\SE but the fact that, somewhere and somehow, the two are clearly going to meet (4S S in the (nidele. And if they do meet, the ground plan of a systematic and comprehe ve development of criticism has been establisned. R@LAND BARTHES fibers considered one of the leading figures in French structuralism, Roland is, as Jonathan Guller puts it, “famous for contradictory reasons.” On the one a there is the scientific Barthes: the one who sought a universal grammar of ative in his influential essay “Introduction to the Structural Study of Narrative 4 166), or who explored FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE’s notion of semiology—a broad ince of signs in human culture, of which linguistics would provide a model—in Such works as Elements of Semiology (1965) and The Fashion System (1967). But on the other hand, there is the hedonist and connoisseur: the Barthes who wrote playfully and allusively about pleasure in The Pleasure of the Text (1973) and in A Lover’ Discourse (1977). Even his literary tastes seemed contradictory: he promoted avant- \yarde writers (Robbe-Grillet, Brecht, Sollers), but he also loved and wrote about the Inost traditional of French authors (La Bruyére, Racine, Chateaubriand, Balzac, \Rroust), And he who questioned the importance of the author was himself preemi- ently an author—indeed, the only author to have written his own volume in a series of “perennial masters” (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1975). A quintessential “man of letters” in the traditional sense, he was also a man of letters in an idiosyn- cratic, literal sense, organjzing three of his books alphabetically so as to avoid thematic or logical organization, and highlighting the material form of letters in one of his book titles, $/Z (1970). He was less a path breaker than a habit breaker, resolutely com- mitted to unlearning the routines of intelligibility, even those he himself had helped promote. Roland Barthes was born in Cherbourg. His father, a naval officer, was killed a year later, and Barthes's mother moved to the paternal family home in Bayonne in south- em France. The theorist of the death of the author thus grew up without a father, living with or near his mother until her death in 1977, three years before his own. In 1924 mother and son moved to Paris, where Barthes progressed to the baccalauréat in the Parisian schools and began studying for entrance into the prestigious Ecole Normale, until his promising academic trajectory was interrupted by the first of sev- eral attacks of tuberculosis. Meanwhile, his mother's already strained relations with her Parisian family worsened in 1927 when she gave birth to an illegitimate child— Roland's half-brother, Michel Salzado. Although Barthes’s grandparents were well- off, they refused Henriette Binger Barthes and her two sons any financial support, with the result that Henriette had to scrape by on what she earned as a bookbinder. From 1934 to 1950 Barthes's life alternated between tuberculosis sanitoria (he was exempted from military duty and spent the years of the Occupation in a sanatorium, in the Isere), academic institutions where he studied, and, when his health permitted, teaching jobs in Biarritz and abroad in Bucharest and Alexandria. Despite—or per- haps because of—his forced convalescences, he read avidly, founded a theatrical troupe, and began to write. From-the first Barthes's sritings reflect both his idiosyn. cratic creativity and his attunement to the intellectual milieu in which he foundcocusste wanenes 168 himself, His frst book, Writing Degree Zero (1953), initially published as articles ip Albert Camus's journal, Combat, analyzes the history of literary styles in terms derived from Marx and from Sartre. In this book Barthes looks at the relations between Literature with a capital L and the various modern forms of its demystfication, from STEPHANE MALLARME's “vibratory near-disappearance” to Camus's “blank” ssle (the “zero degree” of the title) A second, quite different, project Barthes undertook at the same time was an exten. sive study of the imagery used by the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, Scribbling passages on index cards, Barthes organized Michelet's “imagination” in ways that did not correspond to the explicit intentions of his writing. Like the work of the phenomenological critics Jean-Pierre Richard and GEORGES POULET, Barthes’s analysis was a way of structuring Michelet’ writing around its unconscious “obec. sions.” This research was published as a book titled Michelet (1954) in the same writers’ series in which Barthes himself later appeared, Barthes’s third project in the mid-1950s, different yet again, was a series of short wf occasional pieces later published as Mythologies (1957). In this work, of which ve sive three examples, Barthes does a kind of Marxian semiology of mass culture and everyday life. His object is to show how mass culture is saturated with ideological propositions (“myths”) presented as if they were natural and self-evident: the eeslt in many ways anticipates what is today called “cultural studies.” Barthes combines a sharp eye for the social life of signs with a subtle critique of the naturalizations of the ethnocentric, patriarchal, petit-bourgeois French worldview. Critical of the covert functions of what-goes-without-saying, Barthes nevertheless enjoys the exhibitions advertisements, photographs, articles, films, wrestling matches, and commodities that provide the occasion for his little feats of writing, In the essay on soap powders, for example, he both ends up revealing that the competing products are owned by the same company and—in his descriptions of these products in terms of foam and fire, the depth of linen and the triumph of cleanliness—enjoys the process of “frothing” rhetorically himself. In fact, in a perfect illustration of how capitalism devours its critics, an executive at France’s largest advertising firm found Barthes’s work on adver. tising so compelling that he began studying with Barthes and persuaded him to work briefly as a consultant for the automaker Renault. Barthes was critical of the mvth- making operations of petit-bourgeois culture, but he was also intrigued by the meaning-making functions of cultural objects themselves, As a researcher in Paris for ten years at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), Barthes- many others in Paris at that time, including CLAUDE LEVI- STRAUSS in anthropology, JACQUES LACAN in psychoanalysis, and TZVETAN TODOROV and Gérard Genette in literary studies—continued his exploration of the possibilities of extending Saussure's synchronic linguistic analysis to larger cultural structures. In 1962 Barthes was appointed to a tenured post in “the sociology of signs, symbols, and representations” at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (School for Advanced Study), where his seminar became legendary. His book On Racine (1963) raised hackles in the traditional academic community for its concentration on the structures of Racine's textual world rather than his biographical or historical world. Raymond Picard, a Racine scholar at the Sorbonne, countered with New Criticism or New Fraud? (1965). Barthes responded to Picard by arguing that traditional critics recourse to the values of clarity, nobility, and humanity, which they treat as neutral and self-evident, actually exerts a coercive, censoring force on ather interpretive pos” sibilities. ‘The Picard affair is the backdrop for one of Barthes’s most notorious essays, “The oats of the Author.” Written at the height of the antiestablishment uprisings of May 1968, it assails academic criticism’s typical focus on “the man and his work’ (which 's in many ways the organizing principle of the present anthology). Indeed. Barthes was surprised to find himself caught in 1968 between generations: while he was attacking the generation of Picard, the students—brandishing the antistructuralistvork th: the wife Lee Rov lies as.in sbols, sudy), Jes in es of mond New sities veut ce por "The of May toshich Barthes hhe was turalis slogan “Structures don't tke to the streets!"—were rebelling against the generation [ ceries sel sare peath of the Author” begins with an example taken from Balzac's novella sarraine—the tale of a sculptor who falls in love with an Italian diva subsequently Samiied to be not a woman but a castrato (Sarmasine was the text analyzed that year revripceminar. and Barthes went on to publish a full-length study of i in his book S21 Barthes focuses on a sentence in the text in which a series of exclamations st femininity cannot be clearly attributed to the conscious intentions of any one arson, whether that be the author, the narrator, a character, or even “universal Pers Barthes argues thatthe effective, productive, and engaged reading of a text SJepends onthe suspension of preconceived ideas about the character of the particular Gerror__or even about human psychology in general. The tex itself is feigning a set artjawumptions it will subsequently reveal to be misguided. From the moment that orrting detaches itself from an immediate context, “tis language which speaks, not Tne author.” The author, the text, and the reader are each composed of a universe of tjuotations without origin or end. In its celebration of the birth of the reader, “The seth of the Author” explores the consequences of freeing the reading process from the constraints of fidelity to an origin, a unified meaning, an identity, or any other pregiven exterior or interior reality. “The publication of S/Z marks a turningpointin Barthes'srelationto structuralism. It jsamultilevel analysis that refuses to structure the text otherwise than by cuttingit into hundreds of little pieces of varying lengths (called lexias) and also by identifying five < proad functions (called codes) at work in the text. Written as if it were meant to consti- tute a methodological examplar, it exaggerates the performance of methodology tosuch / an extent that it becomes inimitable and ‘perhaps parodic, When commentators! look for a break between structuralism and poststructuralism, S/Z stands as a revealing hinge. C Jnit Barthes pursues not so much a critique of structuralism (as does JACQUES DER- \ rupa, for example) as an explosion of it. The hints of larger structures at work are frag- mentary and multiple, not sustained, and the theoretical comments are printed as digressions, numbering almost a hundred. Boredom with the structuralist project of reducing all narratives to a common grammar combines with delight in the foretaste ‘of a multitude of grammars and rhetorics hinted at but not developed in $/Z. Barthes's subsequent essay reprinted here, “From Work to Text” (1971), is one of the clearest available summaries (including the obligatory disavowal of such a sum- mary) of the poststructuralist theory of the “text” as it was developed not only by Barthes but by all the writers associated with the vanguard journal Tel Quel, including Philippe Sollers, JULIA KRISTEVA, Derrida, and others. This description of “textuality” can be seen as one way of marking the transition between structuralism and post- structuralism. Whereas culture and language for Lévi-Strauss and Saussure were structured like a game (chess is the favorite example), the text is structured like play— children’s play, musical performance, or the excess motion in a machine. But both \ structualists and poststructuralists would contrast their analyses to the classical study of literary and other cultural objects (“work”), The text is a process; the work is ‘product. Works can be found on library shelves; texts are signifying fields into which Lone enters, (The development of the Internet has perhaps made this distinction seem less radical than it did in the 1970s.) Their point is not that literature can be divided into works and texts but that the reader can activate either the closure of the signified {the coherence of a meaning) o the “play” of the signifier (the dissemination and disruption of meanings). The text deserves no vital “respect it snot alive and can thus be “broken” or “manhandled” in ways that would violate organic forms. The death of the author turns out to be based not on a murder but on an elimination of {he metaphor of life inthe first place. The work is “consum the text is “produced” in $/2, Barthes called these the readerly and the writerly aspects of a text). Barthes ends the essay by opening ont a i one ia) by opening, onto pleasure, a top that would engage him more and