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A Barthes Reader

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It is difficult to pin down exactly where to place Roland Barthes as a literary theorist. He began as a structuralist, finished as a post-structuralist, and in between delved into and out of a host of other movements. Despite these changes in philosophy, he managed to remain faithful to a few core beliefs. He envisioned language as the primary means to interact with the world--even if he was inconsistent about how that was to be done. He insisted that various literary forms could best mediate between language and the world--even if he could not always decide which forms and when and how to use them. In short, his life was marked by ongoing contradiction. A BARTHES READER is a lucid collection of many key essays and excerpts from the Barthes canon. The introduction by Susan Sontag well prepares the reader for the complexities of thought that marked Barthes.

There are two ways to gain a very broad over-view of his life and beliefs. The first involves a philosophical classification and the second a phase classification.

In the philosophical classification, one may designate him as the empiricist, one who insisted that there existed a universal grammar of narrative that could be apprehended by looking for this universal grammar through lenses like linguistics, literature, music, popular culture, and even professional wrestling. One could also label him as a devotee of sensuality, one who sought pleasure and jouissance wherever they might be found. Finally, one could see him as he refused to see himself, as a successful author who refused to credit all other successful authors for the wisdom of their words.

In the phase classification, Barthes passed through four sometimes overlapping categories. In the first phase, he was a critic whose primary focus was on history. He wrote a book on the historical poet Jules Michelet, called Michelet (1957). Further, his early career mindset was heavily influenced by his contemporaries, Sartre, Brecht, and de Saussure. In Writing Degree Zero (1953), Barthes traces a history of writing that ignores historical style but emphasizes the historical role of signs in literature. His conclusion: throughout history all literature was not to be used for social communication but for the creation of forms via semiology. In the second phase, Barthes explored the relation that myth has in its ability to manipulate, often subliminally, society into accepting unhesitatingly the intent of that myth. In Mythologies (1957), Barthes suggests that myth making is little more than a tool of power that ensures that the entrenched Powers That Be can control society while at the same time deceive that society into thinking that it is acting of its own free will even as it is controlled by a recurring series of myths, which do not reflect historical fact but alter them into a more desirable form. The third phase is marked by Barthes' gradual abandoning of semiology as an inflexible linguistics discourse in favor of signs and codes. In his three hundred page S/Z (1970), Barthes subjects a thirty page story by Balzac (Sarracine) to an exhaustive analysis founded on a series of five codes that collectively point that story to a universal structure of meaning. The fourth and final phase Barthes himself terms his period of `moralities.' In a book that strongly resembles autobiography, he wrote Roland Barthes (1980), one of several such efforts that mark the protagonist (presumably Barthes) who wallows in love, sentimentality, and theatrics. In Camera Lucida (1980), Barthes uses photography as a metaphor to express his love for his mother. Even here, he could not totally abandon his earlier reliance on signs as he describes photography as the signifier for the looming death of his mother.