SOURCE: Calvet, Louis-Jean. “The ‘After-Death.’” In Roland Barthes: A Biography, translated by Sarah Wykes, pp. 256-67. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1994.

[In the following excerpt, originally published in French in 1990, Calvet examines works by Barthes published after his death and summarizes his intellectual and activist legacy.]

After his death, there were dozens of people who claimed that they had been Barthes's best friend, the person who was closest and dearest to him. Dozens of people sent letters of condolence to Michel Salzedo. The fact that there were so many is proof of the pretension of these self-proclaimed friends, some of whom had probably been in the ‘pains-in-the-neck’ category. It is also symptomatic of Barthes's lifestyle, his ability to compartmentalize his life and of his preference for seeing people on a one-to-one basis, which meant that all his friends were under the impression that their relationship with him was unique. He felt different with everyone he saw on a regular basis, and he wanted to give his all to each and every one of them. Because he believed in the virtues of dialogue, he cultivated numerous quite separate friendships. On top of this, the different areas of his life hardly ever overlapped. He carefully divided up his groups of friends according to the categories they fell into, be it professional, literary, homosexual, old friends, etc. His reluctance to let these different networks overlap could be seen as a hangover from the days when homosexuality was a social taboo and was forced underground. However, perhaps this does not explain his behaviour fully, and Philippe Sollers may be right in interpreting the way he organized his life as an ‘aesthetic gesture’. For his part, Olivier Burgelin believes that it stemmed from ‘a desire not to impose people on one another’.

In addition, his kindness, his capacity for listening, and listening with such attentiveness, made everyone he talked to feel extraordinary and special. Obviously this was the case with his students, most of whom must have felt at one time or another that they were his intellectual heir, the person who would carry on his work. Barthes protected himself, withdrew sometimes, but being afraid of loneliness or boredom the protection he sought was in a complex and contradictory network of affective relations. A network of friends, lovers, contacts, of preferences which were quite temporary or perhaps wholly provisional, but which were experienced by those involved—or perhaps imagined by them—as being absolute and definitive.

THE ‘TOILETTE OF THE DEAD’

Posthumous works are also part of the ‘after death’ and they were numerous. Between 1981 and 1987, no fewer than five books were published by Seuil under the name of Roland Barthes. The first of them, published in 1981, was Le Grain de la voix (The Grain of the Voice), which consisted of a collection of thirty-eight interviews which he had given to various newspapers and magazines from 1962 to 1980. An unsigned introductory note, which was in fact written by François Wahl, stressed that this volume brought together ‘most of the interviews given in French by Roland Barthes’, and it went on:

The best possible preface would have been a description by Roland Barthes himself of what an interview is. We will never have such a description now, but we do have a few pages where Roland Barthes analyses, with admirable clarity, the passage of the spoken word to the word transcribed: we thought it fitting to begin with these pages, where the style of writing interlaces with the grain of the voice.¹

These few pages, which were written in 1974 as the preface to a series of dialogues published by Grenoble University Press, are an incisive reflection on the process of transcription, on the transference of the spoken word into writing:

We talk, a tape recording is made, diligent secretaries listen to our words to refine, transcribe and punctuate them, producing a first draft that we can tidy up afresh, before it goes on to publication, the book, eternity. Haven't we just gone through the ‘toilette of the dead’? We have embalmed our speech like a mummy, to preserve it forever. Because we really must last a bit longer than our voices.²

Barthes asks himself what is lost and what is gained in this process. What is lost is ‘an innocence’, the material presence of two bodies facing one another, what linguists call the phatic function of language: the tags, the ‘isn't that so?’ or the ‘you see’ which are a kind of appeal to the other person, which punctuate a communication and ensure it gets across. What is gained is the more logical organization of the discourse, which occurs when, for example, the ‘but's’ and the ‘so's’ are replaced by ‘although’ and ‘therefore’, with the written preference for subordination. A more ordered, hierarchical structure is imposed on the ideas. Thus, when spoken language is transformed into written language, the body gives way to the mind.

The following year, 1982, a new collection of essays appeared under the rather bizarre title of L'Obvie et l'obtus³ subtitled Essais critiques III.⁴ It contained twenty-three texts, prefaces and articles, on the subjects of the theatre, painting and music. Again, it was prefaced by an introductory note by François Wahl outlining how at the end of his life Barthes had wanted to publish a new series of ‘critical essays’. On the back panel of the cover there was a blurb signed ‘R.B.’, comprising twenty-two lines of quotes explaining the meaning of the book's title. On closer examination it turns out to be a surprising montage extracted from the third essay in the collection, ‘The third sense: research notes on several Eisenstein stills’, which has been edited and presented in this strange fashion. To let the reader judge, here is the blurb:

I believe I can distinguish ❙ three levels of sense. An informational level, ❙ this level is that of communication. ❙ A symbolic level ❙ and this second level, in its totality, is that of signification. Is this all? ❙ No, I read, I receive ❙ a third meaning, erratic, yet evident and persistent, I do not know what its signified is, at least I cannot give it a name, ❙ this third level ❙ is that of signifying [signifiance]. ❙ The symbolic meaning ❙ compels my recognition by a double determination: it is intentional (it is what the author has meant) and it is selected from a kind of general, common lexicon of symbols: it is a meaning ❙ which moves ahead of me ❙ I propose to call this complete sign the obvious meaning. ❙ As for the other, the third meaning, the one which appears ‘in excess’, as a supplement my intellection cannot quite absorb, a meaning both persistent and fugitive, apparent and evasive, I propose calling this the obtuse meaning.⁵

The vertical lines added here mark the cuts which are nowhere mentioned on the cover of the book, the first line marks a cut of three words, the second a cut of twenty-six words, the third a cut of thirty-three words, and the fourth a cut of fourteen lines. This process of cutting adds up to a total of seventy lines: the mind boggles! Particularly since this is a mutilated version—in which the use of the scissors is not indicated in any way, either by brackets or ellipses—of the text where Barthes explains the two terms which go to make up the title of the book, ‘the obvious’ and ‘the obtuse’. For obvious: ‘Obvius means moving ahead which is just the case with this meaning, which seeks me out’ and for obtuse: ‘This word comes readily to my mind, and miraculously, on exploring its etymology, I find it already yields a theory of the supplementary meaning; obtusus means blunted, rounded.’⁶

Two years later the same thing occurred in Le Bruissement de la langue (The Rustle of Language), which is subtitled Essais critiques IV. It consists of a collection of forty-six texts, all of which again are prefaces or articles. Plus, by way of a blurb, there is the same kind of mutilated extract. In quotation marks and signed ‘R.B.’, ninety-two lines of an original Barthes text have been condensed into twenty-seven lines, that is, three pages have been turned into a half-page extract!⁷

The same thing occurred yet again in L'Aventure sémiologique (The Semiotic Challenge), which was published in 1985. Collected together in this volume were fifteen previously published texts, most of them available in the form of reviews, and some of which had already been republished several times (for instance, ‘Elements of semiology’, ‘Introduction to the structural analysis of narrative’, etc.). Again, included on the back panel of the cover was a chopped-up extract from one of Barthes's texts—although this time three out of the five cuts had been indicated by ellipses.

Of course, Barthes's heirs or executors have every right to do if not absolutely everything, then at least a great deal with his writings. And of course it makes good commercial sense to republish previously published texts, add a couple of unpublished ones, give the whole thing an attractive title, and thereby produce a ‘new’ book. But perhaps it is worth asking whether the publication of Incidents in 1987 was not overstepping the mark. This slim volume, in total 116 pages of large type, brought together four texts: ‘La lumière du Sud-Ouest’ (‘The light of the south-west’), published in L'Humanité on 10 September 1977; ‘Incidents’, a series of notes Barthes had made while he was in Morocco in 1968-9; ‘Au Palais ce soir’ (‘At the Palace tonight’), published in Vogue Homme in May 1978; and finally ‘Soirées de Paris’ (‘Parisian evenings’), a diary Barthes had kept between 24 August and 17 September 1979. Thus two out of the four texts had already been published elsewhere. In his ‘Editor's note’, François Wahl wrote that it was only right to publish Incidents because ‘the text was ready for the printer and because Barthes was considering publishing it in Tel Quel.’ As for ‘Soirées de Paris’, he said that ‘the manuscript is titled, the pages are numbered and, as the reader will see, it contains several corrections in the margin which make it quite clear that it was intended for publication—one day.’⁸ Then he added the following:

Is it right to pretend that we do not know what in fact we know only too well—the total lack of generosity, in all senses, with which the doubts Barthes occasionally expresses in these pages about modern forms of writing or his despair over desire will be received? R.B. was not someone who would have shrunk from making a statement if he thought it justified.⁹

Rather than speculating about a possible lack of generosity on the part of the readers, it might be worth asking whether Barthes would really have wanted these pages to be published. In 1979, he had published an extract from this ‘diary’ in Tel Quel, the first part of which had been written in Urt between 13 July and 13 August 1977, and the second part in Paris on 25 April. He had also added a ‘deliberation’ on whether or not one should keep a diary. But even though this was published after his mother's death, it still made no allusion to his homosexuality. It is principally because of the explicit references to homosexuality it contains, and not because of his comments on modern writers—echoes of which were already present in Roland Barthes—that the publication of Incidents might be considered to represent the breaking of a tacit agreement. Hasn't Roland Barthes been rather too heavily made-up in this ‘toilette of the dead’ than he would have wished?

Additionally, and in contrast, François Wahl had explicitly declared his intention not to let even the smallest unpublished text by Barthes be published without his say-so. The same applied to any republished texts. It will be recalled that Barthes had agreed to let Jean-Loup Rivière put together a collection of his writings on the theatre and publish them together with his own preface. As Barthes was putting the final touches to Camera Lucida, Rivière was also finishing the editing of the collection and his own preface. He then submitted the whole thing to Barthes. Naturally, the text, which to this day remains unpublished, highlighted the fact that during the period when Barthes had become its chronicler, the theatre had been a site of struggle. But it also raised the question of why he had stopped writing for the theatre and asked how can one simply give up what has once been a real passion, how can one leave the theatre?

Today Rivière explains that ‘this gesture of his both disturbs and intrigues me. In Roland Barthes, he writes: “At the crossroads of the entire oeuvre, perhaps the Theatre.” So why did he abandon it?’ And Rivière suggested in his preface that perhaps this paradoxical shift from passionate engagement to disappointment was in part connected with the rise to power of De Gaulle: ‘In May 1958, there was a brutal change from a system in which the head of state represented France to a system in which he incarnated it. Barthes published an article on Ubu Roi and gradually withdrew.’ The seventy articles which he selected for the book spanned a seven-year period from 1953 to 1960 and were mostly taken from Théâtre populaire. Since they were all written in the 1950s, Barthes felt somewhat embarrassed by their dated style on rereading them, especially since he was about to publish a new book which bore hardly any resemblance to any of his previous texts. He explained to Rivière that they must make a few cuts, leave out a few articles, perhaps add a couple of new ones, but that at present he had no time to write them. Besides, he probably did not want the two books to come out at the same time, and Camera Lucida naturally took precedence. So together he and Rivière agreed to postpone the publication of ‘Writings on the theatre’ until later. But then Barthes died.

A few months later Rivière, who had signed a contract for the book with Seuil, sent his manuscript to François Wahl. Wahl opposed its publication strongly, just as he had opposed the publication of any of Barthes's letters, especially his voluminous correspondence with Robert David and Philippe Rebeyrol. His argument for not publishing the ‘Writings on the theatre’ was, of course, that Barthes had not wanted the project to go any further. In fact, all Barthes had wanted to do was take a look at the articles Rivière had selected and make a final choice on what was to be included later, after the publication of Camera Lucida. So the manuscript was dropped. As for Barthes's letters, Wahl's arguments against their publication were different: Barthes had not approved of biography, so he could not under any circumstances give his blessing to a project which came close to biography. In both cases, Wahl's clampdown, his determination to stand in the way of any publication which he would not have final control over, meant he was in a key position of power. It was a position some people thought he had usurped: Romaric Sulger-Büel says he behaved as if were the executor of Barthes's will, which he was not. The novelist Max Genève, who had run up against similar problems while making a series of radio programmes on the author of Mythologies for France-Culture, wrote to Wahl: ‘Stop thinking you're Barthes.’

Jean-Loup Rivière, unable to publish the book he had been commissioned to produce, found his own oblique and poetic way of paying homage to Barthes. Several years before, Barthes had got him taken on at the Beaubourg centre as leader of a research group on the image. In particular, the group had come up with the idea of an exhibition on cartography, which was put on in the main gallery of the Pompidou Centre in 1980 under the title ‘Maps and figures of the earth’. A huge catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition a few months after Barthes's death. Inside, on the first page, there is a reproduction of an ordnance survey map and superimposed on to this sober background is a text by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Few people can have realized that the map showed the Urt region and that on the right bank of the Adour river, opposite the village and slightly downstream, was an area marked ‘The Barthes’.

A CHARACTER IN A NOVEL

Along with these posthumous publications (and withholdings), Barthes was also about to embark on a new career which he could hardly have imagined for himself—as a fictional character. Philippe Sollers was the first to ‘open fire’ in 1983 with the publication of his novel Women, in which Barthes appears in the final stages of his life as a character called Werth, along with Lacan and Althusser. In the same year Renaud Camus published Roman Roi, in which Barthes had a somewhat minor role playing a librarian in Romania. Of greater interest is Norbert Bensaïd's Le Regard des statues, which was published eight years after Barthes's death. Michel Laporte, an academic, writer and intellectual guru is run over by a car. A crowd gathers round his hospital bed, mostly women (his lovers) and disciples. Then there is Antoine, the young man who ran him over, who comes to visit him regularly, worries about him and eventually develops a bizarre relationship with him. ‘Did Laporte cause the accident, consciously or not?’ he wonders. ‘Is he possessed by an obscure death-wish?’ worries a psychoanalyst friend. Whatever the case, Laporte's condition does not improve and he eventually dies, not from the effects of the accident but from a heart-attack.

There are obvious parallels here between the Laporte character and Barthes. There is the accident, of course, but there is also the fact that both are famous intellectuals, that both have suffered from tuberculosis, and finally that both have complicated love lives (except that Barthes is homosexual and Laporte heterosexual). In addition, like Barthes, Laporte seems not to want to get better and he has just recently been bereaved, although in his case it is his former mistress, Anna, who has died, and not his mother. Moreover, both have just finished a book: Barthes's Camera Lucida came out a few days before his accident, Laporte is correcting the proofs for his book in hospital. In short, everything leads one to the conclusion that the novel is a roman à clef.

However, according to Norbert Bensaïd, this is not the case. He claims never to have known Barthes, or only to have met him briefly a couple of times: ‘My book has nothing, or very little to do with Barthes. There's the accident of course, but that's a common news item. No, what I was interested in was the Antoine character, and the idea of guilt. I found it astonishing to think that one could be guilty of causing the death of someone else without it really being your fault. Guilt without having done anything wrong.’ He adds that none of the characters are disguised portraits of real people. Even if Laporte is a combination of Althusser, Sartre and Barthes (he has the former's physical appearance, Sartre's political activism and Barthes's death): ‘all the other characters are completely fictional.’ However, it still seems likely that it was this little supplementary mythology—one too many—putting a violent full stop to Barthes's deliberations (to write or not to write a novel) which led to his being transformed without wishing it into a fictional character.

Then in 1980, Julia Kristeva published Les Samouraïs, which comes with the disclaimer ‘novel’ on its front cover. Faced with such a title, it becomes difficult to avoid comparisons with De Beauvoir's The Mandarins, which deals with similar themes. Kristeva's novel, like Sollers's Women, is obviously partly autobiographical. She narrates her arrival in France, her Paris, which is inhabited by a good number of famous intellectuals including Lacan, Sartre, Goldmann and Roland Barthes (or Armand Bréhal as he is called in the book). The novel contains many of the same anecdotes which appear in the present biography (which it should be pointed out come from different if convergent sources). Among these are Barthes's behaviour during the events of May '68, Sollers's invention of the title for S/Z, the trip to China and his accident and death. Evidently Kristeva has invented very little and her ‘novel’ is really an autobiography. Nevertheless, the fact remains that for reasons of her own, she felt the need to add a fictional flavour to this chronicle of her adjustment to life in France and, once again, Bréhal/Barthes became a character in a novel.

To this list of Philippe Sollers, Renaud Camus, Norbert Bensaïd and Julia Kristeva can be added another name, Philippe Roger, whose book on Barthes, although not a novel, was entitled Roland Barthes, roman (‘Roland Barthes, a novel’). Few theorists have so haunted the pages of works of fiction—or works which claim to be fiction—after their deaths. So much so that one is bound to ask just what will Barthes have left behind? Is his legacy limited to these allusive apparitions in the pages of a few dubious scenarios?

THE BARTHES SYSTEM

The ‘after death’ is also the time for assessments. This is not the time or place to attempt to evaluate Barthes's theoretical legacy. It is too soon to assess his influence on contemporary research and, in any case, this would require a different genre, a different kind of book. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to outline briefly what could be termed ‘the Barthes system’, the system he has bequeathed not just to a handful of theorists, but to thousands of ordinary readers. How did this man whose life, friendships, travels, feelings, work and publications have been chronicled in this biography function intellectually? It could be said, perhaps rather provocatively, that his main talents and innovations fall within the field of literature, and that his principal contribution was to bring literature into the human sciences. Let us be frank about this: from Writing Degree Zero to Camera Lucida, Barthes contributed a great deal to semiology, textual analysis and, more indirectly, his work also has repercussions on linguistics or sociology. But his principal contribution was not a systematic theory but a certain way of looking at things, an intuitive approach.

It was this approach which taught thousands of readers to regard the scraps and ephemera of social life (news items, photos, posters, daily customs) as signs: in other words, he made his readers aware of the question of meaning. Some of the detail of his interpretations in Mythologies can be challenged or relativized, as has been seen, but this does not affect the import of his work, the fact that his interpretations of the Dominici affair, literary criticism, colonial discourse, the poster for Panzani pasta, the Tour de France, wrestling and the Abbé Pierre have changed the way thousands of people look at things. He showed his readers what a society could reveal about itself through the signs it produced. It would be wrong to think that Barthes introduced semiological theories to a wider public, even if some passages in his texts give this impression. In fact he did much more: he helped to create a semantic reflex by showing us that we live in a world charged with meaning. According to Olivier Burgelin, ‘he was a mystic’:

Not an ascetic of course, but a sensual mystic, who practised a cult of sensuality. He was a mystic because the whole of his work was an exploration of the same vital question, and his whole life, which was continually being taken back to the drawing board, was engaged in this exploration. The question he explored was that of meaning, of language, of literature.

To this Violette Morin adds: ‘He was like a Beethoven symphony, with a powerful central theme and lots of tiny variations and desires to write all kinds of things. So he would veer off in this or that direction, but he always returned in the end to the same theme’.

This is the real lesson Barthes taught us: we live in a world teeming with signs. Veiled by their signifiers, by writing, by the false obviousness of the ‘natural’, by pseudo ‘common sense’, clothing or theatre, we had almost no idea how to decode these signs. We did not know how the town plan, the discourse of literary criticism, the meal of steak and chips or the treatment of a news item could conceal a social meaning. It was Barthes who made us aware of their existence.

If he was able to achieve this, it was mainly through his style, his writing. At a time when linguistics (centred around Chomsky and his generative grammar) was elaborating increasingly sophisticated models and when linguistic texts were becoming increasingly unreadable, Barthes mastered these theories and made them both readable and crystal clear. Even today, if one wants to introduce students to the concepts of connotation and denotation, one recommends Barthes, not Hjelmslev. But he also used these theories to develop his own line of thought and to support his own intuitions. For there are two ways for the researcher to proceed. The first is through slow and rigorous elaboration of a line of thought, which at times involves a certain amount of drudgery. The other way is by means of lightning flashes of intuition. In the former case, what is discovered is the end result of a methodological process and its proof is already present in this methodology. In the second case, a posteriori methodological justifications are needed. Barthes's great talent was to absorb contemporary theories and use them to shore up his own intuitions.

There are numerous examples of this way of working in his texts. In Writing Degree Zero there are his discreet allusions to Marx and Sartre, in Mythologies the way he used concepts taken from Saussure and Hjelmslev to write his theoretical postscript. Then there is his use of Brecht, not just in his articles on the theatre but also in A Lover's Discourse, and the adaption of phonology to serve his own ends in The Fashion System. Finaly, there are his borrowings from Lacan, Bakhtin and also the young authors who gathered around him and were busy constructing what has been labelled, rather meaninglessly, modernity. Barthes was continually subjugating other people's theories to his own moods, his own instincts. In order to carry out this theoretical re-routing, to concoct his own brew from all the diverse ingredients he collected, he needed more than talent: he needed to have his own way of looking at the world, his own voice and style. If Barthes is not a theorist, then neither is he simply an essay writer who used other people's theories.

Of the two important French intellectuals who died in 1980, Sartre is of course the theorist and Barthes the writer. However, somewhat paradoxically, their impact on society is the reverse: the theorist will be remembered for his actions and the writer for his interpretation of the world. Jean-Paul Sartre was a witness, someone who would always sign a petition, hand out a pamphlet, stand on the street and sell a banned newspaper or take over as its editor, and go to court to defend the causes he believed in. For thousands of people, both prior to and after 1968, these are the traces he has left behind, and this activism is at least as important as his theoretical texts, which are difficult to read and even controversial. Barthes, on the other hand, who never went on demonstrations, never handed out pamphlets, never, in short, became ‘militant’ for a cause, will be remembered by the same generation for his texts, for the way he deconstructed the signs our society generates. Because he taught us how to decode these signs.

As these lines are being written, the societies of Eastern Europe are being shaken by momentous changes. It is pointless trying to imagine the content of what these two thinkers, Sartre and Barthes, might have had to say about such events, but it may be possible to sketch the form their thoughts might have taken.

Sartre would most probably have attempted to theorize this object lesson of a system collapsing like a house of cards. For his part, Barthes would probably have analysed the different discourses on these events, the way they were being discussed. He would have given us his interpretation of the ambiguous reactions to German reunification in Western Europe, and in the case of Romania and Poland he would have pointed out what, in the euphoria of the process of democratization, no one wanted to acknowledge. He would probably have proffered readings of topics such as the rise of Muslim fundamentalism and the reemergence of nationalism which, although opposed to the commonsense view of events, would nevertheless not be misreadings. This kind of intervention, characteristic both of the Barthesian universe and of his readers' expectations, meant that he fulfilled a vital critical function in a world which has become so full of signs that it sometimes appears devoid of sense. No one today has replaced Barthes in this role as reader and interpreter of social life. As Olivier Burgelin says:

His death left a void totally out of proportion to anything I could have imagined. An original voice had fallen silent, a voice which had more to say than any other I have ever heard. The world seemed to have become a definitively duller place. We would never again hear Barthes's opinion on any topic.

It is a silence which leaves us in the grip of mere noises themselves.

Notes

1. The Grain of the Voice (1982; transl. by L. Coverdale, London, 1985), p. 3.

2. Ibid., p. 5.

3. Literally, ‘The obvious and the obtuse’, but translated as The Responsibility of Forms (1982). (TN)

4. Called Critical Essays III because after Essais critiques of 1964 Barthes published a second set of essays, ‘Nouveaux essais critiques’, in 1972 (New Critical Essays, 1980), included in the Seuil edition of Writing Degree Zero.

5. The blurb does not appear on the translation, The Responsibility of Forms. (TN)

6. L'Obvie et l'obtus, p. 45. The twenty-two lines which comprise the blurb are in fact a condensation of three pages of text, pp. 42-5 (pp. 41-4 in The Responsibility of Forms).

7. Taken from pp. 94-6 of Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris, 1984).

8. Incidents (Paris, 1987), pp. 8-9.

9. Ibid., p. 10.

Translator's note (TN): All translations are mine if no English edition is cited. Fuller details of the books and articles by Barthes referred to in the text can be found in the bibliography.