[Barthes] has powerful opponents at home, but I doubt whether there will be much raising of voices here, and the reason is not simply that we are insular. Although Barthes is famous for recondite meditations on the sign-structures not only of literature but of what you never thought had sign-structures, like menus, fashions and furniture, so qualifying as an adventurous structuralist, he rarely refers to any language except French, or to any literature except French. Thus in Writing Degree Zero there is a far-reaching discussion of the French preterite, a tense that now belongs to a written, not a spoken language, and which is treated as 'the corner-stone of Narration', an expression of an order and a euphoria peculiar to the novel; it redeemed time, saved meaning out of an existential mess; but now that we see it for what it is, a comfortable lie, the whole face of fiction is changed. And so on. What does not seem to occur to him is that there are languages, such as English, in which there is no such problem with the preterite, yet these also are languages in which novels are written, and in which there is also, presumably, a 'problematics of the novel'….

[In Writing Degree Zero], among the methodological convolutions, the reader will occasionally come upon a completely familiar notion, for example, that there was, around 1850, a major split in the European mind (French, actually) and in European history. As a consequence of historical developments classical literature then ceased to be possible, and henceforth The Writer (Malarmé sits for his portrait) became 'the incarnation of a tragic awareness'. Writing, which had been a way of communicating thoughts and forms, now became 'a language having a body'—not a medium, but something that grew in concretion as bourgeois consciousness disintegrated. Now we approach the maximum alienation, and a literature totally silent, divorced from the society, existing in absence.

The notion of a literature so reduced to silence is already fashionable, and Barthes can only give us a new way of talking about it if we want to. He rarely says much, here, about individual books or authors, and seems to be a fluent meta-critic rather than a useful critic, though of course it must be hard for someone who thinks such communication impossible to mediate between a silent literature and any honest men there may be left to read it.