When I first ran through [Roland Barthes'] commentaries on [Racine's] tragedies, published on the occasion of a new edition of Racine, I did not take them very seriously. Somewhat baffled, and more scandalized than amused, I supposed them to be a piece of hackwork in the performance of which the writer had diverted himself, with his usual talent, by entering the realm of the venturesome and the preposterous. But when in 1963 these studies were collected in a volume with other writings [On Racine (Sur Racine)] which threw light on them, and when in 1964 another volume offered further details of doctrine and method, I realized my error. Without any doubt this was a coherent undertaking the importance of which was not to be underestimated; the reception of it by a certain segment of the public made that perfectly clear. Indeed, it is one of the most significant examples in the last ten years of the effort, so praiseworthy in itself, to develop a new criticism…. (pp. 1-2)

Mr. Barthes' assertions most often belong to two registers. Some of them (to write somewhat after his own manner) are of a vaticinal order; having no explicatory value, generally not very clear and slightly unusual, these oracular revelations must be accepted such as they are by the faithful. Others, accompanied by reasons and examples, are subject to control; unfortunately, we discover that they rest on astonishingly weak foundations.

What adds to the uneasiness of the reader is the fact that these ruinous structures are situated in an ambiguous and contradictory universe. From the very first, indeed, the critic introduces his study by announcing that "its language is somewhat psychoanalytical," though, he adds immediately, "the treatment [of the subject] is hardly so at all."… Thus he deliberately severs this language from its meaning. And to use the language of a discipline without practicing that discipline is to reduce it to a collection of similes and metaphors. For this reason, and for several others, Mr. Barthes, condemned never to speak of things, is dedicated (it must already have become evident) to a kind of metaphorical criticism—with all the indistinctness that that admits of, the relation between the object and the metaphor which qualifies it being multiple and blurred. (p. 6)

[It is] hard to grasp the exact nature of sexuality in this indefinite kind of psychoanalysis. Obsessive, unbridled, cynical, it nevertheless interposes itself everywhere, and one must reread Racine in order to be persuaded that his characters are different, after all, from D. H. Lawrence's…. It is clear that in the violent drama of Racine, Mr. Barthes has decided to find unbridled sexuality. No one can stop him, nor could they if he wished to find the fundamental role of the Father in a comedy by Marivaux or a drama by Hugo.

For he is above all a man of system. What system, it is not always easy to see; and the uncertainty of his position with regard to psychoanalysis has just been noted. But, no matter. What fascinates him in a system is the spirit of system. "The Racinian Eros expresses itself only through a recital, a narrative. Imagination is always retrospective, and memory always has the distinctness of an image."… Always, only: the truths of which the critic makes himself the prophet are absolute, universal, definitive. One of the most annoying aspects of this book is the intellectual smugness of its author: he fearlessly decides, settles, affirms. Mystery itself has no mystery for him; he penetrates everything, explains everything, knows everything. The only thing that escapes him is nuance. And it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise, given the nature of his undertaking. For he is really concerned with "a kind of Racinian anthropology" which, taking up its station "in Racine's tragic world," describes that world's "population (which may be readily abstracted under the concept Homo racinianus)."… Everything is in this discreet parenthesis. Mr. Barthes gives himself over indeed to a job of abstraction. That is to say, in accordance with his needs (and with intellectual contortions which certainly do not give an impression of ease), he abstracts from the tragedies those elements which he thinks ought, when suitably adjusted, to enter into his prefabricated concept of Homo racinianus. For my part, I have never believed in the existence of such an animal—chimerical in every sense of the word. And the effort being examined here is certainly not one to make me change my mind. Each one of the elements composing this concept ought to be capable of application to all the tragedies; yet the sad truth is that none of the elements, at the outside, concerns more than two or three of them…. [The form Mr. Barthes'] thought habitually takes is that of aberrant extrapolation; one or two observations … are all that he asks as the basis of a generalization…. This method of thundering generalization is repeated too often with evidence that verges on caricature. (pp. 8-12)

One wonders if this critic does not rely upon some private inspiration, some criterion of truth unknown to the common run of mortals, in advancing, as he does in so intemperate a manner, such inaccurate, contestable, or preposterous ideas. Take Bajazet. The Seraglio is "a feminine or eunuchoid habitat."… Eunuchoid? Whatever has the form of an egg is ovoid. The deltoid has the form of a delta. (p. 14)

A eunuchoid habitat, a desexualized place, the asexuality of Achmet—the pathological character of such language has already struck its readers, and this problem cannot be ignored. The vocabulary of this book has been borrowed from biology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and so on, and it includes in addition a large number of neologisms made, not without a certain cleverness, in the image of those to be found in these various disciplines…. [The function of Mr. Barthes' jargon], artless perhaps but effective, is—as we have already seen a dozen times—to give "scientific" prestige to absurdities, to dress up commonplaces, to hide (rather unsuccessfully) the indecision of his thought. With its obscure terms, which remain undefined and are used—without warning—in different senses, with its elastic notions and its too fluid concepts, this jargon is nothing but the instrument of a "show-off" kind of criticism. (pp. 15-16)

[It] is not the obscurity of Mr. Barthes' jargon that I am finding fault with; with a little practice in philosophy and a smattering of Greek, one can manage to understand it. What is annoying for the reader is that his effort is poorly rewarded; the critic's language keeps posing little riddles to be answered by an error, an approximation, or a platitude…. His jargon is useless, and it is pretentious in promising a rigor that his thought belies. I am not troubled by philosophy, any more than by the techniques of research and exposition and the language they often involve. As I see it, philosophy is indistinguishable from thought itself, and anyone who thinks philosophizes, whether he is conscious of doing so or not. I am grateful to Mr. Barthes for trying to see problems in their broadest dimension. As for philosophy, unfortunately, he seems too often to forget its matter and to preserve nothing but its vocabulary and mechanics. It is the opposite that ought to be done.

Such a book is really shocking. For clearly we are not here faced with a mere matter of formal logic or a method of exposition; what is in question is reality itself. This work disregards the elementary rules of scientific, or quite simply of articulate, thought. On almost every page, in the frenzy of its headlong systemizing, the part is given for the whole, an instance or two for the universal, the hypothetical for the categorical; the law of contradiction is flouted; accident is taken for essence, chance for law. And all this confusion is couched in a kind of language the ostensible precision of which is a mirage. Such an excess of satisfied inconsistency, I must confess, "astonishes and dismays me." (pp. 17-18)

And yet it is surely in Mr. Barthes' critical theory—even if he does not always put it into practice—that we shall manage to find an explanation, if it exists, of the singular character of his examination of Racine. Indeed, as we saw at the beginning of the present study, he asserts that it is impossible to "tell the truth about Racine." "Racine lends himself to several languages: psychoanalytic, existential, tragic, psychological …; none is innocent."… Objectivity is inconceivable in criticism. That fact results from the peculiar function of literature, which is to institutionalize subjectivity (which I am rather inclined to admit). It follows from that, continues Mr. Barthes (but I cannot under any circumstances accept his conclusion), that "the critic must himself become paradoxical, must lay the fatal bet and talk about Racine in one way and not in another."… The only objectivity remaining to him is "to declare [his] system of reading," that is, to specify the type of subjectivity he has decided to adopt. To lay a fatal bet, to become paradoxical—it is clear that if such are Mr. Barthes' goals in his book, he has fully succeeded. But this dialectic of the subjectification of criticism has the character of sophistry about it…. It is not, in truth, among subjectivities, as Mr. Barthes suggests, that the critic must choose, but among different types of objectivity. If the laws of physics—as I understand the evolution of modern science—have become statistical laws, we should not be unhappy in the human sciences to formulate statistical laws of the same order…. The universal laws established by Mr. Barthes concerning Racine's universe apply on the average to two or three of the eleven tragedies. The laws of physics, in spite of their uncertainty, seem to be more consistent in their application. Mr. Barthes transposes the You cannot tell the truth about nature of contemporary thought into You cannot tell the truth about Racine, and from the Anything can happen of modern indeterminism he draws a sort of You can say anything. He is right in that it is impossible even to conceive of what the whole, absolute, definitive truth about Racine might be, but he is wrong in that you cannot say just anything. (pp. 19-20)

Every move one makes—and a fortiori every critical move—implies a philosophic decision, a decision all the more arbitrary in that it is often unclear; and Mr. Barthes has been able to make a penetrating analysis of the naive assumptions of a certain kind of biographical criticism. His remarks, however, must not be taken as a justification for doing nothing, or a permission to do just anything. Every concept presupposes a collection of perceptions, and every perception presupposes a concept; yet this ancient difficulty has never paralyzed thought. It is easy to demonstrate a priori our inability to accomplish such and such an intellectual operation—an operation, indeed, which we carry out constantly. It has been by putting aside these little games of the Sceptics that all progress of the human mind, especially in the sciences, has been made. In certain of its aspects, existentialist subjectivism does nothing but dig up this much-picked bone. Mr. Barthes, in his turn, persists in composing prolegomena to the impossibility of all criticism. There are better things he could be doing.

But that is not all. Not satisfied with clearing the ground so as to be able to give free rein to the spirits that move him, he demands that this arbitrary criticism be taken as categorical and absolute. Applying, I suppose, one of the doctrines of the philosophy of commitment, he notes that refusal to commit oneself, or even refusal to commit oneself wholly, is still a form—however wretched—of commitment, and he advocates a kind of criticism made up of passionate affirmations—a criticism which, as we have seen, he himself has widely practiced. (pp. 21-2)

Mr. Barthes' critical proceedings, then, reveal two attitudes which, though well known, used to seem incompatible—the impressionist attitude and the dogmatic attitude. Traditionally, impressionistic criticism found truth in the personal notations of an individual—an individual who offered himself, of course, as a model. On the other hand, dogmatic criticism proceeded in terms of objective, universal statements. Mr. Barthes has invented an ideological impressionism which is essentially dogmatic; he is the Pythoness philosophizing. His book, moreover, is not devoid of a certain poetic charm, provided it be taken for what it is, a dogmatic fantasy in a hundred and thirty pages, with theme and variations…. A large part of the fascination that I am told Mr. Barthes' book exercises on certain readers comes, I imagine, from [a] tone of definiteness, of assurance in his statements, of philosophic truth that attaches to the evidence, not indeed by the force of ideas but by a coloring of the words, a rhythm, a resonance. To watch this intellectual liturgy is to join the chapel of Profound Thought and of the Avant-Garde.

Mr. Barthes' attempt might normally have the effect of confirming in their least ambitious methods those who still adhere to the virtues of objectivity and coherence. Indeed, are they not within their right in asking themselves if it is not better to settle some small fact about Racine in a solid way than to erect a grandiose interpretation of the tragedies which collapses at the first serious examination of it? Is it not better to be satisfied with establishing texts—an essential and difficult task which in many cases remains to be done and to which Mr. Barthes, unless I err, does not even make any reference in his consideration of methodology? Surely these rigorous, if modest, tasks remain absolutely indispensable; but the bustle caused by Mr. Barthes and his friends ought also to be for everyone the occasion of a very serious examination of conscience and of a coherent effort to define the concept of explication in literary studies. Besides, those concerned have not waited for Mr. Barthes in order to begin. Biographical criticism, as he describes it, has been pretty well discredited for twenty or thirty years; source criticism has become more cautious and has lost its explicatory ambitions…. Mr. Barthes, although desirous of placing in opposition to the new criticism what he calls by a generic and contemptuous term university criticism, does not know about it, or in any case gives an incorrect interpretation of it. (pp. 23-5)

Mr. Barthes either is unaware of studies that come out of the universities or systematically misjudges them. He affects to believe that they are all inspired by an impoverished Lansonism, thus failing to appreciate Lanson as well as the extreme diversity of methods now being practiced in the universities. Against university criticism, a phantom he has raised in order that he may squelch it, he repeats his complaints as many as four times, in France and abroad, and then he reprints them in two works. In short, it is clear that he is practicing polemics…. I have spent long, often fruitless hours in studying this book. If I have done so, it is because it has seemed to me that the book is particularly dangerous. The obvious cleverness of its author, his intellectual imagination, his ideological prestidigitation, his dialectical tight-rope walking, his verbal illuminations—in a word, incontestable talent but talent gone astray—all this is not without glamor for certain types of readers: those who know only the two tragedies of Racine studied at school, and the performances of Meyer or Vilar; those who are not really interested in literature and acknowledge Racine only as a pretext for ideas; those who, justifiably tired of the commonplaces and platitudes of a certain kind of instruction at school, desire something new at any cost, etc. For readers who are better informed, the response to this book, as to other efforts of the French "new criticism," is ordinarily of two kinds. Some shrug their shoulders or raise their hands to heaven; others assume a cunning air and mutter, "Debatable but interesting." It has seemed to me a duty, however painful it may be to carry out, not to remain on so superficial a level. Besides, the study just examined only has the scope that Mr. Barthes, his friends—and their public—wish to give it. It concerns nothing, in fact, but Racine. They will have to decide to what extent Mr. Barthes' critical attitude and practice are implied in the work examined, and also to what extent intellectual solidarity, proclaimed in so complacent a fashion by the defenders of the French "new criticism," must play a part here. Do they feel committed to On Racine? One would be glad to know. (pp. 26-7)