Roland Barthes

• 1. Introduction

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  Roland Barthes was walking home through the streets of Paris on the 25th of February 1980 when the driver of a laundry van knocked him down. A month later, on the 26th of March, he died from the pulmonary complications that followed. He was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic and semiotician, and his work resists any single label.

  His subject was signs. He studied the images, words and objects through which a society talks to itself, and he trained his attention on the popular culture that most scholars ignored. Again and again he asked questions that sound simple and turn out to be dangerous.

  What is an ordinary object really saying to us? Who decides what a book means? Can any writing ever be free of hidden assumptions? His answers shifted across four decades, and the shifts are the story. They begin with a boy in Normandy who never knew his father.

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• 2. Sanatoria and Sorbonne

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  Roland Gérard Barthes was born on the 12th of November 1915 in Cherbourg, a town in Normandy. Before his first birthday, his father, the naval officer Louis Barthes, was killed in a battle in the North Sea during World War I. His mother Henriette, his aunt and his grandmother raised him in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne.

  In 1924 the family moved to Paris. Even so, his attachment to his provincial roots stayed strong for the rest of his life.

  From 1935 to 1939 he studied at the University of Paris, the Sorbonne, and earned a licence in classical literature. He showed great promise. Tuberculosis kept interrupting him, though, and treatment often meant isolation in sanatoria. His repeated breakdowns disrupted his studies and his ability to take qualifying examinations. They also exempted him from military service during World War II.

  The years from 1939 to 1948 went to a licence in grammar and philology, his first published papers and a medical study in which he took part. In 1941 he received a DES, roughly equivalent to an MA, for work on Greek tragedy under the direction of Paul Mazon.

  In 1948 he returned to purely academic work and collected short-term posts at institutes in France, Romania and Egypt. He also wrote for Combat, a leftist Parisian paper, and that writing grew into his first full-length book. In 1952 he settled at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he studied lexicology and sociology. He would stay there for seven years.

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• 3. Writing and Everyday Myth

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  Jean-Paul Sartre's What Is Literature?, published in 1947, set the mood of French letters when Barthes began to think seriously about writing. Sartre expressed disenchantment with established forms and with avant-garde experiments that, he felt, alienated readers. Barthes wanted to find what could be called unique and original in writing.

  His answer came in Writing Degree Zero, which appeared in 1953. He argued that conventions shape both language and style, so neither is purely creative. What he called "writing" is the individual choice of how to bend those conventions for an effect. That choice is the creative act. Yet once the public has it, it begins hardening into a convention, so creativity has to keep changing.

  His study of the historian Jules Michelet pushed the idea further. Barthes found Michelet's views of history and society plainly flawed. A reader, he said, should keep a critical distance and learn from the errors, because understanding how a mind goes wrong reveals more about its era than its claims do. He praised avant-garde writing for the same reason. Its obvious artificiality keeps the audience objective. Art, he believed, should interrogate the world instead of explaining it.

  Then came fifty-four short essays, mostly written between 1954 and 1956 for the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles and gathered in 1957 as Mythologies. The subjects ran from soap detergents to professional wrestling. Barthes also read the Citroën car as a modern cathedral, a symbol of the fetishization of consumer goods. A magazine cover showing a Black soldier saluting the French flag, he argued, quietly reinforced colonial ideology.

  His most famous example was wine. Its image as a robust and healthy habit is a bourgeois ideal, contradicted by the fact that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating. To explain the trick, Barthes described two levels of meaning. A picture of a full, dark bottle points first to a fermented, alcoholic drink. The bourgeoisie then attach a second meaning to it: a healthy, relaxing experience. He called such second-order meanings connotations, and he said the motives behind them range from selling products to simply preserving the status quo.

  In The Fashion System he showed the same trick working through words. When fashion declares a blouse ideal for an outfit, the claim is instantly accepted as truth, though the word could as easily be skirt or vest. Then something unexpected happened to the debunker. People began asking Barthes to comment on cultural phenomena, and his own book was absorbed into the culture it attacked. He started to doubt that demystifying culture for the masses could work at all.

  In the summer of 1957, knowing little English, he taught at Middlebury College and befriended Richard Howard in New York City. Howard would become the translator of much of his work.

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• 4. Structure and Its Limits

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  The early 1960s found Barthes chairing faculty positions around France and absorbed in semiology and structuralism. His books challenged traditional views of literary criticism and of the renowned figures of literature. That brought him into open conflict with Raymond Picard, a well-known Sorbonne professor of literature.

  Picard attacked what he called French New Criticism, a label he applied to Barthes inaccurately. He accused it of obscurity and of disrespect toward France's literary roots. Barthes answered in 1966 with Criticism and Truth. He charged the old, bourgeois criticism with ignoring the finer points of language and with selective blindness toward challenging theories such as Marxism.

  His own structural method appears in the essay "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." Barthes wanted to show that a sentence and a whole story share a structure, so narrative could be read along linguistic lines. He divided it into three levels: functions, actions and narrative. A function is the smallest unit, such as one descriptive word. Words like "dark," "mysterious" and "odd" add up to a character, which is an action. Characters in turn make up the narrative. With this ladder he could judge how realistic a function is, and so how authentically a story reflects reality.

  He never believed structuralism could become a strict science, although he thought literary discourse could be formalized. The late 1960s brought radical movements to criticism, including post-structuralism and the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida. Derrida spotted a weakness. A closed system that refers to nothing outside the work needs a symbol of constant, universal meaning as its orienting point. No such symbol exists, so the whole premise of structuralism as a way to judge writing is hollow.

  Barthes took the objection seriously, and it sent him looking for a culture that did not need such a fixed point.

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• 5. The Death of the Author

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  Japan was where Barthes went in 1966 to pursue that question. There he wrote Empire of Signs, published in 1970. He found a culture content without any great focus by which everything else is judged. The Emperor's Palace at the centre of Tokyo struck him as a silent and nondescript presence, avoided and unconsidered. Signs there, he felt, kept only the meaning their own signifiers naturally carried. This was the opposite of the society he had dissected in Mythologies, which kept piling grander meanings on top of the natural ones.

  In 1967, soon after the trip, he wrote the essay "The Death of the Author," the piece for which he is best known. Barthes saw the author as a forced projection of one final meaning onto a text. Language multiplies meaning and no one can know the author's mind, so a final explanation is impossible. He added a sharp economic twist. Giving a book one ultimate meaning makes it consumable, something to be used up and replaced in a capitalist market.

  The essay replaces the traditional author, the lone genius with an original imagination, with a figure Barthes calls the scriptor. The scriptor can only combine existing texts in new ways. This figure has no past and is born together with the text, so the writer's biography counts for little next to textual and generic conventions. Barthes put the result in a single line: "the death of the author is the birth of the reader." Some critics call the essay post-structuralist. Others see a transitional step, noting that the author's irrelevance was already part of structuralist thinking.

  If meaning cannot come from the author, the reader must create it. Barthes tested this in S/Z, his 1970 reading of Sarrasine, a novella by Balzac. He cut the text into lexias, units chosen arbitrarily to keep his method unbiased, and sorted its meanings under five major codes. The story, he found, carries a plurality of meaning, but sequential elements such as a definite timeline limit it.

  From this he drew his ideal of the reversible text, open to many independent interpretations. In a readerly text, the reader only receives ready-made meaning. In a writerly text, the reader joins in producing it. Barthes wanted to make the reader "no longer a consumer but a producer of the text." In the same years he wrote for the avant-garde magazine Tel Quel alongside Philippe Sollers, and in 1971 he served as visiting professor at the University of Geneva.

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• 6. Pleasure and Neutral Writing

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  By the late 1970s Barthes saw two kinds of language at war. Popular culture, in his view, pigeonholed things with its titles and descriptions. Neutral language stayed open and noncommittal. He named the official, unacknowledged systems of meaning the Doxa, and he named their opposite the Para-doxa.

  Marxism disappointed him here. Despite its anti-ideological stance, he felt, it used violent language and assertive meanings just as bourgeois literature did. Both were Doxa, and both assimilated culturally.

  His reply was The Pleasure of the Text, published in 1975. He chose a subject that conservative society and militant leftists both rejected: hedonism. Reading for pleasure, he wrote, is a social act, since the reader takes in the writer's ideas. The climax of that pleasure, which he called bliss or jouissance, is a moment of being lost inside the text. At that point the experience leaves the social realm and escapes culturally loaded language.

  Neutral writing stayed hard to achieve. One word with a loaded social meaning could turn a carefully neutral passage into an assertion. Barthes felt Mythologies had suffered from exactly this. He decided to try a novelistic rhetoric that would not impose its meaning on the reader.

  The result was A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, published in 1977. It offers the fictionalized reflections of a lover seeking to identify, and be identified by, an anonymous amorous other. The unrequited lover searches for signs by which to show and receive love, and the search exposes the illusory myths inside it. Yet the lover is a sympathetic figure, open to understanding as well as criticism.

  Barthes also published an autobiography titled Roland Barthes in 1975. In 1977 he was elected to the chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at the Collège de France, the summit of his academic career.

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• 7. Camera Lucida

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  Henriette Barthes died in 1977 at the age of 85. She and her son had lived together for 60 years, and her death was a serious blow. Out of that loss came Camera Lucida, one of his last major works, and a book partly about photography and partly about photographs of his mother. It reproduces a number of images, but none shows Henriette.

  Photography had interested him throughout his career. In his 1950s myth essays he had shown how a photograph can carry implied meanings that bourgeois culture uses to suggest natural truths. Even so, he granted the photograph a unique power to present a real representation of the world.

  In Camera Lucida he separated two things. The studium is the obvious, symbolic meaning of a picture. The punctum is the purely personal detail that, in his words, pierces the viewer. He was troubled that the line between them collapses once personal meaning is shared and rationalized.

  The photograph of his mother as a child solved the problem for him. A picture, he argued, falsely suggests what is, when what was would be more accurate. Henriette's childhood photograph is evidence of what has ceased to be. It does not make reality solid. It reminds us that the world keeps changing. That leaves a feeling of loss that never leaves his own subjective state when he looks at it.

  His private notes, published in February 2009 as Journal de deuil, or Journal of Mourning, began on the 26th of November 1977, the day after she died, and ran until the 15th of September 1979. In them he wrote: "Do not say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not in mourning. I'm suffering."

  He described the corner of his room where she had been bedridden, where she died and where he now slept. He kept flowers on a table there and wrote: "I do not wish to travel anymore so that I may stay here and prevent the flowers from withering away."

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• 8. Afterlives and Critics

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  A small role in the 1979 French film The Brontë Sisters had Barthes playing William Makepeace Thackeray. His real afterlife was larger. His criticism fed structuralism, semiotics and post-structuralism, and its influence reaches any field concerned with representing information and models of communication, including computers, photography, music and literature.

  Oddly, he left no school of followers. Because his work kept adapting and refuting ideas of stability and constancy, it offers no canon to model oneself on, and so there is no "Barthesism."

  Posthumous books kept appearing. In 1987 François Wahl edited Incidents, a collection of fragments from his journals, including Light of the Sud Ouest, his childhood memories of rural French life. In November 2007 Yale University Press published Richard Howard's English translation of What is Sport, a text close in spirit to Mythologies. It was originally commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a documentary film directed by Hubert Aquin. In 2012 came Travels in China, notes from a three-week trip with a group from Tel Quel in 1974. The experience left him somewhat disappointed, since he found China "not at all exotic, not at all disorienting."

  The criticism has been sharp. In 1964 Barthes wrote "The Last Happy Writer," about Voltaire. Daniel Gordon, editor of a Bedford edition of Candide, replied that "never has one brilliant writer so thoroughly misunderstood another." The sinologist Simon Leys reviewed the China diary during the Cultural Revolution and accused Barthes of indifference to the Chinese people. He said Barthes had "contrived" to give new dignity to "saying nothing at great length."

  Popular culture has borrowed from him freely. A Lover's Discourse inspired the name of the 1980s new wave duo The Lover Speaks, and Jeffrey Eugenides quotes it in The Marriage Plot to illuminate Madeleine Hanna's experience of love. In the 2014 film Birdman, a journalist quotes Mythologies to Riggan Thompson: "The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters." In The Truth About Cats & Dogs, from 1996, a character reads from Camera Lucida over the phone. In the film Elegy, Penélope Cruz's character Consuela first appears carrying The Pleasure of the Text.

  Laurent Binet's novel The 7th Function of Language goes furthest. It imagines that Barthes was murdered as part of a conspiracy to obtain a document called the Seventh Function of Language.

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