SOURCE: Roger, Phillippe. “Barthes with Marx.” In Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, pp. 174-86. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Roger examines Barthes' involvement with theater and Marxism in the 1950s.]

For a long time, French grade crossings have greeted road travelers with this warning: Attention! Un train peut en cacher un autre. (Caution! One train can hide another approaching train.) It is no less true of titles, and mine might well hide another. In fact, the first draft of this chapter announced “Barthes and Marx.” No matter how slight, the distortion had me worried; somehow, it sounded too much like David and Goliath. Thanks to Jean-Michael Rabaté's diligence, the original with has been restored, only to elicit new concerns that the chosen conjunction might be misleading. It is not my intention here to examine Marx's work as a possible source or influence on Barthes. Such a task would not only go against Barthes's constant caveats (“I do not believe in influences”); it would also prove embarrassingly disappointing. Of no greater interest would be an exhaustive recapitulation of Barthes's statements, qualified or not, in favor of Marx or Marxism: no posthumous Barthesian Pour Marx will emerge from these wanderings through Barthes's early writings. My with was and still is intended to draw attention to the very particular companionship of Barthes (who never was a Marxist fellow traveler sensu stricto) with a Marxism of his own. And I would like to explore the riddle of Barthes's relationship with Marxism in connection with theater, his absorbing passion for a decade. A rapture and a political gesture, Barthes's intellectual romance with theater had Marxism for its soundtrack and accompaniment. At the risk of overstretching the metaphor, I would like to describe Roland Barthes in the 1950s as accompanied by Marx, rather than following his teachings. Then my title should be read both ways: “Marx with Barthes” as well as “Barthes with Marx”—which is, after all, consistent with the English version of the same cautionary signal: Beware! Trains coming both ways.

DISCOVERING MARXISM, WITH A TWIST

There is nothing more misleading than an intellectual biography, except perhaps an intellectual autobiography. “At the time of the Armistice,” Barthes confided in 1971 for the benefit of Tel Quel readers, “I was a Sartrian and a Marxist”—a statement to be taken with some caution.¹ Edgar Morin, who knew Barthes in the 1950s and remained a lifelong friend, adds more than a nuance, suggesting that Barthes was then basically endorsing the “Marxist Vulgate” typical of those intellectuals who had perhaps read only a few pages of Marx, and even more plausibly only a few pages of Sartre.² However, one may agree with Barthes (vintage 1971) on one thing: before 1945 he was neither a Marxist nor a Sartrian. There is no hint of any interest or even awareness of Marxism in his early contributions to Existences (1942-44). Before the war, Barthes was certainly not completely apolitical: he took part in a small antifascist student group and welcomed the 1936 Popular Front. But his political involvement remained minimal and his knowledge of Marxism less than minimal. In this respect, Barthes did not differ from the intellectual generation of would-be Normaliens described by Jean-François Sirinelli.³

We have no reason, on the other hand, to suspect Barthes's account of his introduction to Marxism late in 1944 through his new friend Georges Fournié, a fellow patient in Switzerland. Fournié, who like Barthes suffered from tuberculosis, had a working-class background and a very different personal history: while still a very young man, he fought in the Spanish civil war. He was a convinced and apparently convincing Marxist. He was also a Trotskyite, a circumstance of particular importance that allowed Barthes to learn of Marxism through a “dissident,” a word used at the time for Marxist opponents to Stalinism. Back in Paris, it was through Fournié that Barthes became acquainted with the man who “gave him a start”: Maurice Nadeau. Barthes's intellectual closeness to Edgar Morin, who was expelled from the French Communist Party in 1951, has already been mentioned. For Barthes, Fournié, Nadeau, Morin, and Claude Bourdet, the late 1940s were a time of companionship. Barthes shared the excitement of postwar literary and political journalism in Combat or Les Lettres Nouvelles with these brilliant young men. They also shared a vocabulary. In an article published by Combat in June 1951, Barthes referred explicitly and sympathetically to the “dissidents”—meaning the anti-Stalinist, Marxist militants. Commenting on a book by Roger Caillois, Description du marxisme, which he found irritating, he sided with those “numerous dissidents, whose individual destiny is still today fecundated by Marxism” and who cannot afford to regard Moscow-style Marxism as a “scandal” (Caillois's word) because they experience it as a “tragedy.”⁴ Even though Barthes was later acquainted with more orthodox Marxists, particularly within the context of the journal Théàtre Populaire, it is important to underline the peculiar way in which he first had access to Marxism before trying to elucidate his somehow perplexing relationship with Marxist politics or theory.

By tracing his professed Marxism as far back as 1945 (or even 1940) in the Tel Quel interview, was Barthes antedating it for the edification of his highly politicized interlocutors?⁵ Whatever his reasons, chronology here gives away a clue. On the whole, before 1950-51, Barthes's writings offer few Marxist references; when they do, as in some of the Combat articles that eventually became Writing Degree Zero, ambiguity prevails. In these short essays, and even more so in the book version, scattered references to the division of classes are permanently recoded in a very different language, a language of yearning for a “reconciled world” that strongly evokes Blanchot's “communauté impossible.” After 1960, on the other hand, whenever Barthes mentions Marxism, it is clearly from an outsider's viewpoint. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, a chronological chart of his intellectual life indicates that the “intertext” named after Marx, Brecht, and Sartre comes to an end after Mythologies (1957) and before Elements of Semiology (1965). In fact, Barthes's dissociation from Marxism is obvious in his work by 1959-60. As I said before, Roland Barthes had a tendency to overstretch his own “Marxist” period. By reducing it to the years 1950-60, I do not mean to deflate its importance but to emphasize the temporal connection between Barthes's active interest in Marxism and his passion prédominante: his extraordinary infatuation with theater. Marxism and theater: these two intellectual attachments have the same life span in Barthes's career. There is nothing accidental in that coincidence.

THE CLIMAX OF 1955

This is not to say that Barthes was not active in other fields, present on other battlefields. To illustrate his attitude during 1950-60, I will briefly evoke the climatic year of 1955, before coming back to Marx, Brecht, and the question of theater. Three distinct episodes make 1955 especially significant.

First there was Barthes's bitter, final exchange with Albert Camus. I have previously analyzed that quarrel in some detail⁶ and here give only a sketchy reminder of its reasons and implications. An enthusiastic commentator of L'Etranger in 1942 and again in 1947, Barthes wrote a negative review of La Peste in January 1955. The major flaw of the novel in Barthes's view was a symbolism that betrayed Camus's proclaimed intention to depict the reality of anti-Nazi resistance throughout Europe; it was the substitution of a vague and shallow humanism for a much-needed political and historical solidarity. Camus, in his brief answer, displayed his polemical crafts: how could Barthes, who had liked L'Etranger so much, deplore such a lack of “solidarity” when it was so clear that La Peste bade farewell to the loneliness of L'Etranger and opened the way to collective answers to evil in the city? The reason why he, Camus, had chosen symbolism to make his political statement was very simple: he did not believe in “realism in art.” If Barthes, on the other hand, found the morality of La Peste “insuffisante,” could he please tell what other, better “morale” would satisfy him? Thus cornered, Barthes took the plunge: he, Barthes, did believe in “réalisme en art,” more precisely in an “art littéral” that would not obliterate the object under the metaphor; and he, Barthes, was indeed speaking in the name of “historical materialism.”

Barthes had thus burned his vessels in April. Two months later, an article by Jean Guérin in Nouvelle NRF started a new conflagration. Quoting excerpts from Mythologies, which since 1951 had appeared in Esprit and Les Lettres Nouvelles, Jean Guérin was pressing Barthes for an answer: was he a Marxist, and if so, why did he not say so in the first place? He was met with a brutal rebuff: “What difference could it make to Monsieur Guérin?” Barthes answered in the summer issue of the Lettres Nouvelles: “… that kind of question is normally of no interest to anybody but the McCarthyists.” An angry Barthes went on, suggesting that Monsieur Guérin “go and read Marx and decide for himself,” adding that “one is not a Marxist by immersion, initiation or declaration” and that his own admission of Marxism would be both irrelevant and arrogant, inasmuch as “that doctrine [Marxism] is very demanding on its partisans.”⁷

Interestingly, Barthes's answer duplicated the speech strategy adopted by presumed communists in the United States during the McCarthy era. But its transposition to a distinctly different context was not without irony. In previous years, the French Communist Party had indeed been subjected to some police intimidation: in 1952 its leader, Jacques Duclos, had been briefly arrested on a conspiracy charge, rallying support from Jean-Paul Sartre; in 1953 the communist novelist and journalist André Stil (whose style Barthes derided the same year in Writing Degree Zero) had been jailed for his graphic depiction of police violence against strikers. But in 1955 the heat was off. Barthes, on the other hand, was not answering any special committee on un-French activities: his self-styled prosecutor in the Nouvelle NRF, writing under the alias of Jean Guérin, was none other than Jean Paulhan, a prominent figure on the literary scene, an éminence grise at Gallimard—but hardly the French counterpart to Senator McCarthy.

Before the end of 1955, Barthes was fighting still another battle: this time on the theatrical front, to defend Nekrassov, Sartre's satirical play on media manipulation in Western capitalist countries. Nekrassov is a farce about a crook passing for a defector from the Soviet Union, with the active complicity of rightist politicians and cynical journalists. Such a topic, in the midst of the Cold War, was sure to be a hotbed of controversy. With very few exceptions, the press (including left-wing Françoise Giroud) knocked down the play as silly, “invraisemblable,” and a shallow piece of pro-Moscow propaganda. Barthes, on the contrary, vehemently defended Nekrassov as both witty (as witty “as Beaumarchais”) and relevant. He accused the press of reacting in selfish self-defense. Finally, he did more than hint at the accuracy of the fabrication charge central to the plot.

Now, only a few years after the “affaire Kravchenko,” such a defense would inevitably raise questions. Kravchenko, a defector from the Soviet Union, had been constantly portrayed as an impostor by the communist press and his book, I Chose Freedom, denounced as a hoax. In France, the communist campaign had been a success, and Kravchenko's credibility was shaken, if not destroyed, in sectors of the opinion far beyond communist hard-liners. While Sartre's Nekrassov, as a play, was not as mediocre as the Parisian critique made it sound, it certainly seemed to give a belated blessing to the disinformation campaign led by the French Communist Party. It suggested, in retrospect, that Kravchenko was no more “real” than the fictitious Nekrassov, a question Barthes addressed in a bizarre, distorted way, as if the reality of Kravchenko were only a matter of literary doctrine. The press having declared the central character in the play to be “invraisemblable,” Barthes was quick to return the favor. “The bourgeoisie always had a very tyrannical as well as discriminating notion of reality: the real is what the bourgeoisie sees, not what is actually there; the real is whatever can be directly related to its sole interests: Kravchenko was real, Nekrassov is not.”⁸ Witty as it was, Sartre's play participated in the general denial among the French left of whatever painful truth from the East could “désespérer Billancourt.”⁹

The three episodes of 1955 encapsulate the three facets of Barthes's concerns at the time and illuminate his ideological radicalization during the 1950s. Politically, his choices were unambiguous. He broke with a more and more isolated Camus—isolated because of his unwillingness to support the terrorist activity of the Algerian National Liberation Front. He split with Paulhan and the notoriously anticommunist Nouvelle NRF. Finally, he rose in defense of a battered Sartre who had himself rallied in support of the harassed French Communist Party three years earlier, in 1952.

Even more revealing is the intellectual coherence of the three episodes. Barthes turned away from Camus because of what he saw as an aesthetic as well as a political betrayal. “A modern chef-d'oeuvre is impossible,” he had warned in Writing Degree Zero two years before, but Camus would not listen. At best, what could be done by the modern writer, according to Barthes, was to inscribe the impossibility of a “reconciled,” homogenous world: “white writing” was the name and the mark of that inscription. But Camus insisted on the legitimacy of a moral-political statement made through a very conventional fictional form, the novel as “chronicle.” Barthes's brutal dissociation from Camus's works, thus, is not only indicative of a more militant political stand; it is also indicative of Barthes's conviction in the 1950s that fiction writing was not the appropriate answer to what he called, with remarkable insistence, “l'évidence de la dure altérité des classes” (1952), “la dure sécession des classes sociales” (1954), or “le durcissement général de la situation historique” (1956).¹⁰

Narrative fiction had become a sideshow for Roland Barthes in 1955. The “historical situation” called for something else: a “social critique” that would systematically unmask bourgeois ideology, hence the importance given by Barthes to his petites mythologies. On a larger scale, it called for a collective form of art and communication capable not only of exposing bourgeois ideology but of tying together all those who “suffer and stifle under the bourgeois evil.”¹¹ This form and art is theater.

STAGING POLITICS

Roland Barthes's involvement with theater is by far the most important aspect of his intellectual life in the 1950s as well as the most pleasurable, the most passionate. Theater for Barthes is no less engaging than engagé. For about ten years, he happily devoted himself (in Théâtre Populaire and other media) to the transmutation of theater in France. Here again 1955 was a strong moment in this quest, the year of a much-debated special issue of Théâtre Populaire on Brecht. But it is clear that Barthes's passion for the stage was overwhelming during the entire decade, ending brutally—as passions should—in 1960. After 1961 Barthes dropped the curtain, ceasing to write on theater, even ceasing altogether to go to the theater.

Barthes's relationship with the stage has been little studied; his theatrical reviews and editorials were not easily available until the 1993 publication of the first volume of his complete works. This may explain in part the common misperception of Barthes as a sole and dogmatic supporter of Brechtian theater. There is no denying the admiration Barthes felt for Brecht; he himself has spoken of his éblouissement when confronted for the first time (in 1954) with Brecht as performed by the Berliner Ensemble. But it is no less important to insist on the complex, far-ranging vision that Barthes entertained about theater—a vision that was his central projet, in the Sartrian sense of the word, during the 1950s.

Clearly, Barthes's writings on the theater constitute a coherent body of “interventions,” which he intended to republish after revision. Reading them today, one is struck by their scope. To be sure, Barthes deals at length with Brecht and the diffusion of the Brechtian repertoire in France. But he is no less interested in other “revolutionary” attempts, such as Vinaver's in Aujourd'hui ou les coréens. He is no less concerned with the actors than the texts, no less with the classics than the avant-garde—a notion he often analyzes and criticizes. He does not content himself with the Parisian stage; he also writes in support of provincial endeavors, like Planchon's in Lyons; he attends and reviews amateur theatrical sessions organized in the suburbs by the Ligue de l'Enseignement. A severe, unbending critic of the productions, he also devotes many pages to criticizing the critique. In short, he leaves aside no aspect of theater, from program to costumes and makeup: “make-up,” he writes in 1955, “ultimately is part of the same revolutionary struggle as the text.”¹² Barthes's vision encompasses new texts as well as new acting, new staging and, most of all, a new sociology of theatergoers. For the new theatricality he advocates implies and requires a new sociability, paving the way to a renewed citizenry. In this global assessment, Brecht, exemplifying a theater “at the height of our history,” is one—but only one—important answer.

Moreover, Barthes's use of Brecht is quite personal, “dissident,” so to speak. It has often been said that Barthes's personal brand of Marxism was “Brechtism.” Less commented on has been Barthes's paradoxical use of Brecht to distance himself not only from official Marxism but also from the concept of history central to Marx's thought.

“One knows that Brecht was a Marxist,” Barthes wrote, tongue in cheek, in 1957, “but it is certain that Brecht's theater, which owes so much to Marxism […] does not directly realize the Marxian idea of an historical theater.”¹³ Barthes is not content to reassert humorously the preeminence over and autonomy vis-à-vis the political theory of Brecht's works, writing that “it is fair to say also that Marxism owes a lot to Brecht.” He devotes the larger part of this important article to demonstrating that Brecht, far from accomplishing Marx's ideal type of historical theater (as expressed in letters to Lassalle on the play Franz von Sickingen), did not even “borrow from Marx his conception of History.” For Marx and Engels, according to Barthes, “theater must give an accurate, complete account of historical reality at its very roots”—an exhaustive, didactic description of the characters' class status. Barthes disagrees, paradoxically using Brecht as an authority against Marx. “One should not conceive of History as a mere type of causality, like the one Marx is asking for, or the one which is elsewhere [in repertoire historical dramas] caused to disappear under the guise of historical scenery. In reality, and especially in Brecht [emphasis added], History is a general category. […] Brecht does not make History into an object, however tyrannical, but into une exigence générale de la pensée” (754).

The strange formulation “and especially in Brecht” is revealing. In these pages, Brecht is being used by Barthes, not only to chastise and reform the French stage and not only as a dialectical weapon against both the bourgeois “theater of participation” and “the progressive theater” of “predication.” Brecht is also used to construct a notion of history where “historical materialism” would not be denied but kept at a convenient distance from the practitioner and the observer. Brecht thus becomes both an ally and an alibi for that “idea of History” Barthes had already sketched in the 1951 review of Caillois's Description du marxisme. In that article, Barthes first made clear his acquiescence in the concept of class struggle, only to develop, in the following paragraphs, an original concept of history as “inalienable and explainable” at the same time: “History is inalienable and nevertheless explainable; such is the dilemma. Marx seems to have seen it well: class struggle, for instance, is not an analogy, but an organizing principle, which does not hurt the nonnegotiable content of each of its episodes.”¹⁴ Barthes in 1951 “derived” from Marx exactly what he later gave Brecht credit for: his own notion of history as “principe organisateur” or “catégorie générale.” In its Barthesian version, historical materialism, like Epicurus's gods, is somewhere out there—but in such a distant empyrean that the “inalienable character of every historical fact, every historical man”¹⁵ can be preserved. The first, but not the last of Barthes's détournements, Brecht would be enrolled under the banner of Barthes's very particular, post-Epicurian and prestructural breed of Marxism.

Returning to Barthes's militant attitude toward theater, one is confronted with a second paradox. Through his eulogy of the Brechtian theater, Barthes's crusade revives a “mythology” deeply embedded in French culture since the eighteenth century: the notion of the stage as a new pulpit and of the actor as “lay preacher”—the “prédicateur laïc,” in Diderot's words. His own warnings against a “preaching,” progressive theater notwithstanding, Barthes did not hesitate to draw an explicit parallel between Brecht and Diderot, who “have so many traits in common,” nor did he shy away from comparing the “tableau brechtien” to Greuze's paintings,¹⁶ a rather unexpected tribute, all the more disconcerting for Barthes's general lack of interest in French Enlightenment writers. Barthes does not bother to elaborate on the “many common traits” that would justify his comparison. One reason might be that his parallel does not so much aim at any specific analogies between Diderot's dramaturgy and the “Brechtian revolution” as it points to their broader concern with redefining theater in civic terms. By associating Diderot and Brecht, Barthes seems to be confessing his belief, shared in the past by the philosophes, in the enlightening powers of theater and its capacity to help shape a new morality and define a new social cohesion. Describing theater in 1954 as an “important civic problem” and a “thoroughly national question”¹⁷ in which the state must participate (not to control the content, of course, but to subsidize low-price theater seats in Paris as well as the provinces), Barthes repeats claims and demands that were Voltaire's, d'Alembert's and Diderot's—not Marx's. Denouncing the bourgeois theater and its expensive seats; smearing the indifferent, narcissistic, snobbish audiences; and accusing the locale itself, “the stage closed like an alcove or a police chamber, where the audience is a passive voyeur,”¹⁸ Barthes suddenly sounds as if he were rewriting Rousseau's Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles.

Theater has a “mission”: Barthes does not dodge the ideologically laden word, “the majesty of which should not scare us”—although he does italicize it.¹⁹ In the eighteenth-century French tradition of theater-bashing in the name of theater as it should be, Barthes echoes the philosophes' call for a new civic theater capable of the same political effects as the “popular” theaters of the past. If successful, he insists, a Brechtian theater would be the modern equivalent of the ancient Greek or Elizabethan stage: “moral,” “bouleversant,” and “civiquement justifié.”²⁰ Neither experimental nor avant-garde, such a regenerated theater would not content itself to become a token of modernity in an unchanged landscape. It would have to be part of a global process, implying not only drastic conceptual changes in acting and staging (like the wide-open wind-beaten stage in Avignon) but also and more importantly a sociological shake-up of audiences drawn from workers' unions and local cultural associations. This emphasis on sociology is one of the salient features of Barthes's approach to theater in the 1950s, which led him from a rather skeptical mood toward the Théâtre National Populaire (which he declared in 1953 “populaire plus par ses intentions que par sa sociologie”²¹) to an ever more optimistic perception of a renewed medium with enlarged audiences. Only one year later, he wrote that Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire, was already a revolutionary phenomenon, be it only because of its “ampleur sociologique.”²²

The sociological argument made by Barthes is at the core of his passionate support for stage innovators of the 1950s. It also plays a key role in Barthes's choice to “favor” theater over fictional narratives. Always fond of “binarisme” as an investigative tool, Barthes did not cease for a decade to contrast theater and the novel, in terms of reception and outreach. In an article titled “Petite sociologie du roman français,” Barthes insisted on the “division of audiences” typical of the novel, thus concluding, “le roman ne va jamais trouver que son public.”²³ Published in 1955, such a depiction of the novel as an alienated genre strictly reproducing the “cloisonnements” of French society takes its full paradigmatic value when confronted with Barthes's descriptions of theater audiences as (at least potentially) social melting pots. Sociological evidence concurred with the formal analysis developed in Writing Degree Zero to dismiss the novel as an irremediably “compromised” form, whereas a “theater of liberation”²⁴ is possible here and now.

In the early 1950s, theater had thus become for Barthes what literature could not be. In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes had condemned modern literature to exposing only the impasse of a divided society and bearing testimony, through a degraded and compromised language, of its own impotency. Not so with theater. While no new language could be pure enough to quench the writer's thirst, the wind now blowing on the stage would relieve and revive those “Frenchmen like me [R.B.] stifling under the bourgeois evil.”²⁵ When literature could be no more than an “empty sign,” theater emerged in Barthes's provisional Weltanschauung as the greatest of expectations for mind and body and the collective body of society: for “theater is in advance emasculated if one does not crave it with one's entire body, and if that craving is not shared by an entire community.”²⁶

“Le théâtre est un acte total,”²⁷ Barthes wrote in 1953. It presents the viewer with “une évidence viscérale” [Barthes's italics] and with his or her own freedom: “in Mutter Courage, fatality is on the stage, freedom in the audience.”²⁸ Only theater can be, in the same span of time, the ideal battlefield of politics, the hedonistic arena of physical beauty, and the forum where morality and integrity are put to test: for each evening, on stage, “the impure theater, the theater of complacency, where the degrading themes of money and adultery are put to work,” wages war against “the pure theater, the strong theater where what is at stake is man, man at odds with himself, man in the city.”²⁹

A global experience by nature, a civic medium by tradition, theater and only theater, in Barthes's view, can bring together what bourgeois society has divided: art and politics, classes and languages. Hence Barthes's fascination—and his atypical militant rhetoric. Focusing on theater, Barthes for a decade ceased to be “only” a critic. Reshaping, redeeming French theater, he could feel he was part of that “acte total” and engaged in a praxis that would affect French society itself. If Brecht plays an important part in the Barthesian dramaturgy of theater as politics, it is less for the Marxist “lesson” inscribed in his plays than for the added critical and moral value given to Marxism. “Brecht's theater,” Barthes wrote significantly in 1956, “is in its major part, and precisely in its most intimate, subjective, psychoanalytical depth, an apocalyptic theater of demystification.”³⁰

As such, theater appealed to Barthes in the 1950s as a holier, more promising land than literature: while writers according to Writing Degree Zero must, like Moses, die without seeing Canaan or, like Orpheus, lose Eurydice when trying to see her, the stage was to be not only the ideal tribune dreamt of by the philosophes, but also the only “situation” where, in bourgeois society, a miraculous unveiling of truth could happily take place. In 1954 Barthes had praised Jean Vilar for the extraordinary achievement of his acting which, he argued, pointed out the “admirable sociabilité du language.”³¹ A few years later, he ceased expecting anything from either actors or directors, or even from Brecht himself. “Imagine,” said Barthes in a 1962 interview, “a mind like Brecht's confronted with life today; that mind would be paralysed by the diversity of life.”³² End game. Barthes's disaffection toward theater, as we said before, was brutal and total. But the disillusionment came neither from Brecht nor from the French stage at the end of the decade. I would suggest that it came from the very success of a popular, political, even civic theater in the 1960s—a success for which André Malraux and the ambitious cultural politics launched with de Gaulle's support after 1958, resulting in the creation of dozens of maisons de la culture and centres dramatiques in almost every major French city, must be credited. It was a bitter paradox for Barthes to see the despised “régime du Général” realize (or “recuperate”) a shared, militant dream of civic regeneration through theater. Barthes's disenchantment with theater after 1960, his move toward other interventions on other signs, has a lot to do with what must have appeared as a misappropriation, but his disappointment would not have been so profound had he not invested theater with a mission he then declared impossible.

Notes

1. Roland Barthes, “Réponses,” Tel Quel 47 (Fall 1971): 92.

2. Quoted by Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), p. 153.

3. See Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle: Khâgneux et normaliens dans l'entre-deux guerres (Paris: Fayard, 1988).

4. “[P]our de nombreux dissidents, dont le marxisme continue de féconder le destin individuel, le dogmatisme moscovite n'est pas un scandale: il est une tragédie, au milieu de laquelle ils essaient pourtant de garder, comme le chœur antique, la conscience du malheur, le goût de l'espoir et la volonté de comprendre” (Combat, 21 June 1951; in OC1, p. 104).

5. In what sounds very much like a slip, Barthes in “Réponses” spoke of the Liberation as “l'Armistice.” To the classically phrased question, “At the time of the Liberation, where did you stand?” he answered substituting the term Armistice, normally used in French in reference to the June 1940 ceasefire, not the end of the World War II.

6. See Philippe Roger, Roland Barthes, roman (Paris: Grasset, 1986; Paris: Livre de Poche, 1991), part 4, chapter 4.

7. Roland Barthes, “Suis-je marxiste?” Lettres Nouvelles (July-August 1955); in OC1, p. 499.

8. “La bourgeoisie a toujours eu une idée très tyrannique mais très sélective de la réalité: est réel ce qu'elle voit, non ce qui est; est réel ce qui a un rapport immédiat avec ses seuls intérêts: Kravchenko était réel, Nekrassov ne l'est pas” (“Nekrassov juge de sa critique,” Théâtre Populaire 14 [July-August 1955]; in OC1, p. 504).

9. “Désespérons Billancourt!” exclaims Georges, alias Nekrassov, repeatedly at the end of the sixth tableau. The phrase “ne pas désespérer Billancourt” has taken a quasi-proverbial meaning in French: it is now used ironically to describe any attempt to keep the people unaware of a demoralizing truth.

10. In, respectively, L'Observateur, 27 November 1952; Théâtre Populaire 5 (January-February 1954), editorial; Théâtre Populaire 17 (March 1956), p. 90.

11. The phrase appears at the end of the Nekrassov article. Théâtre Populaire 14 (July-August 1955); in OC1, p. 506.

12. “[L]e maquillage est lui aussi un acte politique, sur lequel nous devons prendre parti, et qui, par l'infinie dialectique des effets et des causes, participe finalement du même combat révolutionnaire que le texte” (Tribune Etudiante, April 1955; in OC1, p. 482).

13. “Brecht, Marx et l'histoire,” Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, December 1957; in OC1, p. 754.

14. “L'Histoire est inaliénable et pourtant explicable; tel est le dilemme. Marx semble l'avoir bien vu: la lutte des classes, par exemple, n'est pas une analogie, mais un principe organisateur, qui n'attente en rien au contenu incessible de chacun de ses épisodes.” (“A propos d'une métaphore [Le marxisme est-il une église],” Esprit, November 1951; in OC1, p. 112).

15. “Tout fait historique, tout homme historique est inaliénable” (“Les Révolutions suivent-elles des lois?”) Combat, 20 July 1950; in OC1, p. 86.

16. Préface à B. Brecht, Mère Courage et ses enfants,” L'Arche, 1960; in OC1, p. 900 n. 1: “Si l'on veut bien faire abstraction du style et de la qualité, et en considérant seulement le mouvement idéologique (ce qui d'ailleurs ne laisse pas d'être arbitraire, car une œuvre d'art n'est réellement que la rencontre d'une histoire et d'une forme, c'est-à-dire d'une résistance à l'histoire), c'est plutôt à Greuze qu'il faudrait comparer le tableau brechtien, Greuze dont le théoricien, Diderot, a tant de point communs avec Brecht.” A dubious adequation, and a bizarre equation, where Barthes would be to Brecht what Diderot was to Greuze. Hence, Barthes = Diderot?

17. “La Question du théâtre populaire est une question franchement nationale,” Théâtre de France, t.IV, 1954; in OC1, p. 442.

18. “Pourquoi Brecht?” Tribune Etudiante, April 1955; in OC1, p. 481.

19. “Espoirs du théâtre populaire,” France-Observateur, 5 January 1956; in OC1, p. 530.

20. “Théâtre capital,” France-Observateur, 8 July 1954; in OC1, p. 419.

21. “Le Prince de Hombourg au T.N.P.,” Lettres Nouvelles, March 1953; in OC1, p. 208.

22. “Ce qui fait l'originalité de son action, c'est son ampleur sociologique. Vilar a su amorcer une véritable révolution dans les normes de consommation du théâtre […] Grâce à l'expérience de Vilar, le théâtre tend à devenir un grand loisir populaire, au même titre que le cinéma et le football” (Théâtre de France, t. IV, December 1954; in OC1, pp. 444-45).

23. “La société française d'aujourd'hui nous présente des publics de romans fortement personnalisés, mais aussi fortement cloisonnés, isolés les uns des autres, échangeant rarement leur rôle, essentiellement déterminés par la condition sociale de leurs participants […] En somme, le roman ne va jamais trouver que son public, c'est-à-dire un public qui lui ressemble, qui est avec lui dans un rapport étroit d'identité”; “Petite sociologie du roman français,” Documents, February 1955; in OC1, p. 469.

24. “Théâtre capital,” France-Observateur, 8 July 1954; in OC1, p. 419.

25. “Nekrassov juge de sa critique,” Théâtre Populaire 14 (July-August 1955); in OC1, p. 506.

26. “Le théâtre est à l'avance émasculé, si on ne l'attend pas de tout son corps, et si cette attente n'est pas partagée par toute une collectivité” (“Le Grand Robert,” Lettres Nouvelles, October 1954; in OC1, p. 436).

27. “L'Arlésienne du catholicisme,” Lettres Nouvelles, November 1953; in OC1, p. 238.

28. “Théâtre capital,” France-Observateur, 8 July 1954; in OC1, p. 420.

29. “Le théâtre impur, le théâtre complaisant, où l'on met en œuvre les thèmes dégradants de l'argent ou du cocuage […]”; “le théâtre pur, le théâtre fort, où ce qui est en cause est l'homme aux prises avec lui-même, l'homme dans la cité” (“Le théâtre populaire aujourd'hui,” in Théâtre de France, t.IV, dec. 1954; in OC1, p. 443).

30. “Le théâtre de Brecht est en majeure partie, et précisément dans son fond intime, subjectif, psychanalytique, un théâtre apocalyptique de la démystification” (“Note sur Aujourd'hui [de Vinaver],” Travail Théâtral, April 1956; in OC1, p. 542.

31. “Une tragédienne sans public,” France-Observateur, March 1954; in OC1, p. 410.

32. Le Figaro Littéraire, 13 October 1962; in OC1, p. 980.