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  In short, in many cases, these verbal categories—images, themes, allusions, analogies, metaphors, antitheses, couples, figures, cadences—whose formal aspect was considered until now to be pure product, pure clothing for thought, seem in reality to be a driving force. They are first induced as responses to the demands of some situation of thought, and then come to act as stimulants; the writer is led by his rhetoric as much as he leads it. The literary text is like a gathering of reversible links. An incessant dialectic, enormously complex and of which we see only the most stable elements, agitates the written thought, which is created as it goes along by the action and reaction of figures and cadences, through whatever other words are being organized less immediately, filling, in a more laborious fashion, the voids left between the ready-made forms. In this sense, the writer’s text is like a sequence of sure, rapid, original gestures (that he possesses exclusively, alone or with his era, as a species possesses its specific means of adaptation) and efforts that are more difficult because they are unlearned, but finally more precise because they are more supple and new.

  Thus some trite figure like antithesis can first be the most natural means for adapting to situations of thought that effectively involve antinomies. But what was initially only response comes to play the role of stimulus; the figure of antithesis creates in turn the antithetical situation. We know that, in romantic eloquence, the object of discourse comes to organize itself in the form of a permanent couple, according to processes that are basically only a matter of rhetoric.f The importance of antonomasia in Balzac (Curtius)108 and catachresis in Baudelaire has already been noted. We could equally point to the pleonastic structure of discourse in Molière (from which he draws comic effects when he is aware of it), the driving force of metaphor in highly mannered language or of the symbol in romantic eloquence, etc.

  And again, the alexandrine, as a given rhetorical cadence, absolutely shapes thought, forever acting as a driving and conditioning force. We may foresee all that criticism may one day discover about the rhetoric of Racine or Molière the poet (hasn’t an attempt of this order been made with regard to the verse of Corneille?), that is to say, about precisely what is called their thought. That will be at least as fruitful as pondering over the portion of angel and devil in the soul of Racine or Molière’s relationship with Madeleine Béjart. Imagination, symbolism, realism, sensibility, ideas, etc. cannot have true critical significance outside of an objective rhetoric that must study the development of the literary text at its surface level, in the verbal accidents that it offers to show us, before studying it in the “soul” or the “psychology” of the writer. The point is not to arrive at a static description. The verbal structure of discourse must be seized in its creative aspect; the way rhetorical figures act as a driving force must be brought to light.

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  We may wonder if these verbal categories, these rhetorical figures, are so obvious among all writers and, in each case, where they originate. This is where History must be reintroduced. It is clearly essential to a writer’s rhetoric that he be born in one era and not some other. The age, or more precisely whatever society is in a given age, determines not only the historical state of the language, which is the business of philology; through the play of constraints and deliberations, motives acknowledged or not, it also allows or defends a general rhetorical orientation, within which each writer lets his automatisms function more or less unrestrained. One can say that in general, an aim exists for writing, shared by the writers of the same period. Hence the famous French clarity, the myth of enlightened philosophy (a myth still very much alive since we are forever hearing about the eternal virtue of our language in diplomatic discussions, as if the use of a language could miraculously be the cause and not the expression of a relationship between political powers: see the complaints and hopes of Duhamel in Le Figaro.)109 The myth of French clarity is the product of history, the history of a very well-defined class that, in its ascending phase, aspired to universal power and forged the means for itself. But why should this clarity belong to the French bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century? Here we must allow for new, more technical, historical explanations. We must be able to offer a verbal description of that language, completely elucidate its spoken origin, and really consider that, in the past, French literature followed conversation very closely. The articulations and rhetorical structures of the classical language possess that general character, no doubt, because they are the substitute for actual gestures and developed much more from the requirements of communication in a very homogenous society than from a psychoanalysis specific to each writer. On the other hand, in the Romantic period, under the influence of multiple social and ideological causes, literature abandoned conversation and tended toward prophesy. The rhetorical revolution claimed by Hugo (its social significance is undeniable) replaced persuasion with intimidation, and writers, abandoning a shared set of verbal gestures and universal rhetorical figures (for their class, of course), let themselves get entangled in entirely personal verbal chains that, some fifty years later (Symbolism), they would be the only ones to understand. Abandoning conversation, rhetoric, that is to say, literature, moved to solemnity and then to mystery, and that movement can be seen even more clearly in the historical usage of words than in the profession of ideas. Inquiry into rhetorical processes in literature must thus adapt its means to the period under study. It may be more difficult to understand the genesis of some Romantic enterprise without resorting to psychoanalysis. For a figure employed in very diverse intellectual usages, we may find a single common latent emotion, a single common organic reaction to some natural stimulus like light, the void, the feminine, etc.g The texts most suited to analysis will be those in which general History and personal history (understanding, of course, that the latter is, in fact, a matter of general History) are not absolutely merged. Also it will be easier to bring verbal critique to bear on so-called lyric works. This notion must be emptied of its classical content to receive an entirely formal one. Between Lautréamont and Voltaire, it is not subject matter that sets them in opposition; it is above all verbal behavior. At the extreme, one is all biophysical, the other all historical. And if the first is more available to an immediate rhetorical critique, that is because the personal automatisms there are more numerous, while for the second, verbal adaptation, aiming simply at communication (the social stages of conversation need to be studied closely as well), is grounded in the general history of the language of the period. Resurrecting rhetoric may thus involve old scholastic notions like genre, language, style, etc., but understood in a certain spirit. It is not interesting, for example, to contrast the subject matters of political eloquence and noir fiction. And nevertheless, what an instructive distance there is between the processes of expression in someone like Félix Gouin and someone like Sade.h For the novelist, precise writing, that is to say, writing that was searching, writing that did not adapt automatically to ready-made situations, but intelligently created its own adaptations to new problems and was not content with purely automatic formulations; for the politician on the other hand, vague writing, that is to say, a weave of standard phrases arising spontaneously like an instinctive gesture, an unreasoning and almost animal adaptation to old problems. What constitutes the talent of the first is that, by not adapting through purely rhetorical automatisms, he can thereby adapt to a much greater number of situations; from his most primitive imperfection he draws a final superiority, which is precisely the superiority—not in the least moral, let it be understood—of man over animal. This apparent paradox, which is not now recognized, must be accepted: the precision, the securities of ready-made phrases, the very perfection of their play, represent an almost animal organization of language; and inversely, it is the instability of verbal adaptation that is the distinctive feature of exactitude. By which certain authors have been able to propose the anteriority of poetry over prose. Poetry, to the extent that historically it issues from strict formulations, is an entirely animal c
onstruction. Thus Valéry did not become a poet because he was interested in the origin of spoken ideas; he believed that in poetry the questions of verbal genetics could better be asked, and the mechanisms of formulation better grasped, which he sensed to be the very mechanisms of thought. (It would be strange to rediscover the constraint of History in what Valéry made into beautiful poetry.) Everything comes back to poetry, rarely so experimental, and conveys through the means of rhetoric a nostalgia for animality (which poets call innocence), by which man would be released from thought, that is to say, from adapting beyond verbal automatisms. This is not the place to wonder if all poetici (in the loose and not the normative sense of the word) awakening does not correspond to a general refusal of responsibility and does not flourish especially in periods when a given social group, either tormented and disgusted or alternatively content with the image of its idleness or misfortune, seeks to justify this situation through a sort of verbal fatalism and return to the original conditions of language.j (Here we come back to the modern myth of the poetic childhood.)

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  While awaiting the developments of a precise psychological science, the first tool of rhetorical criticism is the statistical method. We recognize the barbarism involved in listing the accidents of language for a given writer, and that nothing could appear to be further removed from the spirit of refinement, the customary, glorious tool of literary criticism. And nevertheless rhetoric must use statistical information. If a rhetorical figure occurs twenty times or more in the work of a writer, it must signify something important; thus we must go through the numbers. Of course this detailed, often useless research, primarily involving limited observations and uncertain results, cannot be the work of a single individual. Here we must overcome the stubborn prejudice that holds literary criticism to be the individual activity par excellence. In the parascientific operation that criticism must be, collective work is imperative. That would mean accepting a form of research that completely violates the strongest taboo in intellectual activity, the one requiring solitary effort, individual organization of the work, undivided glory for the results. Nevertheless, henceforth the scientific laboratory must fully correspond to the notion of institute and seminar. The Sorbonne must play a role here, because it alone can easily establish indispensable connections between the various sciences of language.

  Some day, with all possible delicacy, criticism will have to transform the problems of expression into problems of adaptation and in this way settle the question of genius. This involves a mindset, materials, and aid that have yet to appear. So why this effort, why revive rhetoric, why prolong the life of literary criticism at all? Well, simply for the sake of understanding. To understand is to create a kind of freedom, and that aim is not immaterial. The most subjective disciplines arising from the cultural practices and the art of a limited society, like aesthetics, psychology, or literary criticism, will eventually become part of the gradual synthesis of the sciences; and it is necessary for that to happen. At that time, exact knowledge of these matters will in itself create a kind of freedom, if it is true that freedom is born the day one recognizes a necessity. Thus we have the right to work toward a recognition of the necessity of poetics.

  It would be ridiculous to prescribe or predict what freedom would produce in this domain.k It is enough to know that it is on the level of language, of social language, that the fate of Belles Lettres will be played out in order to bring light into that taboo world of verbal creation,l even if this must contribute to the death of all that we now call literature.

  Two Romanian Texts by Roland Barthes

  Roland Barthes arrived in Bucharest in November 1947 as an assistant librarian. He soon began teaching there, and then when the Institut Français closed in November 1948 and following the departure of his friend Philippe Rebeyrol in November 1948, he became a cultural attaché. He returned to Paris in September 1949. Two documents attest to this time. The first is from a lecture on French song, “Popular Songs of Paris Today,” probably written in 1948; the second is the report Barthes sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs just before his departure in July 1949.

  Popular Songs of Paris Today

  In 1948, Barthes gave many lectures for the “general public,” a francophone audience that gathered on Saturday afternoons in the main hall of the Institut Français at 77 Boulevard Dacia in Bucharest. They covered such topics as the French tune, Ravel, Pelléas et Mélisande.… Among these lectures was one on the French song, which addressed Charles Trenet, Yves Montand, and especially Edith Piaf; it is now part of the Roland Barthes collection at the BNF. Barthes would later recall his admiration for Piaf in Fragments d’un discours amoureux, citing “Mylord.”110

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  […]

  Music for a class that lives in a special environment: the city. Hence daily encounters, constant pressure of other classes: the boundaries not always very clear. Pressure from the petite bourgeoisie or the underclass: hence a composite style. No barrier against a certain potential vulgarity. This is not pure music. It cannot be. Example: that music for the poor often originates in chic, expensive cabarets: proletariat elements, rise or fall in class through money but not through taste.

  Proletariat: a fluid class with regard to its content. It is, by definition, the class without property; hence, migrations, dispersions, rises, falls. Brownian movement of the working population of the great urban areas (as opposed to rural farmworkers); hence the fragility of the repertoire. Creation of a special element: a kind of popular mode, rapid, very pronounced; outburst whose future is sometimes hard to predict from its beginnings.

  Hence the special role of the performer: the star. Role of a medium, magic role; she reveals the music.

  Also role as object of transference, the individual, humble, poor, powerless, sees herself in the image of the star: glorious, rich, omnipotent; the ugly feel beautifully alive, the lovesick imagine they are happy, etc. Through the great popular star, music becomes “the heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless world.”111

  Role of the star: total.

  Looks + voice + art + poem + music.

  Urban folklore is strongly centralized: Paris.

  a. Specificity of Paris as urban complex: the height of luxury, the strongest commerce, the intellectual pinnacle, plus the factory belts. Very strong attraction, special conditions: the poor are in frequent and obvious contact with outward signs of luxury, wealth, power, happiness.