To say [Barthes] is one of the new French "structuralists" is no help: it is only misleading. What is "structuralism" any-way? We shall later see whether such a "school of philosophy" exists at all. Meanwhile, Barthes can be localized as a French critic and indeed as one of the most articulate and important literary critics writing today in any language, although Writing Degree Zero might not be enough, by itself, to convince anyone of the fact.

This is an extremely condensed little book, thick with esoteric language, highly charged with intuitions which may or may not be profound. You need some time to decide whether or not this is really a brilliant book or just another bag of critical tricks.

Barthes is at odds with Sartre on the question of littérature engagée. In other words he does not think the writer has a duty to arouse in the reader a revolutionary consciousness of some sort, though he does seem to think that "writing" is a subversive activity. On the other hand, he carries out an exemplary campaign of criticism against all forms of writing with a message, and particularly of writing with a political message. To be more precise, he separates the writing from the message and dissects the very mode of revolutionary writing (whether of the French or of the Marxist revolutions). He is, however, very much in favor of Brecht precisely as writer. And his model of "writing degree zero" is Robbe-Grillet. (pp. 140-41)

He is not saying that the "only good novelist" is Robbe-Grillet, or that the "only valid theater" is that of Brecht. He just wants to examine how writing works, whether in Robbe-Grillet (who refuses all complicity with the reader) or in Michel Butor (who takes the reader into his confidence). Barthes is not dealing with "good-bad" divisions at all. We must not confuse him with Sartre, a moralist who bristles with pastoral "shoulds" even while he prescribes to us the most austere and melancholy of freedoms, beyond all comfort of good-and-evil.

Barthes invents his new mystical category, "writing," and sets it up against all the "shoulds" of style. He confronts Sartre's distinction between language, which is "given," and style, which is "chosen" and "free" (therefore the region of commitment, lucidity, subversion, nobility, and revolution). He shows that this division will not work. Style (he thinks) is as much "given" as language. It springs "from the body and the past of the writer."… In a certain way it places the author outside history—though this cannot be pushed too far, and it assumes too readily that style is merely personal, idiosyncratic: a description which might fit the romantics and is of course adequate for Rimbaud and René Char, who are "saturated with style." (p. 141)

To carry out his job, according to Barthes, the writer must accept his language and accept his style as given: what he has to choose is his writing. Not so much the kind of writing as the act of writing. If he is honest, he makes this choice in the full consciousness that what he is doing is merely writing, not something else ("expressing himself," "arousing a revolutionary consciousness," "exploring the metaphysical abyss of being," etc.). When the choice is completely lucid, when the writer chooses simply to write and renounces all the rest ("message," "expression," "soul," "revolution"), then the writing itself stands out clearly as writing. A distance is established which reminds the reader not to get lost in the writer or in the writing, not to immerse himself in false complicities with the message or the emotion, not to get swept away by illusions of an inner meaning, a slice of life, a cosmic celebration, an eschatological vision. When the writing is just writing, and when no mistake about this is possible because the very writing itself removes all possibility of error, then you have "writing degree zero."

How does writing cool down to this icy state?

Though in this early book Barthes cannot yet be accused of "structuralism," he does appeal to the linguistic theories of de Saussure…. (p. 142)

The "writer" is conscious of words in synchronous interrelated systems (style, etc.) and if he knows what he is doing he can deliberately choose to subvert the systems by his use of words. It is here, and not in his doctrine, his "revolutionary message"—or in a supposed "revolutionary style" that the writer really changes the world—(though he should be free of any obvious purpose to change anything). (p. 143)

The point that Barthes wants to make about "writing" is that it is a genuine matter of choice. The writer's mere decision to write is what matters, not his decision to communicate a political message or share a human experience (say of passion, conviction, discovery, exaltation).

Here we come to the precise point where it is difficult to keep up with Barthes. What precisely does the "writer" choose when he decides to write—and write cool? Where does he stand in relation to the rest of the world? His is not of course a childish and narcissistic choice: "I will be a writer—watch me write!" It has to imply a committed and responsible attitude toward the rest of the world. Where Sartre says that the writer becomes responsible to the world for a message or a style that awakens a new consciousness in man, Barthes sees it differently. For him the writer is more responsible to his writing than he is to his public. To be more exact: the "writer" (if he is cool) does not try to communicate something to the rest of the world, but only to define correctly the relation between writing and the world. This means that he knows his business is to write first of all, not to teach, to amuse, to inspire, to elevate, to shock, or to transform society. He does something to society not by pushing against its structures—which are none of his business—but by changing the tune of its language and shifting the perspectives which depend on the ways words are arranged. He systematically de-mythologizes literature. What the writer owes society is, then, to refuse to communicate with the reader if the urge to communicate interferes with his writing. And what the reader will look for is precisely this refusal. This, at least, is what he will look for in "writing degree zero."

The only thing that remains to be explained is: how does the reader keep awake when reading such writing? Barthes does not enlighten us. He assumes that one will follow Robbe-Grillet with alert attention, and without boredom. Maybe somewhere in "structuralism" there is magic or miracle about which we have not yet heard. Fortunately, Robbe-Grillet is not the only writer. Others are not quite so bleak.

Barthes' subtlety can easily reduce us to blind exasperation if we do not take into account his analysis of other kinds of "writing." When we read all he has to say about "political writing," "revolutionary writing," classicism, romanticism, the nineteenth century novel, and Mallarmé "the Hamlet of writing," we find that he is not just advocating solipsism for purity's sake and a Manichean rejection of art. He is really saying something both new and important about the nature of writing: that it is in fact gestus.

"Gestus" is more than "gesture," more than idiosyncrasy. It is the chosen, living, and responsible mode of presence of the writer in his world. But this gestus has been overlaid and corrupted with all sorts of elements which have turned it into posturing. Nowhere a more brilliant analysis of the rhetoric of the French Revolution—and its human or inhuman implications—than in this little book of Barthes. Nowhere a more devastating commentary on Racine and the whole culture of French classicism than in his essays on Racine. Nowhere a more ruthless unmasking of the phoniness of Marxist "literature" or of the "subwriting" of Zola, Maupassant, and Daudet. Naturalism and socialist realism are pure artifice and pure posture just because they claim to be entirely "real" and to induce, by "style," a new consciousness of reality. Their "realism" is an expression of the decay of a bourgeois consciousness which lost touch with reality a hundred years ago…. Barthes sums it all up: as "mechanizing without restraint the intentional signs of art." For what? To sell the stuff, of course. To make money by creating an illusion of significance.

The authentic gestus of writing begins only when all meaningful postures have been abandoned, when all the obvious "signs" of art have been set aside. At the present juncture, such writing can hardly be anything but antiwriting. The writer is driven back to the source of his writing, since he can no longer trust the honesty of his customary dialogue with the rest of society. But, Barthes argues, in doing so he recovers something of the numinous power of that gestus which is charismatic only because it is completely modest.

To do this, the "writer" must forget all charismatic exaltation, all aspiration to power, all numen, all that would seem to give him some ascendancy over the reader. He must practice writing "without alibi, without thickness and without depth … the exact contrary of poetic writing." Here language no longer "violates the abyss" but slides away from us across an icy surface. (pp. 143-45)

What Barthes says about writing corresponds more or less exactly to what Ad Reinhardt said about painting—and said in painting. It is a kind of quietism, if you like; but a deadly, Zenlike stillness out of which—as you find out by reading Barthes himself—there does nevertheless spring a certain inscrutable excitement….

Perhaps the best place to get acquainted with Barthes is in his fine essay on the staging and acting of Racine in the traditional French theater. Here we see clearly that he is not preaching art for art's sake but just the opposite. The theatrical conventions of the Comédie Française have come to demand that in acting Racine the actors cease to address one another and simply sing pure and perfect words which soar "vertically" to some imagined god of pure "meaning." If we are tempted to think "writing degree zero" means something of the sort, we must begin over again, we have not understood it.

Space does not permit an adequate treatment of Barthes' Racine. It is a masterpiece of literary criticism, the power and impact of which may not be fully felt by one who has not had to study Racine in a French Lycée. The criticism goes far beyond Racine himself. It gets at the roots not only of French civilization but of the entire culture of the Western world. (p. 146)