Album Page 15
I myself cannot resolve this all alone. That wouldn’t make any sense, and basically I don’t really know what I think or what I want. That depends on all of us, and very much on you; we need to talk. All that I can tell you now—and this is the main reason I’m writing to you—is that I am—as I have basically always expected to be—fundamentally inclined to contribute in a very real way to whatever you do, whether it is Théâtre populaire or Arche; I will do it, of course, as I am now—and not as I was—assuming there is a difference, which I myself do not believe in the least. No need to answer, I’ve written you (even though I don’t like “long-distance” letters) simply so we can discuss it when I return (about September 20), and so you have my assurance of real supportb from me from now on, whatever we decide.
With faithful affection to you and Geneviève both,
R. Barthes
With Michel Vinaver
Michel Vinaver, whose real name was Michel Grinberg, was born in 1927. After writing two novels published by Gallimard, he went on to become a very important playwright while pursuing a parallel career in industry (at Gillette, where he was chairman and chief executive officer for France). He is best known for Les Coréens, a play produced by Roger Planchon in Lyon in 1956. His last play, Bettencourt boulevard ou une histoire de France, was published in 2014 by Éditions de l’Arche.
Michel Vinaver to Roland Barthes
All Saints’ Day, [November 1, 1956]
Dear Roland,
I welcome the news your letter brings as one welcomes the unexpected. For me it is an event, a “victory” (in Conrad’s sense)98 more than a reward.
And your paper that I just read is the very one that will allow the play to find its place in the general movement.99 It propels, but it also guides, and criticism here becomes conductor. That is an invaluable service.
I was glad you weren’t there Saturday.100 The evening was successful as an operation is successful. It was a victory in the ordinary sense, thus followed by a house depression—that Planchon and I shared: the reality of the performance was obliterated by that of an enormous “machination.” I’ll fill in the details for you this weekend. Tomorrow evening, Friday, I’m going to Lyon and will take a night train to Paris, where I’ll spend Saturday and Sunday seeing what Serreau is doing.101
Michel
Roland Barthes to Michel Vinaver
Thursday, [late 1957 or early 1958]
Michel, I’ve finally read Les Huissiers and I really enjoyed it.102 I am very much for it; I see many things in it that are simultaneously very simple and very interesting. It is much more relaxed than Les Coréens, without losing anything.
The part of the Huissiers is so right that I have already copied passages for my courses on France this summer. I have only one objection to discuss with you: the political palaver, offered as palaver, as empty talk, is too long. You must find a way to render the Algerian hole (in relation to the barbers’ positivity) without inflating the language too much. I’m expressing this badly, but you see what I mean.
I’ll arrive in Annecy next Saturday, coming from Lyon, at 3:19 PM.
Don’t worry about me. I’ll take the bus and will get to Menthon about 5 PM; find a way for me to get into the house. And don’t hurry back from skiing.
Until Saturday,
Roland
I’m leaving Paris Friday at noon, staying with Jean Lacroix, 107, cours Lafayette, Lyon. I’ll have to return Sunday evening. But it’s better than nothing.
* * *
January 5, 1961
Michel, since I have your Brussels address, I can tell you how your play has dazzled me.103 Me, for whom reading is such an effort, such an obligation, I spontaneously read this text on a whole other level, that of pleasure, of seduction. I’ve never seen such sure mastery combined with such profound correctness of thought, of judgment on the world. I hope, yes, I hope that Planchon will produce it—I don’t meaning the staging, because that he does fairly well—but without vulgarity (not his, but his actors …). Yes, this play seems good to me, the best I’ve read of yours. In our generation, I find only you inclined toward an explosive mixture of ambiguity and correctness. The others are either muddleheads (that is to say, bastards) or ideologues.
Happy new year to all the family,
R. Barthes
Michel Vinaver to Roland Barthes
January 15, 1961
Roland,
That’s something I myself feel, the effort of reading, the sense of obligation. And from time to time, like you with the Mycéniens,104 a break in the clouds, a feeling of pleasure. Recently, Le Bel éte by Pavese. It’s true that I had the strange sensation of writing what I was reading. Recently as well, the Contes de pluie et de lune,105 which are the opposite of what I could write. But why this resistance to embark upon some new reading? When it ought to be no problem, like a child popping his thumb into his mouth.
Ten years ago, three things seemed equally necessary and equally verging on impossible for me: writing, earning a living, and creating a family. Three things available to others, closed to me who wanted them not separately but together. Today I feel I’ve hardly progressed. Maybe because I’ve grown too many branches, not enough leaves. Because I haven’t paid enough attention to pleasure.
Your friend,
Michel
* * *
November 21, 1961
Roland,
I read, this morning, “Savoir et folie.”106 Good to hear from you there.
You don’t publish very much, and what you do publish I rarely come across. Each time, reading you brings with it a physical sensation, the sensation of having my hand grasped by a very sure hand feeling its way. I read you and it is simultaneously with recognition and surprise.
Feeling one’s way toward what? In any case, what I seem to read constantly between your lines is “One cannot escape.” Your curse and your privilege to feel and express that with such force. Nothing of what is written offers simultaneously (I keep coming back to that) such an impression of stillness and movement, of the urge to move out from a center.
I tell myself that in my friendship with you there is that scandalous certainty that I can, at any time, set off on vacation; as long as you’re there, I cannot help but—at one time or another—come back.
Michel
The Future of Rhetoric
This unpublished text, drawn from the BNF archives, is one of the very first critical essays written by Roland Barthes, which can be dated to the spring of 1946, as is evident from Barthes's final note for this essay, which alludes to the January 1946 issue of Contrepoints. Thus it was written upon Barthes’s return from the sanatorium in Leysin, one year before the publication in Combat of the sketches from Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, the first of which appeared under that title on August 1, 1947.
* * *
We know the principle of the historical method applied to literature (Lanson): to present the text as within History and to require that it be understood historically.c Lanson cared very much about the scientific spirit of his method; nevertheless, that is its most debatable feature. A scientific attitude too often authorized in these matters the triumph of the letter over the spirit, the secondary over the essential, collation over organized explanation.d Still it is true that after Lanson the literary text no longer belonged to a supernatural and unknowable order; it became the product of precise determination, historical in nature. It appeared as an object, if not concrete, at least observable. A certain portion of the taboo was lifted that had shielded, behind the name of inspiration, the various processes of verbal creation. Criticism began to comprehend; it no longer simply commented. It claims to mark the limits of subjective opinion, the lack of which, despite the appeal, leads to nothing. In short, by helping to eliminate the supernatural from the work of art, Lansonian criticism remains an available method, that is to say, from the moment when the text is presented as an object, it is possible to supplement the pure historical method with an instant set o
f observations, descriptions, and what could almost be called experiments that link literary criticism to the general and shared movement of the other sciences.
* * *
But before moving beyond Lansonian criticism, we must say how its applications leave us—justifiably—unsatisfied. First of all, it is criticism that relies on false psychology. In its explanations and conclusions, it continually resorts to a certain philosophical view of the world and ontological view of man. If that view is weak and unconsidered, it nonetheless exists; it is the one quite naturally colored by the philosophical trend of the moment. By virtue of the apparently objective division of domains, classical literary criticism never addressed questions that seemed beyond the immediate goal of its method. But to be objective in this way is simply to adopt the slogans, that is, the clichés, within the tradition. However innocently and without thinking of the great responsibility involved, Lansonism will thus base its criticism on a certain dualism in man, the separation of reason and temperament, ideas and feelings, thoughts and words, in short on the existence of an absolute mental order. One of the doctors of pure history, Gabriel Monod, thought that he had explained all of Michelet when he reduced him to a homo duplex, in whom the imagination struggles against realism, sensuality, ideal aspirations, etc. Contradiction is for him an avant-garde explanation. Everyone knows that in French literature it is forbidden for a poet to be intelligent and for a cerebral type to be an artist. In this kind of psychological analytics, there is no concern for the total human. Once presented in a great daring gesture, the contradiction is never afterward traced to its roots. One considers oneself too fortunate in having discovered it, in having presented it in the antithetical form as an element of balance. Whereas there is no true explanation without dialectical reduction to unity. Lanson and those who followed him were not at all bothered by using the results of a historical method to develop an arbitrary kind of psychology. They did not believe they had to make a distinction for humans; it was enough for them to adopt the perspective of their time, considered to be eternal. With complete ingenuousness, chapters resolved into paragraphs on the sensibility, the imagination, the ideas, and eventually the form of the writer. But no one considered the degree to which the least writing itself is engaging, and no one foresaw how profoundly damaging erroneous psychology could be to a writer’s work.
That is not all. Plekhanov praised Lanson for returning Descartes’s ideas to their historical milieu.107 That was, in fact, an important critical operation. But could it be decisive insofar as no one had precisely defined this notion of “milieu”? The ideological determinants of a work are not merely secondary. If one gets involved in doing historical criticism, it is important not to stop midway; one cannot avoid calling into question the fundamental structure of society. And here again, an apparent paradox holds that the theory of pure history, the profession of a method free of any social motive, would in fact lead to more superficial results than would an objective, but partisan, critique, framed within a comprehensive explanation of History and society. One can simultaneously want to subjugate everything to History, and claim to dominate it. Lanson did not resolve that contradiction. Thus the same distance separates him from the possibilities for a sociological critique of literature as separates Taine from materialist historians.
Since the milieu can only determine the work through the intermediary of the author, classical criticism gave precedence to the writer’s biography. That means that time was given an all-consuming place in the development of works of art. Through dating crises, movements, reversals, and influences, critics subjected the intelligence of the work to an emotional conception of duration; they considered the written text as a pure succession of moments, and they turned away from the static, even stubborn, elements, the habits one could say, that the text includes. Despite the method’s scientific basis, the results conform more closely to a conception of personal, incommunicable time that dominates the period. Beneath an apparent coolness, beneath the apparatus of objective chronology, slips a totally subjective view of man. Here, alone and definitively, emotional time is creator; works are only accidents of substance: duration. It was after Lanson that many literary hacks began writing biographical novels, whose distinctive feature is to make a writer’s works entirely dependent upon the chance events of his life, and to organize the lifetime into a providentially significant drama. Thus the highly decorative but false notion of destiny was introduced into criticism, where it serves no purpose. Ingenuity vied with arbitrariness in organizing the lives of great writers into dramas. Almost every year the lives of Racine, Pascal, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Pushkin, Mallarmé, Péguy, etc. submit to the easy unity of the novel, and their works are reduced to the state of personal messages and secrets. No one comes close to caring about analyzing actual content, the verbal substance of the written thought. By wanting to define the work through its widest and most lively context, critics neglect the work itself. It is no longer a set of concrete operations, it is an emanation, a quasi-spiritual and inessential vapor, from a single reality: the author. And that reality is rarely examined for what it, like the human body, can offer of the solidly observable; the author here is most often only the geometric location for a certain number of adventures, crises, passions, and influences. He is a character in a setting, the milieu itself being no more than material for a picturesque resurrection.
It is because of too great a desire to explain that one neglects to describe. Explanation loses sight of its object, because it relies upon a spiritual conception of the work. Wanting to elucidate Le Misanthrope, classical criticism will explain in depth comedy before Molière, and even the life of Molière, but the play itself? Not at all. Such effort is necessary, but can only be preliminary. The Lansonians fell somewhat into the error of a more mechanical than dialectical view of causality. Critics did consider the determination of the author over the work; but did they try hard enough to discover the inverse action of the work on the author, the mental categories, verbal reflexes, rhetorical automatisms that the work creates and establishes as latent habits, powerful enough perhaps to shape in advance, as it were, the writer’s future thinking? The danger is mistaking the literary text for a pure summation of influences. One thus abandons, gradually and despite the best, most objective intentions, the sound and necessary idea according to which the text, the writing, always remains a concretely observable subject, requiring description and not just explanation. To tell the truth, the historical method alone can only, in the final analysis, refer to an absolute mental order. The Lansonian tyranny of influence, milieu, rapprochement is only possible within the framework of idealism, where ideas exist independently of words, where what is directly observable in the text, that is, the verbal substance, is relegated to the last chapter on style, a sort of impalpable magic powder thrown over the all-powerful ideas, a final moment of poetic chemistry. And it is, in fact, very much within the framework of Lansonism that the traditional distinction between le fond and la forme—content and form—blossomed; along with Flaubert, all classical literature considered style to be the flesh on a skeleton, the outward appearance of a hidden vital essence. Criticism maintained the old scholastic dualism of mind and body, mental and physical, intelligible and sensible. Our literary handbooks are still burdened with this division. It goes without saying that in these analyses, form is always the poor cousin; it prompts only a short, vague commentary, a kind of false window for symmetry. Philology, which nevertheless has the merit of rigor and historic spirit, restricts itself to the chronology of forms and does not try to penetrate the verbal automatisms belonging to a writer.
The preceding discussion may make it clear that we must now take the desupernaturalization of literature to its limits and try to construct, through trial and error, the framework for comprehensive and objective criticism of literary texts. The reduction of the written work to an observable subject, which is the path to follow, is certainly not new; it is in the air. From what appear to be ve
ry different approaches, writers have tried to reduce inspiration to a set of concrete, technical operations; that was a fruitful attitude to adopt, since it moved us from the metaphysical to the natural. All these questions were then rendered familiar through Valéry and the Surrealists; under the rebellious work of the latter and the aristocratic work of the former, poetic chemistry lost its magical character. Abandoning the supernatural, we have sanely turned toward a technology of creation.
* * *
There will be no materialist history of literature so long as literature is not restored to the practice of a language.
Saying that the milieu acts upon the writer is nothing. Because what is the writer in this case? An organism that adapts through language alone, and not through action. Thus it is to the level of language that literary criticism, if it wants to be entirely historical, must attend.e And here, it must be said, literary criticism can reasonably find hope in the developments of experimental psychology. The future of criticism, an open, nondogmatic future, can only exist where the mechanisms of language, and thus of thought, will be elucidated in accordance with a gradual synthesis of other sciences. For a long time still, criticism will have to remain only partly objective; it will have to be content with hypotheses and approximations. It must be patient, except in immediately linking to the historical method the study of the written text considered as verbal behavior, a set of spoken reactions. Written thought must be reduced to an order of verbal processes, that is to say, to rhetoric. It is, in fact, to a resurrection of rhetoric that we will sooner or later be led, not, of course, as the art of persuasion through the means of formulas and formal classifications, but very much as the science of written language, taking into account all that experimental psychology will have to teach us about the acquisition of verbal habits, the conditioning of speech, the construction, conclusion, and use of word groups, all of which, under the name of expressions or even themes, we will learn to recognize and appreciate for their importance. From now on, criticism must be able to make certain lists, certain calculations and observations of this order. Even without first moving to the verbal level, but remaining for now on the hypothetical level of a pure mental order, we can say that criticism, oriented until now toward the problems of chronology, neglected to inquire into certain constants in the work of a writer. The stubborn and almost involuntary nature of a few ideas and processes, which constitute the very unity in tone and style specific to an author, must arouse suspicions. We soon see that the work of a writer nearly always involves a set of themes, more or less complex, more or less evident, according to the author and the period. This set of themes—and this is its remarkable feature—usually resists apparent variations in ideas. To tell the truth, even in the case of an obvious change in beliefs, like the transition from Christianity to non-Christianity in Michelet, there is much more inversion than transformation. That is to say, ideas change but remain within the same stubborn framework, the incorrigible signs in this case, for example, being Michelet’s religiosity and apocalyptic view of History. It is not that criticism can discover something outside of time; it is simply that time does not act only as a succession of different and differently determined historical situations, but also, inversely, as creator and then preserver of automatisms of thought that contribute to the specific image we have of a writer and that form part of his talent and genius. At this point, time is no longer the place where a soul evolves emotionally; it resumes its solely physical function, that is to say, it helps to establish certain repeated processes within an organism that is always simultaneously seeking economy and efficiency. Time preserves because it accuses the figures of its own rhetoric within which a writer thinks first with happiness, and then with ease, and outside of which he is soon no longer able or willing to think. It is not unusual to see, in a great writer’s old age, these grooves become ruts; beyond maturity, the written work is no more than a collection of habits, a rehearsal of cherished themes. Hence the monstrous nature of those grand old men of literature, among whom genius has the blind force of habit. Because thanks to the pathological distortion of time, this set of themes, taken initially for more than convenience in its classical mental aspect, reveals its essentially verbal nature. The themes are initially alive enough, that is, the organism does not use a word without searching a little, without choosing the best adaptation from among many; but soon the reflex is created. If it is a matter of a lyric writer, that is, if he believes in inspiration, he will continue playing to the very end. We know that the last books of Michelet, Hugo, Claudel, etc. are thick condensations of their specific natures, running on empty here, with the perfect imbecilic efficiency of a machine. This is not to say exactly that the word has triumphed over the idea, nor is it a matter of describing classical verbalism, because initially as finally the writer is only words, as is everyone who speaks or who writes. Rather, it is that verbal automatisms have invaded all discourse, whereas the balanced work is the product of a subtly unstable and not overwhelmingly immediate oral adaptation.