he had research appointments with Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, from 1960 to 1976 he was a director of studies at École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1967-68 he taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and from 1976 to 1980, he was the chair of literary semiology at Collège de France.
Barthes entered the French intellectual scene in the 1950s. The work which brought him into modern literature was Sartre’s What is Literature? (1947). Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953, Writing Degree Zero) was initially published as articles in Albert Camus’ journal, Combat. It established Barthes as one of leading critics of Modernist literature in France. It introduced the concept of écriture (“scription”) as distinguished from style, language, and writing. The work connected him closely with the writers of nouveau roman. He was the first critic to identify the goals of the writings of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor. Barthes looked at the historical conditions of literary language and posed the difficulty of a modern practice of writing: committed to language the writer is at once caught up in particular discursive orders.
Michelet par lui-même (1954), a biography of Jules Michelet, focused on the personal obsessions of the 19th-century historian. Barthes saw that they are part of his writing, and give existential reality to the historical moments related by the historian’s writing. The impressionistic Mythologies (1957) drew on semiological concepts in the analysis of myths and signs in contemporary culture. Barthes used as his material newspapers, films, shows and exhibitions, mainly due to their connection to ideological discourse. The starting point was not in the traditional value judgements and investigation of the author’s intentions, but in the text itself as a system of signs, whose underlying structure forms the “meaning of the work as a whole” An advertising firm found Barthes’ works so compelling that it persuaded him to work briefly as a consultant for the auto manufacturer Renault.
Sur Racine (1963), three impressionistc essays on the dramatist, caused some controversy because of its nonscholarly point of view and neologisms. Raymond Picard, a Sorbonne professor and Racine scholar, criticized in his Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture? (1965) the subjective nature of Barthes’ essays. Barthes answered in Critique et Vérité (1966), which postulated a “science of criticism” to replace the “university criticism” perpetuated by Picard and his colleagues. Barthes recommended that criticism become a science and showed that critical terms and approaches are connected to dominant class-ideology. The values of clarity, nobility, and humanity, taken as a self-evident basis for a research, are a censoring force on other kinds of approach. Thus Barthes dismissed such stylists as Flaubert and Gide and praised Sartre – it was “never said that he wrote well.”
During his career, Barthes published more essays than substantial studies, presenting his views among others in subjective aphorism and not in the form of theoretical postulates. In Le Plaisir du texte (1973) Barthes developed further his ideas of the personal dimensions in relationship with the text. Barthes analyzed his desire to read along with his likes, dislikes, and motivations associated with that activity. L’Empire des signes (1970) was written after Barthes’s visit to Japan, and dealt with the country’s myths. In this great introduction to the art of definitions, Japanese cooking was for him “the twilight of the raw”, a haiku a “vision without commentary”, and sex “is everywhere, except in sexuality.”
In Eléments de sémiologie (1964) Barthes systematized his views on the “science of signs”, based on Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857-1913) concept of language and analysis of myth and ritual. Barthes made his most intensive application of structural linguistics in S/Z (1970). By analyzing phase-by-phase Balzac’s short story ‘Sarrasine’, he dealt with the experience of reading, the relations of the reader as subject to the movement of language in texts. According to Barthes, classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader. But the reader is the space, in which all the multiple aspects of the text meet. A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. “… the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” The study has become the focal point and model for multilevel – nearly playful – literary criticism because of its analytical concentration on the structural elements that constitute the literary whole.
As a gesture of solidarity Barthes travelled in 1974 to China with Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, François Wahl, and other writers. His notes on the journey, Carnets de voyage en Chine, in which he expressed his boredom and disappointment with Chairman Mao’s China, were published in 2009. Barthes’ final book was La Chambre claire (1980, Camera Lucida), in which photography is discussed as a communicating medium. It was written in the short space between his mother’s death and his own. The author himself confesses that he is too impatient to be a photographer, but whenever he poses in front of the lens, his “body never finds its zero degree, no one can give it to me (perhaps only my mother? For it is not indifference which erases the weight of the image – the Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police – but love, extreme love).” Photography, especially portraits, was for him “a magic, not an art.” Through his life Barthes lived with or near his mother, who died in 1977, at the age of 84. During her illness Barthes nursed her, and later wrote in Camera Lucida, that “ultimately I experienced her, strong as she had been, my inner law, as my feminine child… Once she was dead I no longer had any reason to attune myself to the progress of the superior Life Force (the race, the species).” A day after the death of his mother, Barthes began to keep a diary, which was published in 2009 under the title Journal de deuil (Mourning Diary). Barthes died three years later in Paris as the result of a street accident on March 23, 1980. While walking home from a lunch given by François Mitterrand, he [was] hit by a laundry van. Posthumously published Incidents (1987) revealed the author’s homosexuality. —kirjasto
