Roland Barthes

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Preface

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Writing Degree Zero probably isn't the easiest text with which to start an acquaintance with Barthes. The book is compact to the point of ellipsis, often arcane. It barely suggests the variety and intellectual mobility of Barthes' subsequent work…. Though explicitly theoretical in character, the argument here can't compare in rigor or completeness with Barthes' later development of some of these ideas in his "Eléments de Sémiologie."… Moreover, Writing Degree Zero gives virtually no indication of Barthes' sensitivity and imaginativeness in handling individual literary texts and in stating the unifying metaphors of a single author's body of work, skills he was to exercise in the short book on Michelet (1954) and in the influential studies of Brecht and Robbe-Grillet written in the mid 1950's. Lastly, the … text doesn't disclose the witty concreteness of Barthes' sensibility, his talent for sensuous phenomenological description, evidenced in the brilliant essay-epiphanies collected in 1957 under the title Mythologies. Thus, Writing Degree Zero is early Barthes, seminal but not representative. (pp. vii-viii)

Writing Degree Zero lends support to the already well-established cause of advanced literature, not with an argument over fundamentals of taste and purpose, but by an allusive refinement of that argument, oriented more to modernist literature's further prospects than to its celebrated past. But Writing Degree Zero is not only manifesto but polemic. With any difficult text, the reader, in order to understand what the philosopher or critic is arguing for, must grasp what or whom he is tacitly arguing against. Considered as a polemic, Barthes is challenging the most intelligent version of the theory of literature's obligation to be socially committed, that theory having always entailed some attack, overt or implicit, on the tradition of modernist literature.

Indeed, I think, one can name the specific adversary of Barthes' argument. Barthes' topic is the same as that posed by, and stated in the title of, Sartre's famous What is Literature?… It would seem that Barthes, though he never mentions Sartre's book, had it in mind when he wrote Writing Degree Zero, and that his argument constitutes an attempt at refuting Sartre's. Where What Is Literature? is prolix (but easily readable) and contains extended passages of powerful, concrete historical and psychological analysis of the writer's situation and of postwar society, Writing Degree Zero is terse and unconcrete (and rather difficult of access)—as if Barthes were depending on his reader's familiarity with the generous development of the terms of the debate provided by Sartre. (pp. x-xi)

[Writing Degree Zero] suggests a rather single-minded manifesto, advocating a stern retrenchment of literature into a desiccated, ascetic noncommunicativeness. This suggestion is likely to be reinforced for those readers aware that Barthes first became well known in France when he emerged as Robbe-Grillet's most eloquent spokesman—notably in three essays, "Le monde objet" (1953), "Littérature objective" (1954), and "Littérature littérale" (1955), all included in Essais Critiques [Critical Essays]—in which he championed the ingenious and strategic reduction of literary means (i.e. of style as Barthes here uses the word) achieved by Robbe-Grillet by de-anthropomorphizing, eliminating metaphor, etc. But it would be a mistake to read Writing Degree Zero merely or even mainly as a polemic preparing the way for the advent of the "solution" of Robbe-Grillet. Actually the notion of zero-degree, neutral, colorless writing—first discussed by Sartre, who called it l'écriture blanche, in his famous review of Camus' L'Etranger—enters Barthes' argument only briefly: in the introduction …, as the "last episode of a Passion of writing, which recounts stage by stage the disintegration of bourgeois consciousness," and again at the end … as one solution to the disintegration of literary language.

But this horizon of literature's final solution is only a boundary-concept, generated by this argument. It is the logical extension of the type of rhetoric Barthes uses. But it is the ground rules of that rhetoric which should be of much more interest and importance to the reader—and have been to Barthes himself, judging from the minor role that the notion of zero-degree writing has played in his subsequent literary studies. What is essential to Barthes' position is not its apocalyptic terminus, but the diagnosis of the over-all situation of literature he makes. Barthes views that peculiarly modern phenomenon of "the multiplication of modes of writing" as an inevitable development. As literature abolishes "more and more its condition as a bourgeois myth," écriture pushes aside language and style, absorbing "the whole identity of a literary work." Barthes affirms—and here his thinking strongly reflects the influence of Blanchot—the way literature verges on becoming a total experience, one which brooks no limits, and cannot be permanently stabilized or held in check by any particular strategy of writing, the adoption of zero-degree writing included. As modern literature is the history of alienated "writing" or personal utterance, literature aims inexorably at its own self-transcendence—at the abolition of literature. But Barthes' point would seem to be that no amount of moral exhortation or conceptual unraveling is going to alter drastically this tense, paradoxical state of affairs. "In spite of the efforts made in our time, it has proved impossible successfully to liquidate literature entirely."

This would seem to leave the heaviest burden on the critic, who mediates amid competing chaos—a task Barthes has heroically exemplified in his own ambitious body of work. Thus, in Writing Degree Zero, Barthes presupposes both the effort of writers like Valéry, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, and Burroughs to abolish literature and the effort of other writers to confine literature to ethical communication (the notion of "engaged" writing). It is in this agonized suspension between the contradictory goals entertained by literature, I should argue, that the discourse of the responsible critic situates itself—without yielding to an easy dismissal of either position.

Of course, these efforts to liquidate literature have left their trace, which explains the tone, both hectic and detached, with which Barthes approaches his topic. At times, one could describe Barthes' stance in this book as almost an anthropological one, to the extent that he implies that all thinking both about and within literature operates by means of myths. Thus he speaks of the novel as a "mythological object," and of the "rituals" of literature.

The other prominent gesture by which he distances himself from his volatile subject is through constant recourse to a historical perspective…. But while Barthes shares with Sartre a familiar terminology, adapted from the Hegelian metahistorical scheme of consciousness, Writing Degree Zero lacks the detailed, concrete feeling for historical process in evidence in Sartre's book…. The history Barthes continually invokes always wears a capital H. This is perhaps the most serious limit to the argument of Writing Degree Zero: that, while insisting on a historical perspective, Barthes employs such a generalized, thin notion of history. Barthes is not so much referring to a real state of affairs as he is using a metaphor, which allows him to describe literature as a process rather than as a static entity. The particular value of history as an organizing myth is that it provides Barthes with a decisive moment, up to which the situation he describes leads and from which it proceeds—a paradigmatic "fall" of literature, which took place around 1850 and is best incarnated in the consciousness of Flaubert. (pp. xvi-xix)

Barthes' vision of what thinking really is—an insatiable project, endlessly producing and consuming "systems," metaphor-haunted classifications of an ultimately opaque reality—receives only a very elementary exposure in Writing Degree Zero. In [this] book, he appears at least as much the uncritical accomplice of myths as he is their classifier. Deploying some familiar creative fictions of contemporary intellectual life, such as the Hegelian "history of consciousness," the existentialist "freedom," the Marxist "bourgeois society," etc., Barthes proposes one new myth—that of écriture—for the purpose of analyzing a myth, that of "literature." Of course, "myth" doesn't mean that a concept (or argument or narrative) is false. Myths are not descriptions but rather models for description (or thinking)—according to the formula of Lévi-Strauss logical techniques for resolving basic antinomies in thought and social existence. And the converse is also true: all explanatory models for fundamental states of affairs, whether sophisticated or primitive, are myths. From this structuralist point of view, one can't object to Writing Degree Zero simply because its leading concepts are intellectual myths or fictions. What matters is that Barthes' myths about literature are extremely talented, even masterful, and do satisfy the need for intellectual cohesion (comparable to the way myths in the more ordinary sense, according to Lévi-Strauss, produce social cohesion).

After all, it isn't Barthes who made "literature" into a myth. He found it in that condition, along with all the other arts in our time. Someday perhaps a demystification of the myth of "art" (as an absolute activity) will be possible and will take place, but it seems far from that moment now. At this stage, only new myths can subdue—even for the brief time to permit contemplation—the old myths which move convulsively about us. Measured on this scale of need, the myths about literature proposed in Writing Degree Zero seem to me sturdy, subtle, and highly serviceable. They acknowledge basic antinomies that even the most gifted minds addressing the same subject, such as Sartre, have glossed over. And to anyone seriously caught up in the lacerating dialectics imposed by the stand of advanced art and consciousness in our time, the myths/models deployed by Barthes can also be recommended for their healing, therapeutic value. (pp. xx-xxi)

Susan Sontag, "Preface" (reprinted by permission of Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.; copyright © 1968 by Susan Sontag), in Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Hill and Wang, 1968, pp. xii-xx.

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