When the Author died in France in 1968, it was Roland Barthes who with his essay "La mort de l'auteur" administered the coup de grâce. Jacques Derrida had already warned, in Of Grammatology, of the frivolity of thinking that "'Descartes,' 'Leibniz,' 'Rousseau,' 'Hegel,' are names of authors," since they indicated "neither identities nor causes," but rather "the name of a problem." Michel Foucault would later record an "author-function" arising out of the "scission" between "the author" and "the actual writer." The subtext for all three shimmered in the Parisian spring, in the great year of academic revolution, when the students took to the streets and even the sacred baccalauréat felt the tremor. Barthes's way of putting it was somewhat more inspiriting than the transmogrification of authors into functions or problems: "We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space, in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash." What Barthes was celebrating, in language permeated with the rhetoric of liberation, was release from the very idea of an origin; it was nothing less than that staple of the sixties, the death of God.

Barthes made sure his language told the story. The Author is "believed in"; his image is to be "desacralized," and with it his theological meaning. He is the God, "the origin, the authority, the Father" (as Barthes would write two years later), and not a very nice one. Literature is centered on him "tyrannically"; his "sway" is "powerful"; the new literature, now to be renamed writing, "liberates"; the Author is a myth it is "necessary to overthrow." Criticism, as Barthes would tell L'Express in 1970, could participate in "a kind of collective action." (Asked what it did, he answered, "It destroys.") The text, and the reader, are prisoners in the Bastille. With the erasure of the Author-God, the text, escaped from its Great Original, is revealed as an infinite regress of prior traces, of language, of ideas, of societal memories and assumptions. For "to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing," and the reading with it. To dissolve the Author is to inaugurate that exhilaratingly "anti-theological activity," the conversion of literature to écriture, which "ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it." It is "an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law."

To the reader coming in late, and from over the water, the excitement may be somewhat hard to understand. Certainly revolutionaries of the word are easier to live with (and to embrace) than the other kind. But what is all the verbal shooting about? Is this Author-God, this Freudian Father ("a somewhat decrepit deity," Barthes would later call him) anybody we know?

Sixty years ago, like many American children, I had a game of Authors. It was geared to seven-year-olds, about the simplest game there was to play, on a level with Go Fish—a pack of cards with four suits, headed by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. (Not Melville back then, not Whitman, not Dickinson or Thoreau—an early lesson in the temporality of canons.) From the cards we learned such truths as that Longfellow wrote Evangeline and Holmes The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Naturally, we did not learn to think of the Author as God, Father, or even (Whittier?) as an Authority. And even had we been English children, with a deck displaying Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning, we wouldn't have learned it either. To be able to associate authors with God, let alone with his institutional hypostases, you have to be French.

In 1635, in a book significantly entitled De l'Esclaircissement des temps, a portrait appeared of the powerful politician who the year before had founded the Académie Française, Armand Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu. From the Cardinal's head, as if prefiguring the Sun-King whose effulgence his policies prepared, shone forty rays of light. Each of those rays bore the name of an Academician—an Author.

Shall we try to imagine an analogous representation in an English-speaking context? No English prime minister has ever exercised Richelieu's absolute power. Had he done so, it remains inconceivable that the most sycophantic artist could ever have rayed forth from his head the names, say, of Milton, Dryden, Shadwell, and thirty-seven more, to Enlighten the Times with their harmonious and even brightness. Nor can we conceive of an English prime minister—still less an American president—concerning himself to create, as Richelieu did, an institution to regularize the national language, guard its purity, and impose upon its primary public literature, the drama, binding rules of literary practice. We are likely to imagine that a chief of state, even if he is not a cardinal, has more important things to do. But that too is to think an English-speaking thought. Long before Barthes, before Derrida, before Foucault, Richelieu had made the connection between Authors and Authority, between language and power. The relation of the dramatic Unities to monarchical unity, of literary Decorum to political and social conformity, was neither coincidental nor the expression of a vague French Zeitgeist, an Esprit des Temps. As David Kramer has recently shown [in an unpublished doctoral dissertation], the Academy and its projects were a deliberate response to the exigencies of an absolutism emerging from a century of fragmentation and religious war. The Rules, literary and linguistic, imposed by Richelieu's Academy expressed the absolute vision of what was to be Le Grand Siècle while helping to bring it into being.

It was Richelieu's Academy indeed. Perceiving their potential usefulness—or danger—he had by fiat institutionalized the cheerfully intellectual discussions of a group of literary friends, who were something less than enthusiastic to see their informal gatherings transmuted into an assembly of forty so-called Immortals. Some wished to decline the honor, but since Richelieu had forbidden unlicensed assemblies they thought better of it. "The Academy's statutes," Kramer reminds us, "were drawn up, not by a poet or a playwright, but by a Conseiller d'Etat." The Immortals, when not raying directly from Richelieu's head, were in his pocket. He awarded pensions at will. "No one could be so much as proposed for election unless he was 'agréable au protecteur.'" All projects and decisions had to be likewise agreeable; many of them were directly suggested by the protector. The Academy's first and continuing project, the codification and purification of French, was initially undertaken so that the conquering tongue could be more readily learned by those whom the Cardinal's military campaigns were to subject to the glory of the crown. This was the original impetus for the great French Dictionary. Language was a means of control; French was to spread French civilisation abroad, as Latin had. It would equally set limits on what could be written—and thought—at home. We may, if we like, imagine a world in which Dr. Johnson composed his Dictionary not to make the money he told Boswell every sane man wrote for, but to enhance the glory of the Hanoverian monarchy. That done, we have to imagine him thinking of himself as one of forty immortals and not laughing. It isn't easy.

It was, then, more than the afflatus of the sixties that impelled Barthes to kill the Author, and rebel against "a language political in its origin" … "born at the moment when the upper classes wished … to convert the particularity of their writing into a universal language." Though there were contemporary reasons to proclaim liberation from the heavy rod of the Father-God, Barthes's sense of urgency, of need, of triumph was rooted deep in the historic soil of France. Only in France would it be possible to claim, as Barthes already had in "Authors and Writers" (1960), that "for the entire classical capitalist period, i.e. from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century … the uncontested owners of the language, and they alone, were authors"; that "no one else spoke." No one else spoke. The outrageousness of the hyperbole bespeaks its urgency. For when Barthes describes a "literary discourse subjected to rules of use, genre, and composition more or less immutable from Marot to Verlaine, from Montaigne to Gide," it is not hyperbole, but a truism of French literary history. "The certitudes of language … the imperatives of the structure of the genre"—these are not Barthes's own dismissive sarcasms, but the words of Professor Raymond Picard, a critic sufficiently infuriated by the originality of Barthes's criticism to call his "Nouvelle Critique" a "Nouvelle Imposture." Outside France, his essay On Racine wouldn't have raised an eyebrow. But in France those certitudes and imperatives exist, for everything from drama to orthography; one challenges them at one's peril. The walls of the prison house of language are far thicker in France.

What rayed forth from Richelieu's head was exactly that clarity later to be called Cartesian, the absolute and simple brightness of the "clear and distinct ideas" that Descartes thought he could find in his own mind and from them validate a universe; la clarté cartésienne was the visual manifestation of what Foucault calls "the great utopia of a perfectly transparent language." Barthes had already written, in Mythologies, of that "blissful clarity," how it "abolishes the complexity of human acts," giving them "the simplicity of essences," organizing "a world without contradictions because it is without depth, a world … wallowing in the evident." The myth was powerful enough, even in America, that an American graduate student could be told to read Kant in a French translation, because (bien sûr, this was forty years ago) it was impossible to be obscure in French. Clarity was the glory of that class monopoly, "the great French language," whose "lexicon and euphony," Barthes notes in "Authors and Writers," could be "respectfully preserved" even through that "greatest paroxysm of French history," the Revolution. Though nineteenth-century authors might broaden, even transform that language, they were still its "acknowledged owners." Let us reactivate our English-speaking incredulity: it is quite simply inconceivable to us that authors, of all people, could even in imagination own a language. We speak and write a language that from its beginnings has been the product not of authority but of receptivity, of foreign influence and invasion, that from the time of its greatest poet, and in his person, has been defined by its rich intransigence, its falls into obscurity, its resistance to purity or purification. For us as for Shakespeare, language has been the product not of Authors, but of people talking.

But Barthes, with Derrida and Foucault and fifty million other Frenchmen, grew up within the secure structures of the great French language. There were forty Immortals in their youth, and there are forty Immortals today, three hundred and fifty years after Richelieu and two hundred years after that revolutionary paroxysm which nevertheless scarcely interrupted the Academy's guardianship over the integrity of French. Americans from time to time are made aware of the Immortals, as during the flap over the admission of the late Marguerite Yourcenar, and we are reminded that this is something that seems to matter—to matter less, presumably, than when three brilliant French minds were being formed by an educational system whose director was said to have claimed that he knew what page in what book every French schoolchild was turning on a given day, but still far more than we can readily imagine. The Quarante Immortels are still at work on their Dictionary. A centralized educational system still guarantees that a whole nation invests its emotions in the idea of an authoritative language. Summering in a country village, the astonished foreigner is lectured on what is and is not permissible French by the man who retails fish from door to door. Someone encountered in a train, asked to explain a word he has probably known all his life, defines it, then quickly adds, "But that's not French." It is, of course, argot—what we'd call slang, rich and self-renewing like any popular speech. When Victor Hugo introduced a few phrases of thieves' argot into Les Misérables, he appended thousands of words of justification. Authority is defined by power, and power is defined by its ability to forbid. That the vocabulary of classic French drama is confined to some 2500 words (2000, says Barthes, for Racine) as against Shakespeare's 25,000 is not just a quirk of literary history, still less of national character. It is the product of conscious decision. Though the vocabulary of permissible French is of course very much larger today, it is still defined by exclusion.

Helen Vendler has described the "intellectual formation of a French child attracted to literature"—the cahier (the obligatory blot-free notebook), the dictée, the manuel littéraire enshrining every received idea of literary history—and has noted Barthes's own awareness of "how little he could escape from this training." Barthes, in S/Z, describes it considerably more abstractly: "a predetermination of messages, as in secondary-school education." But the structures of French civilization are formed long before its élite attends the lycée, which is what Barthes understands by secondary education. The certitudes and imperatives of French are encountered much earlier. Few of the children whose education Lawrence Wylie describes in his Village in the Vaucluse would ever reach secondary school. Yet in their elementary classroom the Cartesian light still shone, clear and sharp, mandating a dedication to abstract formulation, to analysis, to classification that readers of contemporary French theory will find eerily familiar. American amateurs of the School of Paris may compare Wylie's description with their own grade-school experience and ponder how it applies to their favorite authors—or texts—as these exemplify it at once in conformity and rebellion.

In teaching morals, grammar, arithmetic, and science the teacher always follows the same method. She first introduces a principle or rule that each pupil is supposed to memorize so thoroughly that it can be repeated on any occasion without the slightest faltering. Then a concrete illustration or problem is presented and studied or solved in the light of the principle. More problems or examples are given until the children can recognize the abstract principle implicit in the concrete circumstance…. The principle itself is not questioned and is hardly discussed.

"Children," Wylie observes, "are not encouraged to formulate principles independently on the basis of an examination of concrete cases. They are given the impression that principles exist autonomously … always there: immutable and constant. One can only learn to recognize … and accept them." French education is not Baconian; its motion is not inductive but deductive. English-speaking readers may recall a flicker of surprise upon discovering that "empirical" is not, for French theorists, a word of praise.

In approaching a subject, "the children are first presented with a general framework which they are asked to memorize…. An isolated fact is unimportant in itself. It assumes importance only when one recognizes [the] relationship … of the part to the whole." Applied to literature, this ensures that "no attempt is made to understand or to appreciate the text which is presented to the class until it has been thoroughly … analyzed,… broken down into its logical divisions, and the author's purpose in each division … explained…. Thus a child comes to believe that every fact, every phenomenon … is an integral part of a larger unit," intelligible "only if their proper relationship is recognized." "To approach problems with these assumptions is to approach them sensibly, reasonably, logically, and therefore … correctly."

French of course, "is recognized as the most important subject taught…. Any other subject may be slighted or sacrificed in order to increase the time for drill" in the proper use of la langue maternelle. Wylie notes how hard it is for an Anglo-Saxon "to comprehend how essential this language study is to the French." Yet this is what we must comprehend if we are to appreciate the sense of free air breathed at last that pervades Barthes's écriture. Though so difficult a writing must severely, if regretfully, limit Equality and Fraternity, Liberty's banner floats triumphant, celebrating freedom from the Author/Father/God, from his "predetermined messages," his tyrannical intentions; from the imposed interpretation that wallows in the evident; from consistency; from logic. To rebel against the Author is to challenge Authority in a way neither imaginable nor necessary in an educational culture which valorizes the wayward and the polyphonic; which begs reluctant students to question principles they would much rather accept; and where no author (just ask one) has authority over language or anything else.

..…

Barthes opens Le Plaisir du texte, his celebration of the delight of reading, with imagining

an individual … who would abolish within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simply getting rid of that old specter: logical contradiction; who would mix up all kinds of languages, even those thought incompatible; who would mutely endure all the accusations of illogicality, of infidelity; who would remain impassive in the face of Socratic irony (which works by leading the other to the supreme opprobrium: to contradict oneself) and of legal terrorism (how much penal evidence is founded on a psychology of consistency!). That man would be in our society the lowest of the low; the courts, the school, the asylum, ordinary conversation would make him a stranger: who endures contradiction without shame?

Any reader whose pleasure has been taken largely in texts written in English will recognize an accent, even in translation. From Chaucer to Sterne to Salman Rushdie, the glory of English has been the mixing up of languages thought incompatible. And only in French could "illogicality" be associated with "infidelity." The translator of the American edition was forced to render infidélité as "incongruity" lest he stymie the English-speaking reader in mid-sentence. Infidelity? To whom? To whom but the Author-God, with his "hierarchical sentence," his tyrannical meanings; with his hypostases of law, science, reason; with his fixation on logical consistency. God is French. That great rebel against the Rules, Victor Hugo, could still write with perfect naturalness in Les Misérables that "artistic peoples are logical peoples," since "the ideal is nothing but the culmination of logic, just as beauty is the apex of truth." No wonder Barthes complained, defending Sur Racine, that the classes supérieures, universalizing their own ideal of language, put forward "la 'logique' française" as "une logique absolue." The disclaiming quotes are, of course, Barthes's own.

Who endures contradiction without shame? Barthes's language vacillates here, as he likes it to do, with its initial suggestion that it's the representatives of school, court, and asylum who can't bear to be contradicted by Barthes's "counter-hero," the reader-writer taking his free pleasure. But "shame" takes us back to that abjection which I have translated as "the lowest of the low," to the shame of a Frenchman who has been caught out in a logical contradiction. C'n'est pas logique! Even the superficial tourist has heard it, in the racket of a train station or screamed on a playground: the continuing battle cry of Cartesian clarity.

Who, then, can endure the shame of logical contradiction? English shouts its answer. Emerson can endure it ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"); Whitman can endure it ("Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself"); Blake can endure it; the metaphysicals can endure it. Shakespeare can endure it. Sir Philip Sidney, cosmopolite and aristocrat, his own French almost accentless, rejected a "mungrell Tragycomedie" that mingled kings and clowns. Shakespeare went right ahead, befouling the purity of tragedy with comic gravediggers who spoke the people's prose. Voltaire hated the gravediggers, though there were a lot of things he admired in Shakespeare; you don't come across such barbarities in Racine.

French intellectuals, of course, do not read Emerson or Whitman; they read Poe, who is plus logique. And they generally read in French. Barthes refers to "The Purloined Letter" in Mallarmé's translation. Though he does quote Blake (a single Proverb of Hell) he quotes in French, and his reference is not to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell but to a book (in translation) by Norman O. Brown. He seems unaware of the literature of modernism in English; there is an extraordinary passage in Plaisir in which he describes the experience of sitting in a bar, amusing himself by enumerating its "whole stereophony" of "music, conversations, noises of chairs, of glasses," the "little voices" which dissolve the hierarchical sentence into the "nonsentence." It is as if Joyce's "Sirens" had never been written—or translated. "Why," he asks, in his autobiography, "so little talent for foreign languages?" English at the lycée was "boring (Queen Mab, David Copperfield, She Stoops to Conquer)." The candor is characteristic and disarming; still, so comfortable an admission is unexpected from someone who feels so intensely the difference between one word and another, and emphasizes the distinction between denotation and connotation as if he had discovered it. Though he excoriated the "narcissisme linguistique" of the guardians of the "idiome sacré," French is for him "nothing more or less than the umbilical language." It is in French he writes, in French he reads (with occasional hints of German and Italian); it is to the readers and writers of la langue maternelle that he addresses his écriture.

So it is curious that it is not in France that his work has acquired its maximum power. There the liberation of the text from the structures of decorum, of consistency, of logic could be felt as an exhilarating duty. Let its false and deceptive unity dissolve, its meanings float free, in "a paradise of words" a "happy Babel" in which "one may hear the grain of the gullet, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels," and exult in the amorous perversity (his word) of an écriture that "granulates,… crackles,… caresses,… grates,… cuts,": and at last, joyously, "comes." But how perverse is that perversity for readers whose experience of literature has been formed by the happy Babel of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Carroll and Lear and Joyce? What needs exploring is why these quintessentially French linguistic preoccupations have found so warm a welcome in an educational culture so different from, even antithetic to, that of France.

After all, it's been fifty years and more that English and American criticism has been preoccupied with language; with metaphors and metaphorical systems (Caroline Spurgeon got us started in 1930); with the referentiality of poetic statement (I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot in the twenties); with the layered suggestiveness which makes words rejoice as they fend off all attempts at paraphrase. French students learn that their greatest playwright wrote the speeches out in prose to cast into alexandrines; in classical French "no word," wrote Barthes (Writing Degree Zero) "has a density by itself." Here few students who undergo Introduction to Literature escape an exercise expressly designed to raise their consciousness of verbal densities. The distinction between denotation and connotation has been a staple of freshman writing texts ever since this year's retirees can remember. The inseparability of content and form is a truism: as Cleanth Brooks wrote in 1938, in words destined to inform introductory literature courses in colleges, then high schools, all over America, "the experience that [the poet] 'communicates' is itself created by the organization of the symbols he uses," so that "the total poem is therefore the communication, and indistinguishable from it." The sentence, including its suspicion of communication, could be Barthes's own. As he would put it twenty-one years later, with characteristic abstraction, "signification [is] the union of what signifies and what is signified … neither form nor content, but the proceedings between them."

Barthes's Author-God emitted "messages" in 1968: Brooks and Robert Penn Warren had warned American teenagers to stop hunting them thirty years before. Barthes put the Author's intentionality in question; "the intentional fallacy" hit American criticism in 1946. Did New Critics direct us away from the poet to The Poem Itself? In 1963, so did Barthes, rejecting traditional criticism's interest in "coordinating the details of a work with the details of a life" in favor of an "immanent analysis" functioning "in a realm purely internal to the work," "a criticism which establishes itself within the work and posits its relation to the world only after having entirely described it from within."

Nor could it have surprised an English-speaker to have read that "the Word in poetry can never be untrue," shining as it does "with an infinite freedom," "preparing to radiate toward innumerable and uncertain connections." For how many years have we been telling each other that poetic language is inexhaustible? In French, however, ambiguity is not a positive value: my Larousse de poche defines it as "a defect of that which is equivocal." We may cheer, then, as Barthes in 1963 converts defect to virtue and tells the French establishment that "each time we write ambiguously enough to suspend meaning … writing releases a question … gives the world an energy … permits us to breathe." Indeed, breathing wasn't all that easy; Barthes would soon have to defend against professorial attack his "right" (imagine it!) to read in Racine's "literal discourse" "other senses which [he was still stepping gingerly] do not contradict it." But though his valorization of ambiguity might be news to the French Academy, the American academy had started amusing itself with seven types of ambiguity in 1930. Thrilling as it is to read of language as "an immense halo of implications" making "knowledge festive" with words "flung out as projections, explosions, vibrations, devices, flavors," readers whose language long before Hopkins embraced "all things counter, original, spare, strange," must take it as confirmation rather than battle cry.

Even deconstruction has a familiar ring. Excise the word "personal" from the following; guess the writer; guess the date: "That radical mode of romantic polysemism in which the latent personal significance of a narrative poem is found not merely to underlie, but to contradict and cancel the surface intention." In 1966, confronting Picard, Barthes was still leery of contradiction. In 1953, M. H. Abrams was as much at home with it as Blake had been in 1790.

Nor can Barthes's amorous embrace of the concrete, of the physical object seem radical, though it may surprise us as we persevere through aridities of abstraction which, while less extensive than those in Foucault and Derrida, are equally uninviting to the Anglo-American explorer. Empiricism informs English-speaking style as well as English-speaking epistemology. Freshman composition texts are as one in discouraging abstraction and enjoining specificity; like McGuffey before them, they do their best to get American students, in Wylie's words, "to formulate principles independently on the basis of an examination of concrete cases." Helen Vendler's examples of "compositional subjects of the sort set for French students—'Arrogance,' 'Ease,' 'Coincidence'"—would appear, if at all, only to illustrate the kind of subject to avoid. Barthes too believes in concreteness. Outraged when Picard accuses him of "an inhuman abstraction," he insists that "the works of la nouvelle critique are very rarely abstract, because they treat of substances and objects." Reversing the deductive method taught the French pupil, he "starts," he says "from a sensuous object, and then hopes to meet in his work with the possibility of finding an abstraction for it" (italics his). He complains of the classic taste that considers objects "trivial," incongruous when introduced "into a rational discourse"; he commits himself to the object in full physicality he likes to call erotic; his "body," he says, "cannot accommodate itself to generality, the generality that is in language." The language is a bit warm for a freshman text, but the message (you should excuse the expression) is wholly familiar.

American critics, intellectual historians, and pedagogues, however, are not among the prior traces which constitute the text called Roland Barthes, which is entirely truthful in saying in 1963 ("What is Criticism?") that French criticism "owes little or nothing to Anglo-American criticism." (The Anglo-American texts Barthes does refer to address very different preoccupations: Bruno Bettelheim, D. W. Winnicott, Alan Watts, Norman O. Brown.) The relation of La Nouvelle Critique to The New Criticism is post, not propter.

What, then, explains our fascination? There is, of course, a peculiar pleasure in re-encountering one's own idées reçues, especially when expressed with an elegant difficulty that lends them the dark glow of revelation. From New to Nouvelle was an easy transition, as the case of Hillis Miller shows. The transatlantic breezes started blowing just as the New began to seem old hat. Barthes was affirming, with supremely French intelligence, the pieties of English 101.

But of course there's more to it. In retrospect, the New Critics seem surprisingly modest. They might distrust "messages," but they were comfortable enough with meanings. They left epistemology alone; they had no aspirations to philosophy or psychology. Though they discouraged biographical approaches, though they directed attention from poet to speaker and novelist to narrator, though they might (some of them) bracket authorial intentions, they didn't meddle with the idea of the self. But if authorial selves are (in the words of Vincent Leitch) "fabrications … interpretations … effects of language, not causes," why should our own selves be any different? As Frank Lentricchia puts it, "the self is an intersubjective construct formed by cultural systems over which the individual person has no control." A heady idea, the dissolution of the self; if personal responsibility dissolves along with it, it's a well-known revolutionary maxim that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Because there is more to it than old wine in new bottles. There is true exhilaration about the dissolving of certainties, the breaking of tablets. "Damn braces: bless relaxes," said Blake, in the book he began in 1789. The New Critics had scarcely been revolutionaries, literary or philosophical, least of all political. Yet the familiarity of their ideas could pave the way to the Paris of '68. Though the shadow of the Author-God did not reach across the sea, though the guardians and structures of English possessed minimal power either to preserve or coerce, though these were French texts speaking to the French, still they had their message for American intellectuals living in a country whose imperial impositions were increasingly difficult to ignore or justify. They aimed at the Author, but their target was Power. We could imagine with them a grand international democracy of power-free language—or if that were an impossible dream, we could at least proclaim our awareness of the invisibly tyrannical habits of our discourse. In the disillusioned seventies and the shameful eighties, there were new, progressive uses for our old New Critical techniques. They could be applied to any writing. "Literature" was only a category, as artificial as any of those frozen seventeenth-century genres. Guilt of nationality, class, and gender could revivify a tired scrutiny. For there is a politics of language. Orwell had told us that in 1946, in his blunt, concrete, English way; thirty years after, we could examine the matter with new French subtlety.

And somewhere in the last paragraph irony gives way to appreciation. Barthes would have recognized the movement: of reversal, of the statement no sooner made than put in question, of contradiction not merely acknowledged but embraced. One may—I do—question the cost-free radicalism, so much easier than actual political engagement, of our American warriors of theory, called to no undertaking more heroic than the reading of these admittedly exigent texts and the acquisition of a parole which now, in universities all over the country, itself exerts the power to require, insist, and exclude. For academics who have joined the club, the return of grand theory has brought not risk but a bonanza of renewal, liberating them into a hermeneutic paradise of publication where the professional reader (not the hapless freshman, who retains the privilege of getting things wrong) is Adam, forever encountering beasts that invite him to name them anew. Critical theory, I'm told, is a game; you don't have to play it unless you enjoy it. But power games are rarely optional. Barthes, like Foucault, like Derrida, had something more radical in mind than the substitution of one linguistic tyranny for another.

For they were French. A true radicalism goes to the root; theirs attacked the root assumptions of an unusually restrictive socio-politico-linguistic culture. There was a heroism in their assault on clarté, their determination to validate a darkness all the richer by contrast with that vaunted ésclaircissement, to honor the category of what Foucault called "the unthought." It's even explicable, though it would have surprised, then appalled Orwell, that stylistic obscurity should join the other insignia of liberation, the étandards sanglants of the good fight they were fighting.

Their status as revolutionaries was helped, of course, by the unique history of the French seventeenth century, which permitted such a ready association of oppressive structures of literature with oppressive structures of economics and of class. A phrase like Barthes's "the entire classical capitalist period" won't work in England or America, neither of which has a classical tradition you could put in your eye. In France it is at least intelligible. With "capitalist" functioning as negative shorthand in literature as well as economics, Barthes could claim a radicalism just as genuine as Sartre's, and a lot more subtle. Though Susan Sontag admires Barthes, she calls him a dandy. That's not wholly fair. When he rejects political engagement for a different responsibility, the responsibility to his umbilical language, it is more than mere aestheticism. The radicalism was genuine, the status as outsider absolutely real. In his fragmentary autobiography, Barthes defines himself as his culture had defined him: religiously, sexually, and academically marginal. "Who does not feel how natural it is, in France, to be Catholic, married, and properly accredited with the right degrees?" He wasn't, he tells us, even right-handed. We should not forget that the game American insiders now play was originally an enterprise of risk.

Barthes meant it about power. His essays were essais in Montaigne's original sense, tentative, trials of ideas. In his last decade even these came to seem too domineering, too insistently coherent, too "classical"; better to relax, to group paragraphs under topic headings, in alphabetical order, open to the aleatory air. Thus The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse. Aleatory was a favorite word. Perhaps, to do him justice, that's the way this essay should end, miming his progress from the impersonal to the personal, from the essay's assertive form—thesis, argument, conclusion—to something more wavering, more faithful to the moods of thought, its tenuous demands, how it's always escaping, from reader, from writer, yet can't escape its paradoxical consistency, its message, its loyalty to the values of a life-time. The older you get, the more everything you write and do connects, yes, into a self. What Keats, who didn't get old, called soul-making. So:

Abstraction: How could he escape it? And though we may grumble for a more fraternal ratio of specific to general, we had better appreciate it. Abstraction, analysis, is just so much harder than concrete specificity, not just to read but to do. Anybody can learn to be specific, and most of our freshmen will. But try setting them to write on Arrogance, Coincidence, or Ease. To discuss an abstraction and produce anything but truisms you have really to think. In A Lover's Discourse Barthes produces eight pages (in ten short takes) of analysis of the "holophrase" I-love-you. Here's just a bit of it:

I-love-you is active. It affirms itself as force—against … the thousand forces of the world, which are, all of them, disparaging forces (science, doxa, reality, reason, etc.). Or again: against language. Just as the amen is at the limit of language, without collusion with its system … so the proffering of love (I-love-you) stands at the limit of syntax, welcomes tautology (I-love-you means I-love-you), rejects the servility of the Sentence … is not a sign, but plays against the signs.

No wonder we're impressed. As Dr. Faustus said, "Sweet Analytics, 'tis thou hast ravish'd me." As well they might. But they don't always. "The actantial model" may "stand the test of a large number of narratives," but it's hard to keep our attention on "the regulated transformations (replacements, confusions, duplications, substitutions) … of an actantial typology" through page after page when the ratio of generalization to example is about 50 to 1.

Assertion: how nicely RB tries to avoid it, sure that it can't be done. "The work is always dogmatic"; the author's (his word) "silences, his regrets, his naivetés, his scruples, his fears, everything that would make the work fraternal—none of this can pass into the written object." The sentence is by nature assertive; "writing declares"; "there is no such thing as a generous language." Perhaps. But that's what he tried for.

Author: in RB by RB, RB reproduces without comment a secondary school exam question on a passage he had written twenty-four years and hundreds of thousands of words ago. He knows, who better, that he has become the Author. Style, he wrote then, is "a way of speaking, a lexicon … born of the body and the past of the writer … an autarchic language … its depths in the personal and secret mythology of the author." Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contain multitudes.

Boredom: has an entry to itself in The Pleasure of the Text, pervades his writing about literature/life. Who, he asks, reads a classic text without skipping? The word "nausea" too recurs, as in this from S/Z: "The referential codes have a kind of emetic virtue, they bring on nausea by the boredom, conformism, and disgust that establishes them." Master of a tradition that bores him, he sticks with it; he doesn't go foraging abroad, or open a backward window on Villon or Rabelais. What are you going to do with a story like Sarrasine? Forget it, we might say, but Barthes is French; the myth of the great French language is his myth, however he demythicizes; Balzac is his Author. Skipping is one solution; another is to read into, read around, read under—having already dissolved the Author, so the question of whether to credit him with all these new pluralizing riches needn't arise. Here's a technique that can work with any text one's read so many times one can no longer imagine what it might be to encounter freshly what it says. RB liberated, alas, not so much the reader as the professor.

Bourgeois: show them no mercy. Functions, like "capitalist," as a simple pejorative. Nobody is nicer, more generous than RB, yet he depersonalizes with a word. For him, Marx joins with Flaubert to evoke in mid-twentieth century M. Homais and the boredom of Yonville. The domain of the bourgeois is the domain of the "self-evident," of the "violence" of unexamined conventions, of those who are "content to utter what is self-evident, what follows of itself: the 'natural' is, in short, the ultimate outrage." The emphasis, of course, his. Though he rejected stereotypes, including those of the left, he held on to this one.

Dilettante: What he was. In its fine, original sense. He did read skippingly, skim over the flowers, take what he could use, leave it behind when it came to bore him, committed not to philosophy but to pleasure. Unlike ourselves, who now take him so seriously.

Fragments: RB on himself, in his not very impersonal third-person: "His first, or nearly first text (1942) consists of fragments,… 'because incoherence is preferable to a distorting order.' Since then … he has never stopped writing in brief bursts…." As in "Fragments d'un discours amoureux," which precisely does not equal "A lover's discourse."

Freedom: the primary, pervasive value. From the self-evident, from the classic, from the bourgeois, from what he called the Doxa; from Nature which is not nature but nurture; from the "binary prison" of conventional sexuality, text and sexuality released together. Released from what? Ah, there's the rub. "From meaning." To "achieve a state of infinite expansion," in a text of enjoyment, of jouissance, a text which "comes."

Grammar: Abstract by its very nature, who in English can write like this about it?

Obsolete in spoken French, the preterite, which is the cornerstone of Narration, always signifies the presence of Art…. Its function is no longer that of a tense [but] to reduce reality to a point of time, and to abstract, from the depth of a multiplicity of experience, a pure verbal act…. It presupposes a world which is constructed, elaborated, self-sufficient, reduced to significant lines, and not one which has been sent sprawling before us, for us to take or leave. Behind the preterite there always lurks a demiurge, a God, or a reciter.

Can you get any more intelligent than this?

Logic: The mind can't entertain two ideas at once, wrote Descartes, because the pineal gland can't be in two places at the same time. C'n'est pas logique. Boileau's "Twelfth Satire" equated ambiguity and equivocation long before Larousse. Reason was the Goddess the Revolution installed in Notre Dame. In the French words of the Internationale it's Reason that announces the final conflict. It's Justice in the English version. Experiential versus cognitive, empirical versus rational.

Neologism: Professor Picard accused him of jargon. He loved neologisms: they too were insignia of liberty. Against Doxa, paradox; against stereotypes, "novation": escape from the limits of authorized French. Playing with roots. With Greek ("holophrase," "semiophysis," "semioclasty"). The petty bourgeois can't do it; their Larousse, unlike English dictionaries, gives no derivations. You have to go to Littré, Robert; derivations are the privilege of the educated, the signifiers of (don't say it) power.

Object: He believes in it, repudiates abstraction. Yet il n'y a pas de hors-texte. There being no outside to the text, the object is hard to get at. The text is our universe, and we live inside it like the Shropshire Lad, in a world we never made. But what for Derrida is a philosophical position is for Barthes the actuality of experience. He really does live in a universe of signs. It's not surprising that he wants us to join him there; language, he says somewhere, was his Nature. He likes to quote vivid descriptions; it's the physicality of objects that he admires in Michelet. Yet his own language rarely evokes direct physical experience. The scarf the lover of A Lover's Discourse selects for his beloved is merely a sign; we are not told its texture or color. What RB describes, so well that we examine them as never before, are not objects but texts, written but also visual, stills from Ivan the Terrible, the plates of the Grande Encyclopédie: signifying phrases of the world's language. Texts were for him Nature, took the place of the conventional Nature which excluded him and which he repudiated as one more of the masks of clarté. Language he can describe incomparably, the nuance of its structures, the susurrus of its words. It is the rustle of language that he hears, not the rustle of Julia's silks, or anybody else's. Vendler doubts, in the course of her fine appreciation, that he was interested enough in people to write the novel he intended, and indeed, even in the clearly personal A Lover's Discourse the beloved X seems as abstract as his designation. Through abstraction the brilliant intelligence can at once confess its pain and hold it at an ironic distance. So the examples are far more often taken from literature than from life: Proust, Goethe. When we do get a signifying object, the blue coat and yellow vest belong to Werther.

Obscurity: RB by RB: "He realizes then how obscure such statements, clear as they are to him, must be for many others." Language obscure enough, elliptical enough, must in its "dreadful freedom" sacrifice fraternity and equality to liberty. The reader is continually being tested: are you intelligent enough? Industrious enough? Not what RB envisaged in 1963 when he rejected an academic ideology "articulated around a technique difficult enough to constitute an instrument of selection," in favor of an "immanent criticism" which required, "in the work's presence, only a power of astonishment." Obscurity becomes protective clothing, thick enough, all too often, to convert what might otherwise be productive challenge into dismissible peevishness: that wasn't Barthes's intention, who claimed, growing older, "no power, a little knowledge, a little wisdom, and as much flavor as possible." The author's work escapes him; he told us that. And the academy does not deal in astonishment; he told us that too.

Power: Why so much when he claimed none? The young thrill, perhaps, of putting everything at risk, safe in the suspicion that everything deconstructed will come together again by pure bourgeois inertia?

Plural: Central to his lexicon, the word evokes the consistency of a life. Invoking La Déesse Homosexualité ("all she permits to say, to do, to understand, to know"), he would speak of "cruising," in reading too. That too was liberty.

Received ideas: he had his own. Marxism afforded them; so did psychoanalysis. Self-evident, they followed of themselves.

Responsibility: "What we can ask of a writer is that he be responsible"—but not for his opinions, and not to truth, to which he "loses all claim." Yet Barthes continues: a writer's "true responsibility" is to "literature … as a Mosaic glance at the Promised Land of the real." For him, as for Orwell, writing was an ethical enterprise. But where Orwell warred against the abstraction that obfuscates the appalling cruelty of the actualities it is our duty to see feelingly, Barthes felt the characteristic French responsibility, not first to the real, but to language. Still, though you can desire the escape from meaning, try for it, you can't accomplish it. Language foils you, stubbornly referential. The reader foils you, always looking for a meaning, not really satisfied to think he's free to find his own, wanting at least to approximate yours. And saying the same thing over a lifetime's écriture, you foil yourself. You thought it was true, and necessary to be said. Which brings us back to responsibility—the old-fashioned kind.

Truth: "Literature has an effect of truth much more violent for me than that of religion." A sentence from his journal, his last published work; he had been reading of the death of old Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace while his own mother was dying. Cagy still: an effect. Yet somehow truth made its way into the sentence. When push comes to shove, it's the Promised Land that seems real.

(Hand) Writing: Introducing RB by RB: "All this must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel." Cagy again; hide-and-seek, RB's discreet charm. Yet he arranged for the words to appear not in print but in his own fine rapid cursive, most personal of signatures. On another page, notes made in bed show handwriting loosened but still his own. Of course he didn't type.

Zed: He called it "The letter of deviance" and made it his own. First the straight line of assertion, then the zigzag of "reversal, contradiction, reactive energy"; but, on the other hand, yet. In the end of Mythologies, for instance: one demystifies the bourgeois myth of "good French wine"—but thereby regretfully "cut[s] oneself off from those who are … warmed" by what is in fact good, condemned, however progressive one's politics, to a sociality one's intelligence must render merely theoretical. So too the Author zigzags back in The Pleasure of the Text; though "as an institution" he's dead, yet "lost in the midst of the text (not behind it, like a god from the machine) there's always the other, the author." For (emphasis again his) "I desire the author"—"d'une certaine façon."

When the Author died in France in 1968 it seemed a local matter. But as the report spread and discipline after discipline faced the demands of grand theory, the game turns serious. The insouciant critic gives way to the sober philosopher; people get nervous. In 1989 the lead article in the journal of the American Historical Association called "authorial presence" a "dream"; invoked Barthes, and after him Foucault and Derrida; worried whether, the author absent, intellectual history could be written at all. The simplicity of the answer may perhaps startle; the writer confesses that "it is beginning to look as if belief in the author may be our best response" (italics his). "Writers from a variety of disciplines are now suggesting that, if we hope to make sense of any text, we must first attribute to it an author." He had to read an awful lot to get to that point; my grandmother called it going round your elbow to get to your thumb. Perhaps, after the years in the wilderness, the professors are again turning their eyes toward the Promised Land, joining the Common Reader, to whose common sense Dr. Johnson trusted because it was "uncorrupted with literary prejudices," "the refinements of subtilty," or "the dogmatism of learning."

"Of all the intellectual notables who have emerged since World War II in France," writes Susan Sontag, "Roland Barthes is the one whose work I am most certain will endure." If so, it is because he is the one whose writing can be read, at least intermittently, for pleasure. Pleasure of the text and pleasure of the author, no god and no authority, but a human being to be enjoyed, for his commitment to freedom, to multiplicity, and to delight, for his intelligence, and for the generosity of his intentions. He desired the author. So do we.

Clara Claiborne Park, "Author! Author! Reconstructing Roland Barthes," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLIII, No. 3, Autumn, 1990, pp. 377-98.