Roland Barthes is an incomparable enlivener of the literary mind. He is as adventurous in the formulation of new principles for the understanding of literature as he is provocative in dispatching the old ones. To read him is to be led to think more intelligently and enjoyably about what literature is; about both the practice of writing and its function. He has renewed literary criticism in France, which is now a far more varied and practical discipline than it was, and is helping to renew it outside France as the translations of his work spread.

Barthes has not done this by constructing some definite theoretical position of his own vis-à-vis literature and then sticking to it stubbornly over the years. Quite the reverse; he is famous for his mobility, for the way in which he is constantly transcending old positions, and often in unexpected directions. Each new book that he publishes is very obviously a departure, not a consolidation of his earlier arguments. There is a consistency in Barthes, as I shall hope to bring out, but it is easy to lose sight of it when there is also so much attractive novelty. Barthes is determined to keep his mind moving, and not to allow his miscellaneous insights and projects for the interpretation of literary texts to harden conveniently into a doctrine. (p. 52)

[The] unusual preference for the plural and centrifugal, as against the singular and coherent, has come to mark Barthes's published work more and more strongly. It is not a fashionable belief—though more fashionable in these generally materialist times than it used to be—nor an altogether persuasive one; since whoever holds it as adamantly as Barthes does risks achieving definition by others as the champion of indefinacy. It is a belief intended by Barthes to contradict what he takes to be more orthodox beliefs in the matter of identity: a paradox, in the old sense of that word, meaning an opinion which runs counter to the accepted wisdom of the age. But paradox has always been Barthes's stock-in-trade. He has seen his vocation, from the outset of his life as a writer, as being antithetical: his arch enemy is the doxa, the prevailing view of things, which very often prevails to the extent that people are unaware it is only one of several possible alternative views. Barthes may not be able to destroy the doxa but he can lessen its authority by localizing it, by subjugating it to a paradox of his own. So given to paradox is he, indeed, that he is even capable of rounding on his own earlier opinions and denying them.

Barthes is only fully to be appreciated, then, as someone who set out to disrupt as profoundly as he could the orthodox views of literature he found in France when he was a young man. (p. 54)

Barthes's own first published book or essay, Writing Degree Zero (1953), was written in order to show what a modern, marxisant history of French literature might be like. It is an interesting book but hardly a successful one, partly because it is far too short to do the job Barthes was asking of it. It traces, summarily, the emergence and eventual break-up of an 'écriture bourgeoise', which is the description Barthes gives of what others would have called French Classicism. (p. 55)

As polemic Writing Degree Zero is an invigorating book and it at once gave Barthes, for all the Sartrean echoes to be heard in it, a distinctive place on the literary left. But it is not always an easy book to understand and some of the crucial concepts which Barthes introduces remain shadowy. This is the case with the term écriture, which does not, at this stage, mean at all what it has come to mean in Barthes's mature writings. In Writing Degree Zero he appears to use it where other writers would have used the term style; certainly he fails to establish what, apart from his own literary intuition, the criteria might be for distinguishing one écriture from another, and whether it is legitimate to group all French writers between the years 1650 and 1850 so neatly together as practitioners of the écriture bourgeoise. (p. 56)

Michelet par lui-même (1954) [is] an anthology of the writings of that remarkable, highly Romantic nineteenth-century historian, together with Barthes's idiosyncratic and ambitious commentary on them. Barthes opens with the warning that 'In this little book the reader will not find either a history of Michelet's ideas, or a history of his life, still less an explanation of one by the other.' This seemingly definitive isolation of the text from its author yet goes, in Barthes, with the conviction that a psychoanalytical interpretation of literature is extremely fruitful. But his Michelet shows how it is possible to psychoanalyse a text—uncover, that is, its obsessions, its most potent and persistent sexual imagery, its evasions, and so forth—without at the same time believing that you have psychoanalysed its author. Barthes respects the extreme ambiguity of the relationship between an author and what he writes. (p. 57)

In an essay of 1960 called 'Écrivains et écrivants' (reprinted in Critical Essays), Barthes made a dramatic qualitative distinction between two sorts of writer. The first, and lesser, sort is the écrivant, for whom language is the means to some extra-linguistic end. He is a transitive writer in that he has a direct object. He intends that whatever he writes should carry one meaning only, the meaning he himself wants to transmit to his readers. The écrivain is a nobler, more auspicious figure by far, 'priestly' where the écrivant is merely 'clerical', to use one of Barthes's own antitheses (and this resurrection of the old notion of the writer as someone akin to a priest is an indication of Barthes's own underlying romanticism). The écrivain writes intransitively in so far as he devotes his attention to the means—which is language—instead of the end, or the meaning. He is preoccupied by words not by the world…. (p. 65)

It is the écrivain who is of interest because he is, in Barthes's prophetic scheme, the writer of the future. The literary world may hardly be ready for him yet, even in avant-garde Paris, but his time will come—or so at least Barthes seems to promise. He is not, as one might at first think, a throwback to Romanticism and to that happily dilapidated critical edifice, the Ivory Tower. The écrivain is withdrawn but he is no dreamer; rather, he is a toiling language-worker whose isolation lasts only for as long as he is actually writing and who, far from washing his hands of the world, is its conscience, since his duty is to sound out his native language to the full.

The écrivain does not work from meanings, as the écrivant does, he works towards them. As Barthes likes to put it, meaning is 'postponed'. It is there, as it should be, when eventually we come to read what he has written: 'the écrivain conceives literature as an end, the world returns it to him as a means'. The world is ourselves and we read literature instrumentally, as if it were the work of an écrivant. We assume the process of signification has travelled from signified to signifier: the writer knew what he wanted to say, then he decided how exactly he should say it. We are upset if we are asked to believe the opposite, that an author had first decided how to say and only then discovered what 'it' was; this reversal of our habits seems degrading to the whole notion of authorship. But Barthes could claim that his version of how signification works is frequently true to the facts. It has the enormous merit of not positing, as the alternative version does, immaterial signifies which somehow exist in the writer's mind even before signifiers are found for them. (pp. 66-7)

Just as the intentions and activity of écrivain and écrivant are at variance, so are the goods they produce. The écrivain produces a Text, the écrivant only a Work. As before, it is the Text which matters, and as before the Text is still a hypothesis, a possibility for the future and at the same time a standard against which to measure the Works of the past and present. The Text is a sort of verbal carnival, in which language is manifestly out on parole from its humdrum daily tasks. The writer's language-work results in a linguistic spectacle, and the reader is required to enjoy that spectacle for its own sake rather than to look through language to the world. A Text comes, in fact, from consorting with the signifiers and letting the signifieds take care of themselves; it is the poetry of prose. (p. 69)

The Lover's Discourse [Fragments d'un discours amoureux] is a melancholy book to read because the state of being in love is presented by Barthes as a very painful one; but against the pain must be set the lover's perverse pleasure at finding himself trapped in a perfectly intractable situation. The very form that Barthes has given the book conspires against any idea of there being some teleological force at work that might be the light at the end of the lover's tunnel. The arrangement of its contents—of what Barthes calls the 'figures' of the lover's discourse—is alphabetical; which is the most impersonal arrangement of all. What Barthes has carefully avoided is any suggestion of a narrative element to the book, of an histoire d'amour; the form of the Discourse is as it is so as to 'discourage the temptation of meaning [sens]'.

And as with the love affair, so with the Text. Neither leads anywhere, both are charged uninterruptedly with an intense meaning. The lover finds himself, in another emphatic phrase from the Lover's Discourse, 'in the brazier of meaning', because of his compulsive need to interpret the ambiguous signs of the Loved One's behaviour. The lover is thus also a reader. But he is a reader of a particular kind, the kind that a Text, composed by a true écrivain, deserves. What he is attempting to do is to understand that Text from within, to re-produce it for himself. He is far too emotional, as someone in love, passively to settle for it as a mere representation of the Loved One.

The Text which the Loved One weaves counts, unless I am mistaken (Barthes himself makes no such connection), as a scriptible one, the scriptible being a Text so written as to make of its readers producers instead of consumers. They are scriptible, or 'writable', because the reader as it were re-writes them as he reads, having been induced to mimic in his own mind the process by which the Text came to be written in the first place. Texts are scriptible by definition; Works on the other hand, and that means all the literature we have experience of, are lisible, or 'readable'. We do not rewrite those, we simply read them; and read them moreover from start to finish, since Works are teleological, they move towards an appointed end. We proceed horizontally through a Work, but vertically, if that is possible, through a Text—the ultimate in Texts, I fancy, would be a single, infinitely meaningful word, which we could use as the dispensable cue for our own language-work. (pp. 70-1)

Barthes is a disappointing prophet, but he is prophetic only when he is especially anxious to undermine certain ideological principles, and to show that all principles are transient. His future—where the écrivains work at language and eventually inspire jouissance with their scriptible Texts—is comprehensible only as a stick with which he means to beat the present. And what Barthes appears to find most noxious in that present is its persistent belief in the integrity both of persons and of literary works. (Integrity here is to be taken in a philosophical sense: to mean one-ness.) Works and authors are commonly understood to be entities or wholes; as critical categories they imply essentialism. Barthes began, as we have seen, as an enemy of essentialism and he has remained one; and in his later writings his arguments against it have become both subtler and more complete. (pp. 72-3)

Barthes's own words in S/Z outnumber Balzac's by a good six or seven to one. This degree of unbalance, between text and commentary, is common in the study of poetry, exceedingly rare in the study of prose, for the reason not only that poetry is considered to be a more condensed use of language than prose, but also that, since it is not usually discursive, poetry can be chopped up ready for examination with less detriment to its continuity. As we know, the will to disintegration is unsleeping in Barthes, and his first act with Sarrasine is to divide it up into 561 lexies, or 'units of reading'. (p. 73)

But this ruthless dissolution of the text is only a start; the categories which Barthes introduces in order to conduct his analysis of it are even more destructive of its supposed unity. These are the five codes, which have become one of his most admired innovations. Each has a different responsibility: the Hermeneutic and Actional codes regulate the sequences of events in the story, the first being concerned with the narrative 'enigmas' which the story poses and eventually solves, the second quite straightforwardly with the successive stages into which a distinct action is divided; the Semic and Symbolic codes Barthes uses to catalogue the meanings of characters, situations, and events in the story, the Symbolic code being reserved for the various oppositions on which the narrative structure is founded; and the Referential code, finally, is held to codify all the many references which the story makes to a reality outside the text.

This last code is a controversial one because it is in a text's references to an extra-textual or historical reality that the practice of Realism is held mainly to lie. Barthes introduces the Referential code, provocatively, last of all, and asks it to take care of Sarrasine's numerous references to morality, psychology, history, and art. These references one might think were Balzac's own: those points in his story where he introduced his own thoughts and preferences and embedded his fiction solidly in the reality of his time. But not so, according to Barthes, who delights in proving how the arch-realist refers constantly not directly to life but to the commonplaces of the age, to the doxa. The 'real' turns out to be the 'already written'; any originality that might have been claimed for Balzac vanishes before the authority of the code. Balzac is not inventing, he is quoting; he is even accused at one point of 'spewing out stereotypes', a crime which Barthes could never forgive. More damagingly, he points out also how the verbal descriptions of people and places which are so supremely Realist and characteristically Balzacian, themselves originate in the techniques not of writing but of painting…. (p. 74)

The major injustice of which Barthes is guilty in S/Z is the glibness with which he invokes the accepted wisdom of Balzac's own time whenever the Referential code comes into play. Admittedly, Balzac is not famous for his moral or psychological acumen, but that does not mean that he had no insights of his own at all into contemporary human behaviour in France. In point of fact Barthes is referring Balzac's various judgements in Sarrasine to a corpus of 'stereotypes' which does not exist. Barthes cannot know, because no one can know, exactly where Balzac is referring to current notions of human psychology, let us say, and where he is hoping to amend those notions in order to bring them closer into line with what he believed to be the facts. When Balzac talks of 'the kind of frenzy which only disturbs us at that age when desire has something terrible and infernal about it', Barthes allots this dismissively to 'the psychology of age' as if it were unthinkable that it might be the fruit of observation or experience. Under his dispensation it is hard to see how the common stock of knowledge or belief could ever be modified.

Sarrasine is very much a Work and not a Text: it is lisible, not scriptible. Nevertheless, in S/Z Barthes manages to flood it with meanings. It has what he calls 'a limited plurality'. It is not, by the time he has finished analysing it, and distributing its different elements among his five codes, at all the unity that it was. Its continuity has been broken by the division into lexies: or rather its discontinuity has been exposed, since the continuity of a text is a deception. To undeceive us in this respect has been a most important part of Barthes's programme, because the continuum belongs in nature not in art. (pp. 75-6)

[Just] as the narrative of Sarrasine is irremediably broken up, so too is its author. The great aim of S/Z is to 'de-originate' the text, to demonstrate in what way it is a weaving together of many voices rather than the utterance of just one—that of Balzac. All texts, even those as thoroughly lisible as Sarrasine, give voice to a chorus (and the more cacophonous that chorus proves to be the better we should like it, if we are faithful Barthesians). S/Z bears out quite dazzlingly the structuralist premise that 'the rule is openly substituted for subjectivity, and technique for expression'…. There is no question of Balzac being thought of as 'expressing himself' in Sarrasine because that would be Idealism, which believes that the writer has a self independent of and preexisting what he writes and that he sets out to represent his self in language. That Barthes does not allow. For him a writer's 'self' is a convention of the text of which he is the author, a 'creature of paper' or else an 'effect of language'…. (p. 76)

The writer is thus no more than the grammatical subject, real or implied, of a piece of writing: the explicit or implicit 'I'. He is not a substantive presence to be located, as in the past, 'behind' the text. He has undergone a dissolution because he is to be found everywhere in what he writes. In a text 'the subject comes undone, as if a spider were to dissolve itself into its web'…. The writer therefore dwells in his text as a form; materially speaking, he is a personal pronoun. Much of his reality has had to be sacrificed because language is an objective, collective system which we can only use, never expropriate. The real 'I' is thus debarred from ever putting in an appearance…. When he turns to writing about himself, as in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes lives strictly up to his own rules and appears there in the third person, either as 'he' or as 'RB'. In the subsequent Lover's Discourse, on the other hand, which is not offered as an autobiographical work although there are self-evidently autobiographical moments in it, he chooses to write in the first person throughout. But this first person is that representative first person which philosophers like to use when they pause to instantiate some abstract argument ('I am sitting in my study. I see a chair. What is actually involved in my seeing a chair?'; and so forth). This is an impersonal, structural 'I', an empty form with which we can each identify. (pp. 76-7)

[There] is much of the outsider in Barthes, of the person who willingly alienates himself from the culture in which he lives the better to explain and at the same time to judge it. He has once or twice posed in his time as a 'scientist', bringing what are uncommonly sharp powers of analysis to bear on processes of signification but without revealing any moral or political attitude towards them. These have been the only dull or unsatisfactory moments of his literary career (I am thinking above all of the technical sections of Système de la mode (1967), Barthes's long semiotic study of fashion writing). Barthes is not a scientist but a moralist—anyone who has read A Lover's Discourse must recognize that.

I do not mean by that that he wants to impose a particular form of morality on other people, because nothing could be further from the truth: he is the patentee after all of a conception of writing which sees it ideally as an activity beyond Good and Evil. He is a moralist in the sense that moral passions and distinctions excite him, and he would like, as the French moralists of the seventeenth century did, to try and plot them on paper. His writings are diverse but underlying them is a philosophical consistency. Barthes is both a materialist in philosophy and an avowed hedonist, judging intellectual experiences, like experience in general, by the gratification they provide.

One of the lessons he has taught is that we have scant right to call our language our own, because it is a system to which we must surrender much of our individuality whenever we enter it. Whoever speaks or writes is, in his description, no more than 'the great empty envelope' around the words. Barthes, the author, may be only the name on an envelope, but no one in recent years has put the French language to richer, more original, or more intelligent use. (pp. 78-9)

John Sturrock, "Roland Barthes," in Structrualism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida, edited by John Sturrock (© Oxford University Press 1979; reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, pp. 52-80.