Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

Roland Barthes’ On Racine: On the Deathbed of the Author?

Supervisor: Paper submitted in partial Prof. dr. Jürgen Pieters fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels- Nederlands” by Reuben Martens

2014-2015

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis had a rather late and odd start, as originally it was not supposed to be what it is now. I started writing this as a conference paper for the ‘Roland Barthes at 100’ conference which was hosted by Cardiff University on 30 and 31 March 2015. But it became more: in the course of my research for the conference paper I soon discovered that Barthes had a lot more to say than I expected and I felt that my research was actually far from complete. Having been so close to Barthes, I simply could not abandon him, so I decided to make him the topic of my thesis in an attempt to complete what I had started; the result is that which you now have before you. But before you start reading, there are some people I would like to thank first.

First of all, I must thank Jürgen Pieters for his continuing support, for helping me prepare for the conference and for his help in the making the paper into the thesis it is now. Prof. dr. Pieters was always ready for me with helpful commentary and useful suggestions on what to improve and continually pushed me to make my work better. This would not have been possible without his help and I am very grateful for it.

Secondly, I would like to thank prof. dr. Neil Badmington from Cardiff University for giving me the opportunity to present a paper at his conference. It was an amazing experience from which I learned a lot and provided me with a set of new academic skills. Then there is also dr. Marius Hentea, who I would like to thank for taking the time to revise my work and provide me with helpful comments, all the way from Manchester Metropolitan University.

Also, a big thanks to my parents for giving me the opportunity of even going to university in the first place, taking the time to read my thesis and their continuing support. And lastly, I would like to thank my wonderful girlfriend Ine Verheyen, for her support and also for correcting my work and spotting the odd comma, which is not my strong suit; thank you very much, my love!

I hope that my thesis provides an answer to a yet unexplored question within the existing research on Barthes’ work. Together with prof. dr. Pieters, I was able to find a gap in the existing research, which I now hope to – at least partially – fill with my thesis. I hope that all readers may be able to enjoy my work!

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...... 4 1 THE QUARREL: NEW CRITICISM OR NEW FRAUD? ...... 7 1.1 ON RACINE: A RECEPTION TURNED BAD ...... 8 1.2 BARTHES VS. PICARD: “NOUVELLE CRITIQUE” VS. ACADEMIC CRITICISM ...... 10 2 THE AUTHOR’S DIAGNOSTICIAN: ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1980) ...... 15 2.1 [ENTERS STAGE]: BARTHES, ‘TRAGIC’ OR ‘TRAGEDIC’? ...... 15 2.2 RACINE OR BRECHT: WHO WILL SURVIVE? ...... 16 2.2.1 Barthes and Tragedy ...... 16 2.2.2 Barthes, Brecht (and the Modernists) ...... 19 2.3 ‘TRAGEDIC’ INFLUENCES: GOLDMANN AND POULET? ...... 26 2.3.1 Poulet’s ‘Notes sur le temps racinien’ (1949) ...... 27 2.3.2 Goldmann’s The Hidden God (1955) ...... 31 2.3.3 On Racine: authentic, or a mere corrected copy? ...... 34 3 [EXIT BARTHES]: GUIDING THE AUTHOR TO HIS DEATHBED ...... 37 3.1 THE AUTOPSY REPORT: A SHORT GENESIS OF ‘THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR’ ...... 37 3.2 THE TRAGEDY OF THE AUTHOR: BARTHES ON RACINE ...... 39 3.2.1 ‘Racine Spoken’ ...... 39 3.2.2 ‘Racinian Man’ ...... 42 3.2.3 ‘History or Literature?’ ...... 46 3.3 SAVE THE AUTHOR… OR LET HIM SUFFER? (‘CRITICISM AND TRUTH’) ...... 50 3.4 A DRAMATIC GENIUS OR MODERN AESTHETE? (CRITICAL ESSAYS) ...... 52 3.5 FINALLY, THE AUTHOR DIES… (THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR) ...... 54 4 CONCLUSIONS ON THE AUTOPSY OF THE AUTHOR ...... 58 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 62 APPENDIX I ...... 65

Word count: 25.849

3 Introduction

“He who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die” Oscar Wilde, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’

The Author died in Paris in 1967, but perhaps his death had already been anticipated since the beginning of the decade. He had not been feeling so well for the last couple of years and his health declined without any chances of recovery. Quite possibly, a French doctor already made a diagnosis that would predict the Author’s death, in 1963. This doctor, going by the name of Roland Barthes, cleverly discovered a new form of criticism, which ultimately would prove a cancerous tumour in the heart of the author that would become his death sentence in the fullness of time. The newfangled diagnosis: Nouvelle Critique. The Author’s hand was no longer fully controlled by his brain and he started to become unable to control the meaning of the words that he voiced. His childhood friends, colleagues like Mallarmé and Proust, had already abandoned him before he got diagnosed with the terminal illness that would lead up to his extirpation.

Hope for revival, for resurrection from the grave was possible only after diagnostician Barthes was deceased. However, the Author would not be able to return in the full ornament and glory of his days of yore, the Romantic era. On his deathbed the Author lay, from 1963 till 1967 when his oncologist Barthes decided to pull the plug and let the Author die, perhaps in pain and with great sorrow to some. Barthes, as any scientist who discovers a new diagnosis, described the moribundity over due time in a number of select publications. Voices had been raised that Barthes had no idea what he was doing and rivals, such as Raymond Picard, claimed him to be a fraud, only with the intent to serve his own purposes. His new method was considered faulty and in direct conflict with the old academic methods of Picard and his peers. Debates ran high and Barthes’ method was put under scrutiny. Successful counterattacks in successive publications by Barthes himself assured his status and made him a more than respected figure. Nevertheless, the Author died. Did Barthes indeed already give up on the Author in 1963, or did he only do so later on, after first trying to keep him alive in some way or another?

In this thesis, I want to explore the progression of the death of the Author, beginning with On Racine, which Roland Barthes published in 1963. In this work, he expresses the idea of regarding the literary work as an autonomous object, to be looked at without the interference

4 of worldly interpretations. By implication that means the author, perhaps for the first time, was theoretically put outside of his own work; in other words, the author became no longer part of his own creation. Later, in 1967, Barthes published the essay ‘The Death of the Author’, in which the Author was not only put aside, but also more or less ‘murdered’.

Specifically, I want to take a deeper look at how Barthes constructs the image of the author Racine – in On Racine – and compare that to Barthes’ later publications from the same decade Criticism and Truth, the essay ‘The Two Criticisms’ in Critical Essays, and ‘The Death of the Author’, where he constructs author images of modernists like the already mentioned Mallarmé and Proust. I will be wondering if there a similarity between these conceptions and if so, can we regard upon On Racine as anticipating what Barthes was only to fully put to words in ‘The Death of the Author’?

However, in order to explore this idea, much needs to be taken into consideration. An idea does not simply come from anywhere, it is inspired, a reaction to or because something or someone else. Therefore, in order to properly investigate how Barthes’ concept of the author grew, we need to take a look at the seeds that may have caused its inception. A short exploration into Barthes’ past seems in order, a look into what attracted him to the theatre, why he chose Racine as a subject and what his view on the theatre was. These aspects will be explored in chapter 2 of this thesis. In that chapter we will also take a look at two contemporary critics, namely Lucien Goldmann and Georges Poulet, and explore how their works may (or may not) have attributed to the fundamental principles of On Racine.

In exploring the proposed research question, the necessity rises to provide an overview of the debate between the ‘Old’ and Nouvelle Critique, in order to pinpoint the main differences in perception of the author by both movements, which should enlighten the broader perspective of Barthes’ On Racine, and by extension the genesis of the fundamental idea of the death of the author. This overview will be presented in chapter 1 of this thesis. All this necessary background will then prove to be the framework for the presented analysis of On Racine, ‘The Two Criticisms’, Criticism and Truth and ‘The Death of the Author’, which ultimately explores the progression of the construction of Barthes’ author image, which I will be discussing in the third chapter. With this research, I hope to fill an existing gap in the current study of Barthes’ work: Seán Burke (1998) explains the principles behind ‘The Death of the Author’, but only briefly hints at the connection with On Racine, David Funt (1968) traces the connection between Barthes and the Nouvelle Critique but does not make the link between

5 On Racine and ‘Death’ either. These are merely two examples of an enormous deal of works that handle either on the subject of ‘The Death of the Author’ or On Racine, the latter mostly in relation to Barthes’ theatre activities or the polemic with Picard, yet most of the works that I observed in relation to my research question fail to make the connection between the two. So in this thesis, it is this link I want to explore, perhaps to discover it is a very weak link or to find that the basic premises of ‘The Death of the Author’ (thus the concept of what an author is for Barthes) do indeed date back to 1963 with the publication of On Racine, or possibly even earlier.

6 1 The Quarrel1: New Criticism or New Fraud?

New Criticism or alternatively (and mockingly) ‘Magical Criticism’ is, in the words of Raymond Picard “a parasitic criticism which at best considers the literary work as a dunghill where flowers can be made to grow” (Picard 1965:ix). For someone who criticises Barthes for being obscure, Picard does not make much effort to be transparent himself in his pamphlet Nouvelle Critique ou Nouvelle Imposture? (1965). An important note must be made with relation to the term New Criticism here: New Criticism in this context has almost nothing to do or in common with the Anglo-American New Criticism; it is simply the translation of the French name for criticisms practiced by Barthes and his likes, namely La Nouvelle Critique. Even though Picard feels personally attacked by certain polemical passages, newspaper articles and reviewers, he is not shy of voicing some (unfounded) crude and derogatory criticism himself. Perhaps his main weakness is intolerance: Picard seems biased right from the beginning of his argument. Somehow whatever Barthes says must be wrong; Picard wrote a new introduction to New Criticism or New Fraud? for the English translation in 1969 in which his adverse stance towards Barthes is already clear from the opening paragraphs and even worse than before2, as in the remainder of the original text from 1965. Picard’s bias is also already quite apparent from the genre that he uses, namely the polemic pamphlet.

The constant repetition of ‘Mr. Barthes’ throughout the whole text for instance, which is obviously ironic and demeaning, and denigrating comments on behalf of Barthes make clear, even from the introduction, that Picard is biased and refuses to even entertain the premises of this New Criticism. This rivalry between Picard and Barthes has to be understood in the context of ‘traditional’ academic French criticism. Picard has to be labelled a traditional critic, in the sense that he, in his own words, is concerned with a criticism “preoccupied with intelligibility, inspired by a flexible, humanistic neo-positivism” (Picard 1965:x). Barthes on the other hand, is adverse to this kind of ‘university’ criticism and tries to inculcate what is called New Criticism. Understanding this debate within French academic circles is crucial to a more complete understanding of Barthes as a critic.

1 For a fully detailed analysis of the whole debate, I would refer readers to the extensive discussion of this matter in Davis, Colin. "Impostures of French Theory." After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory. First ed. USA/Canada: Routledge, 2004. 9-33. Print. and the chapter ‘The Theatre Years’ from Calvet, Louis-Jean. Roland Barthes: A Biography. 1990. Trans. Wykes, Sarah. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. Print. 2 See Appendix I. A summation of other demeaning remarks made on account of ‘Mr. Barthes’ by Picard and other critics can also be found on p. 41-44 of Criticism and Truth.

7 1.1 On Racine: a reception turned bad

Raymond Picard had placed himself in the late fifties at the heart of French literary scholarship with the publication of his magnum opus La Carrière de Jean Racine (1956). This 700-page long work documents every single work dealing with the playwright from when he saw the first light till when he saw his last. In this book, Picard does not offer any real interpretation of Racine’s plays: his main interest is their place in the development of Racine’s career. Over the next couple of years, new interpretations of Racine’s plays had been published by Charles Mauron, who offered Freudian psychoanalytical interpretations and Lucien Goldmann, who focused on a Marxist sociological reading, but Picard, who refused to accept their works as serious criticism, dismissed both in a later Foreword to a new edition of his work. Things turned grim when Barthes published On Racine in 1963 and his Critical Essays in 1964. A media circus enfolded and the height of the discussion culminated in Barthes’ riposte Criticism and Truth in 1966 (Davis 2004:9-12).

Barthes’ publication of On Racine resulted in a lot of criticism, which is actually rather odd. As mentioned before, and in the work itself, all three essays of On Racine had been published once before and all earlier than 1963. Why there was no criticism at the original time of publications is strange, as the content did not change, On Racine is merely a compilation of the three. Calvet (1994:149) takes notice of this same fact, but seems unable to attest as to why Barthes never received such amount of criticism before (but that is exactly the power of media); he does however report on several of the accounts of (both positive and negative) criticism from 1963-1964. Against what is perhaps the general perception, there was quite a positive response at first towards On Racine:

In Le Monde of 12 June 1963, Pierre-Henri Simon voiced his scepticism regarding Barthes’s ‘dialectical virtuosity, which alternately … dazzles and … disturbs’. […] Roger-Louis Junod, writing in La Tribune de Genève, called the book ‘A new perspective on the Racinian universe’. The title of Guy Dumur’s piece in France- Observateur was ‘How to get more out of Racine’. Then there was the article in La Croix, ‘When new criticism attacks the classics’, and finally Robert Kanters on ‘Roland Barthes and the Racine myth’ in Le Figaro littéraire. Several months later, from January 1964 onwards, it was the turn of the review. Le Mercure de France gave the book the thumbs up, as did La Nouvelle NRF. La Pensée did not entirely disapprove […]. Critique (…) asserted that ‘today it is only Marxist and

8 psychoanalytical which can rediscover the meaning of Racinian tragedy (…). (Calvet 1994:149-50)

Things only started to turn grim when Raymond Picard decided to fight back. Picard had studied with one of Barthes’ early friends, Phillipe Rebeyrol, for the entrance exams to the École Normale Supérieure, when Barthes was on retreat in Bedous to treat his tuberculosis. Picard felt attacked, both personally as author of The Career of Jean Racine and the institution he represented, and replied with an article in Le Monde, in which he said that “[a]ttacking the university is part of avant-garde orthodoxy, and M. Barthes is one of the avant-garde’s principal representatives” (Picard 1964). Later, in the autumn of 1965 Picard published New Criticism or New Fraud, a very overt attack on the avant-garde critic Barthes. In that same respect, it feels strange that Picard felt so personally attacked by On Racine; surely Barthes addresses what he thinks is wrong with the ‘current’ type of ‘academic’ criticism, and mentions Picard as an example, yet his tone is never offensive or insulting, merely that of a scholar trying to argue his point. Picard on the other hand does not shun personal attacks and derogative language to slander Barthes (Calvet 1994:149-51).

‘Avant-garde’ students and intellectuals, who read Barthes’ work agreed on its premises and may have laughed at Picard, yet the popular press offered almost full support for Picard’s intervention. Calvet (1994:150-51) sums how several newspapers and even ex-colleagues of Barthes from Théâtre populaire jumped on the chance to harshly criticize On Racine. Jacqueline Piatier, a journalist for Le Monde, said that “‘Picard’s principal weapon is ridicule. The strength of his critique lies in the fact that he makes one laugh simply by recourse to rigour, coherence and logical thought’” (Calvet 1994:150); a scholarly argument surely should not make someone laugh? It did not, as Barthes suffered from these attacks; he felt isolated, helpless, fragile and vulnerable, Calvet (1994) reports. Alain Robbe-Grillet, writes that Barthes was “excessively upset by Picard’s reproaches (…) the wrathful glare of the old Sorbonne paralysed him with a complex feeling of hate and terror” (Robbe-Grillet 1997:50).

Picard’s hard response caused three separate reactions in 1966: Barthes’ Criticism and Truth, the theoretical defence of On Racine, an article called ‘Néocritique et paléocritique’ by Jean- Paul Weber and Serge Doubrovsky’s ‘Pourquoi la nouvelle critique?’, which caused the debate to erupt all over again; La Gazette de Lausanne called it ‘The war of the critics’. Newspapers published replies from both parties and even started to use boxing metaphors, such as ‘Barthes vs. Picard: third round’. The verbal violence in this debate was quite unseen.

9 What exactly was at stake, what caused these aggressive reactions from Picard? Calvet (1994:152) writes that as far as Barthes was concerned, the conflict with the institution dated back to 1953, when he was unable to attend the entrance exam for the École Normale because of his illness. At that time, Barthes accused his friend Phillipe Rebeyrol, who was accepted into the École, of having a stereotypical, cliché-filled language to talk about literature. It was this kind of language of the academic criticism that Barthes would later on regard as the opposite of the ‘New Criticism’, the true challenger to the institutional discourse which Picard embodied.

1.2 Barthes vs. Picard: “nouvelle critique” vs. academic criticism

Without analysing Picard’s essay into full detail and taking a closer look at some of his, sometimes laughable, assertions of Barthes and the ‘New Criticism’, in short it can be said that is the text of a scholar that felt threatened in his position and used ridicule and slander in order to try and maintain his position at the top of his academic field. Barthes was probably the metaphorical ‘last straw’ for Picard and as such Barthes got attacked. The bigger picture was that Picard probably felt threatened by the rise of the ‘New Criticism’ and found in Barthes’ On Racine the scapegoat he was looking for. Picard published his own thesis on Racine in 1956 and in that same year Lucien Goldmann published his work The Hidden God, which gives a Marxist sociological reading of Racine, a year later Charles Mauron’s L’Inconscient dans l’œuvre et la vie de Racine (1957) was published, which is a Freudian psychoanalytical reading of Racine and Georges Poulet published the first part of his Études sur le temps humaine, a phenomenological analysis, already in 1949. All these works (and also Barthes’ On Racine) challenged the ‘old-school’ criticism of Picard’s thesis. So when Picard’s La Carrière de Jean Racine was republished in 1961, he added a Foreword in which he excluded the works from Goldmann and Mauron from the ranks of ‘serious publications’. Barthes published his work in 1963 and later in 1964 his Critical Essays: by that time things had gone far enough for Picard and the polemic developed.

“At the beginning of Nouvelle Critique ou Nouvelle Imposture Picard recorded that he had originally thought that Barthes’s work on Racine was intellectually negligible but relatively harmless” (Davis 2004:12). Picard initially believed Barthes’ work to be harmless, yet in the course of four years became convinced of the dangers of Barthes’ (and others’) new interpretative methods and ‘heretical readings’ of Racine. His main problem however was not academically but personally motivated: Racine was up till that point regarded as the canonical

10 playwright in France and “Picard’s own immense scholarship was devalued if irresponsible amateurs were to be taken seriously. Moreover, whereas his work was patient and judicious, […], the new critics moved rapidly from particular details to global assertions, regarding Racine’s plays as a coherent, unified œuvre […]” (Davis 2004:12).

Picard’s own scholarly publications were, in contrast with ‘la nouvelle critique’, works based on biographical details of the author, whereas the New Critics did not shun making global assumptions based on small details about the whole of Racine’s oeuvre (Davis 2004:12). Barthes provides us with an example of ‘useless’ criticism by Picard:

Obliged by the primacy of the author to pay as much attention to the “affaire de Sonnets” as to Racine’s income, Picard makes his reader search high and low for this social information he has clearly seen. Moreover, he informs us only as to Racine’s condition. But was this really exemplary? What about the others, including, and especially, the minor writers? No matter how often Picard rejects the psychological interpretation (…), Racine’s person constantly returns and embarrasses him3. (Barthes 1963:159-60)

Picard thus seems to have a problem with the New Criticism of Goldmann, Mauron, Barthes and the likes. Even though Barthes differs on important points from Goldmann and Mauron, they are all looking for a new methodological framework to explain the structural coherence and the variations in Racinian tragedy, whereas Picard is only interested in the person Racine, the historical Racine. The biggest problem with these analyses for Picard was perhaps that they are irreconcilable: how can Racine’s texts possibly provoke three (and many more) analyses, which compete each other? How can we assess which ones are right and which are wrong, or are they all one or the other, should they be dismissed or reconciled? Barthes (1963:171) clearly says in On Racine that there is an openness of interpreting Racine and that there is no such thing as ‘the truth’: “Racine lends himself to several languages: psychoanalytical, existential, tragic, psychological (other can be invented, others will be invented); none is innocent. But to acknowledge this incapacity to tell the truth about Racine is precisely to acknowledge, at last, the special status of literature”.

3 Interestingly this sentence reveals that Racine’s person is of a certain importance of Barthes as well, which is unexpected in the course of his work. It feels as if Barthes is saying that Racine’s person is present in his work as well, but without it embarrassing him.

11 Nonetheless, this all seemed like a load of shenanigans to Picard. To him, the new critics are “not merely wrong-headed, they are impostors; hence to denounce them is not simply a matter of self-interest, it is a positive moral duty” (Davis 2004:16). Picard actually turns the literary debate into a moral one, where he is the knight that needs to uphold traditional values that have been lost in these ‘new critics’ analyses. “The moral language adopted by Picard suggests not merely that these are errors that can and should be corrected, but that Barthes and the new critics are wilfully deviant and aberrant; their mistakes flout basic rules of critical responsibility” (Davis 2004:16). Picard (1965:1) is visibly prejudiced at the start of his essay New Criticism or New Fraud?, as on the very first page it reads:

[On Barthes’ On Racine] When I first ran through these commentaries on tragedies, published on the occasion of a new edition of Racine, I did not take them very seriously. Somewhat baffled, and more scandalized than amused, I supposed them to be a piece of hackwork in the performance of which the writer had diverted himself, with his usual talent, by entering the realm of the venturesome and the preposterous. […] Without any doubt this was a coherent undertaking the importance of which was not to be underestimated […]. Mr. Barthes even theorizes about this matter. Affirming our “incapacity to tell the truth about Racine”, he does not hesitate to stand forth in the capacity of critic, as “an utterly subjective being” (…). Why, then, continue?

Picard has difficulties with the subjectivity of Barthes’ analysis, whereas he believes to be working as a fully objective critic, only analysing facts about Racine’s life in relation to his work. For Barthes, this is wrong: trying to see the historical Racine in his oeuvre is hineininterpretation, and the person Racine needs to be separated from his work altogether. There is a difference between the study of the functions of literature (which is literary history for Barthes) and the study of the psychological aspect of literature (which is the literary creation). This will be discussed further in section 3.2.3. It has to be remembered that Barthes as a Marxist critic believes in the fact that the reader should be able to see (or give) his own meaning in the literary work, that which is embedded within the text, not what others claim to have been the ‘original’ author’s intention. This basic idea, which is there on the first page of On Racine, is what will sprout to full growth and practice in ‘The Death of the Author’. Thus Barthes agrees that the New Criticism is ultimately subjective, as it is impossible to make objective statements when making a personal interpretation of a literary work, therefore

12 Barthes also admits to there being something as a multiplicity of interpretations, all right in their own respect, depending on the view of the reader or critic.

Although Picard (1965:46) says that “[i]t seemed to me that it was a duty, however painful it might be to fulfil, not to remain at such a superficial level [as Barthes’]”, he fails to rise above anything but personal attacks and shallow commentary, with a statement as “[s]till if he [Barthes] writes on Racine and publishes what he writes, it must be because he judges his subjectivity of universal application and because he believes in the value of what he has to say. To communicate is by its very nature to objectify” (1965:2), which is obviously not of any relevance and quite wrong. Picard’s text is filled with such bold statements which are meant to look impressive but do not go beyond the borders of personal subjective criticism, the very thing he criticises in Barthes. As Davis (2004:17) puts it:

Picard’s procedure, however, is every bit as disreputable as the practices he imputes to la nouvelle critique: he puts words into Barthes’s mouth, and then declares those words to be utterly wrong. […] Some of Picard’s points are challenging and well made; others are based on weak reasoning, crude misreading, misrepresentation and direct insult. Picard lifts quotations from Barthes’s text and makes little apparent effort to understand the context of the argument from which they are taken. In other words, he does to Barthes pretty much what he accuses Barthes of doing to Racine.

After the publication of Criticism and Truth, Barthes’ last reply in the debate, he fled into work and travel: he would visit Japan several times in 1966 and later that same year, in October, Barthes would attend the conference on criticism in Baltimore, where he probably met Georges Poulet, Derrida and Todorov and lectured on ‘The languages of criticism and the sciences of man’. Barthes claims that this was ‘on commision’, and no longer part of the previous debate: Calvet (1994:154) however says that “[t]his is only partially true, but it is illustrative of an interesting trait of his character: he loved to give a good rhetorical performance on any topic whatsoever […]”. It just goes to show how Barthes perhaps could not let fully go of the whole polemic, which had unfolded and had to explain once more what his view on criticism now exactly entailed.

This lengthy (yet rather condensed) overview of the debate between Picard and Barthes is significant for understanding On Racine better: it shows how Barthes’ text is revolutionary as to cause so much stir with institutional critics such as Picard. One of the aspects that made

13 Barthes’ On Racine so ‘provocative’ has to do less with the real analysis than with the premise of the work: where the critic becomes the entity that gives meaning to the text, instead of the author who had done it before him for centuries.

14 2 The Author’s Diagnostician: Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

2.1 [Enters stage]: Barthes, ‘Tragic’ or ‘Tragedic’?

As a young man, Roland Barthes belonged to an Ancient Theatre Group, played the role of Darius in Aeschylus’ Persians and wrote his university dissertation on the rites of passage in the works of three major tragedians. It suffices to say that Barthes was at least ‘a bit’ interested in tragedy in his early days. Tragedy was not only important to him in an academic sense; it also has certain significance in light of his homosexuality. In an unpublished text for Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, he wrote:

Long ago, in bourgeois circles, the claims of homosexuality could not be made in contestatory, leftist fashion [...] Gay discourse could only exist through a sublimated, formalized mediation: that of ancient Greece with its value as high culture, which happily itself was passably queer. (Barthes 2010:323)

John McKeane (2015:2) explains that Barthes presents the Greek tragedy here as ‘providing a refuge for gay discourse still seeking to find a directly political voice’. Further, he also notes that Barthes’ interest for tragedy seemed to stop after 1965-1966 (Critical Essays); there are no articles or reviews on tragedy, of which there used to be plenty, after the mid-1960s. So it seems to be a phenomenon, only related to his youth.

Barthes’ most famous book on tragedies must be On Racine (1963). Not only were his three essays on Racine considered as highly innovative within the academic Racine discourse, they were object of a storm of criticism (see supra). McKeane (2015:2) writes that Barthes’ interest for tragedy was ‘abandoned amidst the sound and the fury of the dispute with Raymond Picard’ and calls it, in tragedic terms, an Oedipal scene (more on that later).

But why this passage on Barthes’ interest in drama? Two reasons stand out: firstly, studying On Racine, I have become aware that even though this work, to a certain degree, appears to be radically new (as the opening passage would have you believe), its ideas cannot have sprouted out of nowhere, without having at least partially or contrastingly being based on works of other critics; that is to say that Barthes must have relied on other studies in order to broaden his own perspective and create his own form of structuralism. Secondly, it might be interesting to ask ourselves why Barthes abandoned his interest in tragedies and shifted his focus towards modernist authors (and playwrights); the contrast between the two cannot be

15 bigger in terms of poetics; this is especially interesting as the poetics of the Modernist are much closer to Barthes’ own concept of the author than that of the classic playwrights.

These two conditions might prove useful when trying to determine whether On Racine is the true cradle of the idea behind ‘The Death of the Author’; where did the idea come form? Was it inspired by other critics? Why did Barthes leave the Author behind and what are the relations between the dramatist, the modernist and the dead author? These questions are crucial to my research and therefore a deeper exploration of them should hopefully provide some new answers.

2.2 Racine or Brecht: who will survive?

After 1963, as previously mentioned, Barthes appears to abandon drama – that is to say the classical form of drama, as his interest in Brechtian theatre will remain – given that after On Racine he has not shown particular interest in tragedies anymore and his focus changed to more modernist authors, such as Mallarmé and Proust. Perhaps a little dive into Barthes’ own personal history might provide a first clue as to why that is. I will be looking at facts, which have to do with Barthes and theatre first and then with those that relate to Barthes and the Modernist authors. Because of this selection, it might seem as if the following stories are incoherent, but my intention is not of reiterating Barthes’ life, therefore I will not bother with the ‘details’ in between the facts that I need for my argument. For those interested in an overview of Barthes’ life, I refer them to the bibliography and footnotes of this page for interesting sources.

2.2.1 Barthes and Tragedy4

It is a well-known fact that Barthes was interested in music and theatre from a very young age. Calvet (1994:20) reports that Barthes’ interest for theatre sprouted in 1930, as he used to regularly visit “the Mathurins5 and the Atelier6 to see shows by Pitoëff7 and Dullin8”. These

4 A new biography on Roland Barthes appeared earlier this year: Samoyault, Tiphaine. Roland Barthes. Fiction et Cie. Paris: Seuil, 2015. Print. However, I used the biography that was written by Louis-Jean Calvet, as he has a full chapter devoted to what he calls ‘The Theatre Years’, and seeing as that is my main focus here (with regard to On Racine), I chose Calvet. I am however aware that Samoyault has integrated sources from certain previously ‘unseen’ and ‘unpublished’ works by Barthes, which Calvet did not have access to in his time, yet these are of lesser importance in my case. 5 The Mathurins is a Parisian theatre; located at 36, Rue des Mathurins, in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. 6 Le théâtre de l’Atelier is another Parisian theatre; located at 1, Place Charles-Dullin, in the 18th arrondissement of Paris.

16 theatre directors were mainly interested in modern theatre, but also featured a range of more classical names, like Shakespeare, Molière and Balzac; however, both Pitoëff and Dullin never produced any plays by Racine. Undoubtedly Barthes had read at least some works by Racine in school, however Calvet (1994) does not seem to mention this.

When attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, a school for children of the privileged classes, from 1930 to 1934, Barthes received a certificate of merit for recitation (assuming recited poetry, therefore performance art). Interestingly, Barthes’ favourite writers at the time were, as Calvet (1994:22) writes, Valéry and Mallarmé and during the summer of 1932 he discovered Marcel Proust’s writings.

It is only later, in 1935, after having fallen ill and being moved from Paris to Bedous, to hopefully cure his TBC, that Barthes’ interest in Racine is recorded, as when he was taking a law degree by correspondence, “[h]e found law an extremely dry subject and preferred to read Racine or Gide or think about the ideas of The Beautiful or The Good […]” Calvet (1994:33). Barthes, who was getting bored in the Pyrenees and felt cheated out of a university education, mocked his friend Rebeyrol, who was studying in Paris, for the way he adopted his tone and style of writing to get into the École Normale. Barthes criticised his friend for the way in which he integrated the idea that every writer must be labelled and reduced to stereotype: e.g. “Montaigne and scepticism, Rousseau and pride, Racine and passion, […]” (Calvet 1994:35). Barthes did not want to accept the idea that someone with an open mind would waste time with such blatant clichés.

In 1936, Barthes founded the Ancient Theatre Group with fellow student Jacques Veil9, at the Sorbonne. The idea was to perform Greek tragedies and Latin comedies. In their first performance, The Persae by Aeschylus, Barthes played the part of Darios. According to Calvet (1994:38) Barthes spent more time devoted to the theatre, than he did to his actual

7 Georges Pitoëff (1884-1939) was a director of French theatre of Armenian origin, connected to the Mathurins theatre. Interestingly he mainly directed plays by George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Tchekov, Georges Duhamel, all rather ‘modern’ playwrights at the time, and only two plays by William Shakespeare (and no Racinian plays at all). 8 Charles Dullin (1885-1949) was a French theatre manager and director. His most notable student is perhaps Antonin Artaud, with whom he mainly developed avant-garde theatre. However, Dullin did, between 1931 – 1940, mainly produce plays from Passeur, Molière, Shakespeare, Balzac, Gresset and even Aristophanes, more ‘classical’ plays than experimental. 9 Old acquaintance of Barthes from Louis-Le-Grand, where Barthes had defended Veil from the anti- Semitic jokes of their classmates. Veil would end up being tortured and murdered by the Nazis (Calvet 1994:37).

17 studies. He continued spending time with this theatre group (including a trip to Greece and Italy), until he partially obtained his literature degree in June 1939, but had to leave Paris because of the pending war in Europe.

Later, around 1953, Robert Voison, who had read some of Barthes’ published articles on theatre in Les Lettres nouvelles, founded the review Théâtre populaire. He contacted Barthes, and with some others, they started the project of a new review that would defend a certain particular vision of theatre10. An event to illustrate this vision is Barthes’ theatrical revelation when he saw the Berliner Ensemble’s production of Mother Courage by Brecht, at the Paris international festival in May 1954; Brecht makes theatre that offers no identification between the audience and the characters, therefore leaves room for the audience to critically think about the play11, an attitude which Barthes pursued in his critical essay(s) in On Racine. Later in 1954, Voisin appointed Barthes as literary advisor and editor of Théâtre populaire. Barthes and fellow editor Bernard Dort focused on the plays of Brecht and Adamov, which “represented a sort of non-dogmatic realism which they found completely fulfilling” (Calvet 1994:116). Brecht’s importance in Barthes’ later work is not to be underestimated: the first essay in On Racine is clearly influenced by Brechtian theory, as it tries to do exactly what was described above; to critically think about plays, without an identification between the author and the text (more on Brecht later, cf. infra 2.2.2).

Around 1956, the year Barthes would put together the texts for Mythologies, he started severing his ties with Théâtre populaire. Calvet (1994:127) asks the question why Barthes distanced himself more and more from the theatre and writes that “[i]n fact, this way of distancing himself is a common feature of his life, as if he were afraid of becoming tied down by what he was doing or trapped by his choices, and felt the need to ‘unhook’ himself and move on to something new”. In 1960 he would write the last article for Théâtre populaire on Brecht’s Mother Courage. Calvet leaves out the importance of TP in Barthes’ career; I will discuss this further in 2.2.2.

Barthes changed course and went on to be a member of the editorial team of the review Arguments: a non-dogmatic space where both socialists and communists could write, without it being exclusive to any of them. In the first edition he published an article on Brecht and

10 Calvet (1994:109) leaves out to explain what vision that was, however we can assume Barthes’ vision on theatre to be that which he defended in Les Lettres nouvelles. 11 This in contrast to Maria Casares’ performance in Phèdre (see ‘Racine Spoken’, in On Racine (1963)), of whom Barthes thought she was too personally involved with her performance.

18 Robbe-Grillet. But after that, Barthes seems to discard the theatre, with the exception of the polemics with Raymond Picard in 1965 (see supra) and Calvet (1994) does not mention any restored interest in drama later in his life. Even though On Racine was published only in 1963, Barthes was not entertaining himself anymore with reviews or texts on theatre: the essays in On Racine predate the bundled publication itself. “The first essay had been the preface to a 1960 edition of Racine’s collected works by the Club du Livre Français; the second was a review of a TNP production of Phèdre which had been published in Théâtre populaire in 195812; and the final essay had appeared in Annales in 1960” (Calvet 1994:149). This might explain why the preface of the book and its statement of intent do contradict the actual essays at certain points, but more on that later when I discuss On Racine (see 3.2).

2.2.2 Barthes, Brecht (and the Modernists)

The previous paragraph 2.2.1 shows how Barthes’ love for theatre bloomed and suddenly faded away. Calvet (1994) simply explains it as Barthes’ typical move of discarding something as soon as he fears it might determine who he is and therefore changes course. Even if that is the explanation, it feels as too easy an answer to a rather complex question. As seen from the beginning, Barthes seemed to have more interest in modernist (than contemporary) literature, like Proust and Valéry. The question should perhaps be asked differently; not why Barthes abandoned the theatre, but why he spent so much time on it in the first place? It was clear that, even from the very beginning when he got so-called interested in theatre, he spent his summers reading up on Proust and Mallarmé. So why the attention to theatre, and especially to Racine? In his time most of the plays he would have seen at the Mathurins and the Atelier would have been ‘modern’ pieces from Shaw and Ibsen (which were already a bit dated by the 1930’s though), and in what follows next, it will become clear that Barthes’ big theatre idol was in fact Brecht, so why then Racine?

In that respect, a short exploration of Barthes’ relation with Brecht is yet another small, but vital, piece of this puzzle, as it may explain certain aspects of the ideology of On Racine, and of the related ‘The Death of the Author’ texts. The latter essay contains two major Modernist writers and one Modernist movement, namely Valéry, Proust and Surrealism: none of these were mentioned in On Racine. They are indicators of a certain break in Barthes’ work. Where still he focused on the dramatic texts of Racine in 1963, by 1967 he had pointed his scope

12 This is an interesting essay: it predates the two other texts in On Racine, therefore the question rises whether or not Barthes’ later ideas on the concept of the author (which culminate ultimately in ‘The Death of the Author’) might find their inception in this texts. I will discuss this further in part 3.2.1)

19 towards the works of modernist authors. It is a rather important change, as the poetics of the Renaissance are not simply identical to those of Modernist authors, who clearly serve a poetic goal which is much closer to what Barthes is trying to accomplish in ‘The Death of the Author’: the centralisation of the reader and the text itself.

However, there is already a presence of Brecht in On Racine; especially in the theoretical background that tries to offer solid ground to the analysis. Brecht tries to create plays that leave room for interpretation by the spectator; Barthes similarly tries to interpret Racine’s plays in that Brechtian sense, distilling his own interpretation from those plays. Barthes’ problem with regard to the performance of Phèdre, which offers for him no room for interpretation, is also exploited in On Racine (to which I will come back later in this subchapter). So one can say there is already a certain Modernist influence in On Racine, yet it is subtle and not an overt and bold change. The abrupt move towards Modernism must thus have sprouted somewhere, and it might be important, in light of this study, to try and define that moment. Therefore, again a look into Barthes’ life might be useful, in order to maybe find the source of Barthes’ sudden move and where Brecht’s influence came into play.

So in the words of Barthes, it must be so that “[a]ny reflection on theatre and on revolution must come to terms with Brecht” (Critical Essays 1964:71). Therefore, let us first take note of Brecht, whose presence is already noticeable through On Racine, and on whom Barthes had already made publications before, in Théâtre populaire. Barthes’ serious Brechtian period occurred somewhere in the mid-50’s, with the January 1955 issue of Théâtre populaire, which focused on Brecht’s theatre: “It was Barthes’s editorial in January 1955 which, proclaiming ’la revolution brechtienne’, had begun the defence and promotion of Brecht’s theories”, according to Andy Stafford (1996:33). Barthes was consequently mocked and ridiculed by those drama critics who felt that Théâtre populaire committed ‘messianism’ towards Brecht’s theatre13.

Barthes’ involvement in Théâtre populaire has been underestimated in Calvet (1994) as he spends little to no attention to this period in Barthes’ career, even though he wrote over seventy articles on theatre between 1953 and 1960, as Stafford (1996:34) notes. Interestingly

13 Stafford (1996:33-34) notes how Eugène Ionesco’s play L’Impromptu de l’Alma (1956) is a humorous criticism of both Brechtian theatre and Roland Barthes. The play features three characters respectively called Bartholoméus I, II and III, who advise a playwright, called Ionesco, on how to write a new kind of drama which is “‘scientifique’ and for a ‘public populaire’, as well as insisting that ‘il y a une politique du costume”.

20 Barthes’ last article for TP was in 1960 - the same year he wrote the first essay of On Racine – which was concerned with Brecht’s Mother Courage; why the change from being a huge supporter of Brechtian theatre, only to return to classical drama, which offered none of the characteristics Barthes’ praised in Brecht? Stafford (1996:36) argues that the failure of the TNP14 (Théatre National Populaire) drove Barthes away from his interest in theatre and more towards his sarcastic and pessimistic view of popular culture, as voiced in Mythologies (1957).

Barthes originally started out writing positively about the TNP and in 1954 his enthusiasm for the TNP was remarkable in TP. Around the same time Barthes also became an active member of the ATP15 (Amis du Théâtre Populaire) and became the central figure in articulating the ATP’s needs for a radical popular theatre. Before Barthes’ encounter with Brechtian theatre (at the ‘Festival de Paris’ in May 1954), he advocated the ATP’s demands for a truly popular theatre and stated that the three aspects to success were that they should (a) attract the masses, (b) deliver a high cultural repertoire and (c) have an avant-garde dramaturgy. In other words, Barthes wanted political content, which attracted the masses and made them think for themselves. Yet, it was his “insistence on a repertoire, above all, which was to bring about the split with the TNP over the next two years and to result, eventually, in the collapse of the ATP”, according to Stafford (1996:38). Barthes’ statements in the summer of 1954 meant the beginning of the politicisation of TP, whereas the journal started out saying that politics were in its view not an integral part of theatre.

So when Barthes showed significant support for Brechtian theatre in the January 1955 issue, it meant a final break with the original poetics of the journal, which were not politically involved at all. This change was not as abrupt as it may seem, since Barthes’ first editorial in 1954 in TP already introduced a political stance16. At first however, Barthes seemed sceptical

14 The TNP was a theatre in Paris, founded by Firmin Gémier in 1920. Its goal was to deliver quality entertainment for the general public, thus opposed to what Barthes calls the ‘bourgeois theatre’, represented by the Comédie-Française, which was a state theatre with its own troupe of actors, located in the very luxurious Palais-Royal complex in the first arrondissement of Paris, only available to those of the higher classes. In 1951 Jean Vilar became the new head of the TNP, and received support from Voisin, the original founder of Théâtre populaire. 15 The ATP’s main goal was to draw audiences interested in new dramatic forms and widen theatre audiences. They coordinate their actions with emphasis on popular theatre, driven in part by the work by Jean Vilar. 16 “Or le théâtre que nous vomissons, c’est le théâtre de 1’Argent; le théâtre où l’on paye cher les places [...]; où le luxe vaniteux des décors et des costumes [...] postule toute une économie du faux or [...]; où les tèemes du répertoire ne présentent jamais qu’un homme minuscule [...] sans rapport avec le

21 of the possibility of a true popular theatre in a capitalist society - it is important to remember that Barthes considered himself a Marxist critic at the time – however he seemed to believe that it was not improbable, if it occurred under the right circumstances: his three-point plan and later, the Brechtian theatre, which he called ‘a completely popular oeuvre’ (in TP 8, 1954). Yet despite his own best efforts, Barthes would lose faith in this idea of a true radical popular theatre:

His conversion to the belief that some form of popular theatre was possible under capitalism encouraged him after 1954 to take a lead in the movement (…) by advocating the three-part plan. And it was precisely the gap between his growing confidence in the possibilities of constructing a radical popular theatre and the failure of Vilar’s TNP to deliver this theatre which caused Barthes to lead Théâtre populaire away from support for Vilar. (Stafford 1996:41)

During 1953 and part of 1954, Barthes remained a fan of Vilar’s TNP, and felt that he met his three-point requirements for radical popular theatre: with an innovative production style and plays of a grand repertoire that attracted the masses, Barthes thought that the TNP was nearly perfect in its efforts. This attitude of support changed when Vilar announced his season program for the summer of 1954. Barthes disagreed with the choices of plays to be performed (Hugo’s Ruy Blas and Pinchette’s Nucléa) as he did not consider them as grand plays for a mass public. At the same time he came in contact with Roger Planchon’s new ‘Comédie’ theatre in Lyons, that “was offering an avant-garde, tragic and political theatre to popular audiences without compromising the production styles, and using little-known, amateur actors” (Stafford 1996:42). Around the same time Barthes also came in contact with Brechtian theatre that fulfilled all his needs for a radical popular theatre, which Vilar seemingly continued to fail when he did not match the TNP’s performances to the dramatic events of the Cold War and colonial unrest of the time, so Brecht became Barthes’ solution.

Even when Vilar’s TNP did perform great tragic theatre, as Macbeth in early 1955, he did not get it right according to Barthes17 and Vilar continued to avoid the theatre of history as Brecht’s, which only hardened Barthes more and more in his belief in Brechtian theories.

tragique de 1’Histoire. [...] Les complaisances générales dont jouit actuellement le théâtre bourgeois sont telles que notre tâche ne peut être d’abord que destructrice. [...] Cette opposition vise gros, ne s’embarrasse pas de nuances. (TP 5, p.3; OC 382-3)” (Stafford 1996:39) 17 According to Stafford (1996:42) Barthes praised Vilar’s production style, but regretted the lack of Brechtian ‘distancing’.

22 Mainly, Barthes felt that France lacked political theatre similar to Brecht’s; he even defended Sartre’s rather traditional Nekrassov, simply because it tried to develop a critical and political theatre (even though the play was not meant for a mass audience). Barthes started to ‘radicalise’ by the end of 1956, after he felt Vilar had compromised his theatre simply for the sake of attracting bigger audiences (which does seem a bit paradoxical), and kept on refusing to perform plays that were somehow connected to the current events of the Cold War and the Algerian War. Barthes’ promotion of Brechtian theatre took up more of his time and effort and was accompanied by a brief attempt to help amateur theatre associations: these associations were part of the people, performing for the people. At the same time, the ATP was dissolved because it was financed by the TNP, yet ironically through Barthes’ efforts within the ATP and TP, he (and thus the ATP) was also their greatest source of criticism.

Barthes was thus left behind with the only solution for a successful radical popular theatre, which was of Brechtian nature. The Brechtian production style and subject matter were perfect for his goals, yet the biggest problem remained: how to get Brecht performed and produced correctly? In France, only the earlier mentioned Planchon seemed to be good enough for Barthes. Planchon, who he felt was the only producer to apply Brechtian theory successfully to productions of epic drama. The scarcely good Brechtian productions, together with the dissolution of the ATP and new career opportunities (a contract with Seuil in 1956 for Mythologies and the start of his research on fashion at the CNRS), were all factors which helped bury Barthes’ enthusiasm for the popular theatre. This was visible in the frequency of writings on the subject, which dropped dramatically from then on, according to Stafford (1996:44).

Interestingly, one of Barthes’ latest articles on the matter was a review of Villar’s performance of Racine’s Phèdre: “[h]is disillusionment with Vilar seemed almost complete by the time of Vilar’s inclusion of Racine’s Phèdre in the TNP season of 1958: not only, thought Barthes, had he chosen the form of drama most antipathetic to popular theatre, Vilar had also produced it badly” (Stafford 1996:44). This review became the second chapter of On Racine, called ‘Racine Spoken’ and deals with Barthes’ frustration about the actress who plays the role of Phèdre in such a way that spectator is unable to interpret the play for his own, and he heckles her involvement in the interpretation of the play. This review spurred a lot of criticism later on from Picard, who only believes in the text as it is; Barthes’ criticism (cf. infra 3.2.1) is mainly based on the fact that the actors ‘speak’ the play, accenting words

23 that the author underlined or italicised. For Picard, that would have been obvious rubbish; the author’s intention should indeed be enacted, why change what is there, why would one put accents somewhere else than indicated by the author? Nonetheless, the question is thus why Barthes then went on to write a rather long essay on Racine in 1960, after being so horrified by Vilar’s production of Phèdre, which went against the main principle of Brechtian theatre? Stafford (1996:47) provides a partial answer:

What were the role and perspectives of his view of constructing this popular theatre? Why spend so much time and effort building a theatre if it could only be popular ‘idéalement’? On the one hand, he had a Trotskyan cynicism towards popular culture, on the other, he was quickly swept up by a typically Communist Party cultural populism. This politico-cultural confusion in Barthes’s attitude helps explain, I suggest, his disillusionment with theatre at the end of the 1950s. […] Thus Barthes’s ‘structuralist’ phase seemed to develop out of his jaundiced attitude towards mass culture from the late fifties into the sixties.

This answer however remains rather incomplete, in the sense that it may explain Barthes’ disillusionment with theatre and even his ‘structuralist’ phase; but it does not explain why he then went on to write a lengthy structuralist analysis of Racine’s oeuvre in 1960, or rather why Barthes did still write on theatre at all? Of all the things he could have chosen to write an structuralist analysis about, the whole canon of literature and theatre available to him, why Racine? Perhaps the answer is very (and almost too) simple: financial reasons. Calvet (1994:149) reports that Barthes was asked by the Club du Livre Français to write a preface to the 1960 edition Racine’s collected works (which is confirmed by Barthes (1963:vii) himself in the ‘Foreword’ to On Racine). Nothing more seems to be known on the publication of On Racine.

Sure enough, Barthes explains why Racine is still a valid topic at the time, and therefore quotes on how other critics like Poulet, Mauron and Goldmann approached Racine, but even that does not fully explain why he would occupy himself with it. He could have taken any other oeuvre to study and still form his own method of analysis, without having to analyse the exact same author. Stafford (1996:48) notes how Barthes did not even like it when in 1959 the reformed TNP included more Racinian plays: “His displeasure with the ‘réforme’ of the ‘théâtres nationaux’ by André Malraux in 1959, which included advocating more Racine to be played in the theatre and the construction of Maisons de la Culture, allowed Barthes to see the

24 gap between the French youth and Government cultural policy”. The choice of his subject matter thus seems to be contra-intuitive: as a previously heavy Brechtian supporter, his obvious displeasure with the performance of Phédre and his annoyance with the decision in 1959 that more Racine would be played, it does not make sense as to why he would then go on to agree on writing a preface to the collected works of Racine.

The financial motive seems thus at least plausible. Even though this question is not exactly relevant to my research, it is troubling and interesting at the same time: perhaps unsolvable, as we cannot find out the author’s intentions after he has passed away or even when he is alive for that matter. If it had been merely a financial matter, it might explain the general ‘messiness’ of the first essay in On Racine: surely enough the basic premises of his structuralist theory are there, however they are not fully incorporated and worked out in the analysis. If the essay was only driven by financial motives, it might just be a sort of neglect from Barthes for the subject matter: he did not think Racine as it was performed at the time to be fit for his idea of a radical popular theatre, so why put much effort in a thoroughly executed analysis, if it is only to serve as a preface. It also makes us wonder as to why he decided to On Racine publish in 1963 after all: there are no new parts in the book and he opens by saying that he has no intention of giving the essays a “retrospective unity” (Barthes 1963:vii). To reduce this publication merely to a financial motive would however be simplistic, yet it might just be, as was often the case with Barthes that “[s]ometimes, of course, he took on too many such commissions and, faced with a build-up of deadlines, he would ‘bury his head in the sand’, as he called it” (Calvet 1994:154). Perhaps it was indeed a lack of time that caused him not to edit his previous essays before bundling them in On Racine, but it still remains a hypothetical answer.

Nonetheless, it seems as if it were the means to an end: if Barthes would have been seriously committed to Racine, why not at least then correct some of the flaws of the first essay if it was to be published in a book. This is of course simple speculation, but it makes us wonder. On the other hand, ‘Racinian Man’, the first essay, shows some reminiscences with other critics, especially Mauron, Goldmann and Poulet, which in its turn does prove that Barthes did read all these different interpretations on Racine’s work. The question arises again as to why would he have studied them so carefully, when clearly he did not carry Racine in his heart? Would it not have made more sense if he would publish anything at all, it would be about Brecht? An answer might be found in what was hypothesised before.

25 It remains at least strange, that Barthes chose to write on Racine and not Brecht. As Jürgen Pieters (1999:36) notes, Barthes has written many a text on Brecht in the 60’s: the texts are there, an example being the essays ‘Mother Courage Blind’, ‘The Brechtian Revolution’, ‘The Tasks of Brechtian Criticism’ and ‘On Brecht’s Mother’ in Critical Essays from 1964; these essays already exceed the number of essays Barthes devoted to Racine. Besides that, his 1958 review of Phèdre shows his disliking of the performance of Racinian plays. However, Brecht’s influence in On Racine is clear through Barthes’ reading method: his goal is to find an interpretation in the Racinian plays that he evokes from the text itself, not the performance (see the second essay of On Racine in which he hates the involvement of the actress playing Phèdre, as it limits the possibilities of interpretation). Leaving this issue aside, one can however distil certain other influences in Barthes’ study of Racine, namely the influences from other ‘New Criticism’, Marxist critics Lucien Goldmann and Georges Poulet (amongst others).

In a sense, Barthes’ fondness of Brechtian theatre explains why he changed his focus to the Modernist writers (even though he had discovered quite early in his life); these writers carry the same poetical background that is found in Brecht: openness of meaning, writing themselves out of the text, in order to shift the focus to the creative mind of the reader, which has to use his or her imagination in order to extract meaning from their work. Besides that, the Modernist writers try to achieve what Barthes thinks is of the highest priority in literary criticism: the absence of the author, in order to let the reader flourish, an idea fully expanded in Barthes’ aptly called essay ‘The Death of the Author’.

2.3 ‘Tragedic’ Influences: Goldmann and Poulet?

Barthes (1963) acknowledges the importance of certain recent works in the field of Racine- studies, and singles out Lucien Goldmann and Charles Mauron amongst others like Georges Poulet and Jean Starobinski (even Picard makes the list) on page two of On Racine18. I have chosen to take a closer look at Goldmann and Poulet rather than Mauron, because of the following reasons: firstly, because McKeane (2015) already explores and discusses Mauron’s impact on Barthes, and secondly because Poulet is also mentioned in several of Barthes’ other works that are important with regard to my thesis, namely Criticism and Truth and The Two Criticisms. In what follows I will turn to respectively ‘Notes sur le temps racinien’ from

18 Mauron even makes it to the very first page of the book, and is mentioned already within the second paragraph.

26 Poulet’s Études sur le temps humain (1949) and Goldmann’s The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and Tragedies of Racine (1955).

2.3.1 Poulet’s ‘Notes sur le temps racinien’ (1949)

Barthes and Poulet19 (presumably) met in October 1966, at a famous conference on the legacy of structuralist criticism at John Hopkins in Baltimore20. Other than that, the two gentlemen do not seem to have been in contact, with the exception of perhaps reading each other’s works. Barthes expresses admiration, of some sort, in the opening paragraphs to On Racine, for Poulet21, who amongst other critics is keeping Racine alive in the contemporary scene of literary criticism.

J. Hillis Miller (1963)22 published an article called ‘The Literary Criticism of Georges Poulet’, which offers an overview on the major outlines of Poulet’s work. The article starts with a feature of Poulet that instantly reminds us of Barthes, namely the importance of the act of reading: for Poulet, reading is a practice that allows access to another mind. Even though this reading act is not separated from the author, the simple premise, the act/virtue of reading, is something that is recurring in Barthes’ work as well. The two differ hugely in their conceptualisation of the act of reading: Poulet focuses on the mind of the author, where Barthes reads anything but the author’s intention.

“Criticism, for Poulet, is the putting in order and clarification of the identification attained through reading. Order and transparency are two fundamental needs of his mind” (Miller 1963:475). Disregarding the phenomenological background, this nearly could have been a quote from Criticism and Truth. Barthes as a critic searches for transparency, a transparent

19 Georges Poulet (1902-1991, Belgian-born) was one of the main theoreticians of the (second) Geneva School, which is not to be confused with the Geneva School of De Saussure. Its background lies in phenomenological theory, in Romantic literary tradition and in Henri Bergson's analyses of perception of time. See also Miller (1966) and Lawall (1993). 20 Barthes and Poulet’s respective papers for that conference have been published in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy. Eds. Macksey, Richard and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970. Print. 21 When looking for Georges Poulet in Barthes’ biographies, I came across rather funny ‘mistake’ in Samoyault (2015:504/710); in a quotation from Travels in China (2012:85) that is adopted in her biography, the word ‘chicken’ (‘poulet’ in French) is found; which, according to the index of her book, is a reference to Georges Poulet (obviously a harmless and involuntary mistake). Yes, Barthes was many things, but I doubt he was a cannibal on top of it all! 22 Miller initially recognised Poulet’s influence on his work, but rejected the Geneva criticism in favour of deconstructionism. For those interested, Miller’s latest interview (by Frederik Van Dam (KU Leuven) recorded in May 2015, in Maine) is to be premiered on 17 September 2015 at The Trollope Bicentennial Conference at the KU Leuven.

27 language in which to express his criticism (although it must be said his language is far from transparent) and internal organisation, orders within the text, are what his structuralist interpretations of Racine’s plays are based upon: the text is filled with images and motifs that form a complex internal world which has to be described by the critic. “The works of an author make up a complex, three-dimensional structure, a palace of crystal filling the mind, and integrated organically in its interplay of part with part, aspect with aspect” (Miller 1963:475); it feels almost like one is reading Barthes.

In reading Miller (1963), the similarities keep piling up, as apparently Poulet makes use of a similar kind of structure in order to explore different texts within the oeuvre of one author, the same way Barthes does in On Racine. The sole structure of On Racine is based on the same principle of how Poulet used to structure his interpretative criticism:

Firmness of structure is attained by a great power of reduction. Passages from different books by an author, written at different times of his life, are set side by side, so that their similarity can be seen. All the apparent heterogeneity of a multiform author like Balzac or Baudelaire is reduced to a manageable number of motifs. (Miller 1963:479)

As is the case in On Racine, the difficulty is where the analysis should begin, if one does not just start chronologically with the first work of an author. Poulet resolves the problem, as Barthes has, simply by just starting anywhere, as it does not matter since the critic will be led everywhere, through all aspects of the works that suit the premises of the interpretation23. It must be noted that I am explicitly focusing on the similarities between Poulet and Barthes, because apart from what I have already mentioned, they are very different critics indeed. A simple example to point at their differences: “Poulet's criticism is first of all mimesis, and the duplication of author's mind in critic's mind is accomplished when the critic can as it were speak for the author, alternately in the author's language and in the critic's language, for the two languages are the same” (Miller 1963:477). The sheer thought of identifying with the author’s mind would have been unacceptable for Barthes (although the quote is a bit

23 This is expressed simplistically; Poulet would search for the Cogito as the true beginning: a moment when nothing exists but a naked presence of consciousness to itself, in itself. However, this moment is undefined and decided upon by the critic itself, therefore in a way it is arbitrary. Barthes on the other hand does not acknowledge such a thing and starts his interpretation of On Racine by simply listing motifs that can be found throughout Racine’s plays, after which he then goes on to interpret individual works on the basis of those motifs.

28 misleading as Poulet’s criticism does not simply reciprocate, its aim is to contribute, prolong and deepen the literature it concerns itself with). Poulet does not distance himself from the author, as it would be not beneficial for an intimate comprehension, whereas Barthes makes the complete opposite move.

However, in forming their respective forms of criticism – Poulet’s phenomenological and Barthes’ structuralist interpretation – they share a basic premise: criticism is derived from an act of self-dispossession. In its most simple form, it means that both critics do not want to be involved in the process of criticism: “Lire ou critiquer,” says Poulet (1963:203), “c'est faire le sacrifice de toutes [nos] habitudes, désirs, croyances”. The critic is a neutral entity that only interprets without trying or forcing its own conceptions of things on the work that is studied, which is exactly what Barthes tries to do as well. In that respect, Lawall (1993:73) writes: “Geneva critics reject aesthetic evaluation or any judgment from external criteria, in practice they prefer works demonstrating an existential authenticity in which patterns of consciousness are accepted, explored in all their contradictions, and given a coherent resolution”. Barthes shares with the Geneva School the idea that a work should not be judged from external criteria (but he does concern himself with aesthetic evaluation) and if interpreted widely, Barthes shares this whole premise with them.

Yet, to argue that one of Barthes’ main arguments from Criticism and Truth – that criticism should be based on the internal relationships of the work without relying on external influences – is based upon Poulet’s work, is difficult. We know that Barthes has read Poulet, but there is no definite way to prove he got the idea from the Geneva critics, as this idea can be found elsewhere too (e.g. Prague Structuralism). But we do find Poulet’s name on the penultimate page of Criticism and Truth, where we read:

The critic is nothing other than a commentator, but he is fully that (and that is enough to put him on dangerous ground): for on the one hand, he is a transmitter, he re- conveys something from the past (this is often necessary: for after all, is not Racine somewhat indebted to Georges Poulet and Verlaine to Jean-Pierre Richard?); and on the other hand he is an operator, for he rearranges the elements of the work so as to give it a certain comprehensibility, that is to say a certain distance. (Barthes 1966:39)

The footnote with this passage of Barthes simply lists ‘Notes sur le temps racinien’ from Études sur le temps humain (1949) as a ‘source’, but as is rather usual with Barthes – you

29 will see throughout this thesis24 – the reference remains rather obscure and does not reveal much about the actual Racine-Poulet relationship that is being suggested. For that, we will take a closer look to Études sur le temps humain, to hopefully gain a useful insight in what Poulet might have inspired in Barthes’ work.

Poulet’s ‘Notes sure le temps racinien’ is divided in 11 very small subchapters, all of which pose answers to and expand on one main question that involves time within the Racinian world, which he defines as; “[…] so that in the Racinian universe, as in the Bergsonian universe, what is called the present is not only pure and ceaseless invention, but also a preservation of the past, as well as a continuation of that past in the present”25 (Poulet 1949:149). Reading Poulet’s essay on Racinian time has a certain ‘Barthesian’ feel about it; in the sense that Poulet’s style matches Barthes’ (or rather vice versa). However, Barthes and Poulet differ quite in their understanding of what an ‘author’ is: for Barthes it is merely the hand that wrote the text, while for Poulet the author is the entity that has put meaning in the text and only through duplication of the mind of the author it is possible to distil meaning from the text. For Poulet, the author is thus a necessary part in the process of analysing a literary text, where for Barthes the author might as well be a monkey and it would not change the way he would make his analysis.

Poulet employs a certain writing style that intrinsically carries unsolved internal paradoxes within (which we also find in Barthes’ writing): “All of Racine's tragedy is presented as the intrusion of a fatal past, of a determining past, of a cause-efficient past, in a present which is desperately trying to render itself independent”26 (Poulet 1949:150). This holds the following paradox: Poulet (at least according to Miller (1963)) wants to be transparent in his criticism, and wants to remain within the mind of the author, but also within the borders of the text, not relaying on external sources. Both of these terms have been violated by the previous quotes and he has referred to the philosopher Henri Bergson. Notably, and in a way surprisingly,

24 Perhaps I should be using the term Barthes’ “ink blots”, as coined by Neil Badmington (2008), for the obscurities that Barthes’ texts evoke. Badmington does however use the term in a slightly different and further unrelated way; therefore I shall not use it here. 25 My translation of the original French text: “[…] si bien que dans l'univers racinien, comme dans l'univers bergonsien, ce qu'on appelle présent n'est pas seulement invention pure et incessante, mais préservation du passé et continuation du passé dans le present”. 26 My translation of the original French text: “[T]out le drame racinien se présente comme l'intrusion d'un passé fatal, d'un passé déterminant, d'un passé cause-efficiente, dans un présent qui cherche désespérément à s'en rendre indépendant”.

30 Barthes suffers from the same kind of ‘errors’, although it can hardly be called a clear indication of influence.

Poulet’s criticism on Racine is very limited, only a scant eighteen pages long and is merely a chapter in a bigger study of human time in literary texts from writers such as Montaigne, Molière, Madame de la Fayette, Baudelaire, Valéry and Proust. Oddly enough, Poulet focuses both on ‘modern’ (his contemporaries) and dix-septièmiste writers, a trend which we will see reoccurring in Barthes.

2.3.2 Goldmann’s The Hidden God (1955)

Romanian-born critic Lucien Goldmann was a Marxist critic (like Barthes), who developed a sociology of thought, based upon Kant, Marx and Lukács, and formulated a ‘genetic structuralism’. His structuralism is based on “the idea that all thought tends systematically to create a link between the person as the thinking subject, the world and the absolute” (Leenhardt 1993:340). This has to be nuanced in the sense that Goldmann does believe that any literary work that tries to present a worldview27 is insufficient, unless it arises out of a social force (social class). This social class limits the thought of the artist, because the artist is bound by the rules and conventions of his social class. In this sense, there is a dichotomy between Goldmann and Barthes, as the latter does not engage (or definitely claims not to engage) in any kind of sociological interpretation of the literary work whatsoever.

Barthes and Goldmann, despite Barthes’ faint appraisal of Goldmann in On Racine, did not quite get along with each other. Calvet (1994:167) notes how Goldmann tried to stir up anti- Barthes feeling in the movement of May 1968, claiming that Barthes was on the side of the establishment. In that same time, Barthes and Goldmann were confronted with each other, when they both sat on the jury of Julia Kristeva’s MA thesis viva. During the viva, Goldmann apparently cleverly congratulated Kristeva’s thesis in such a way that he criticised Barthes’ structuralism instead (Calvet does not expand on the details of this dispute). These events however unfolded after the publication of On Racine: it might as well be that Barthes before the troubles of May 1968 has read and found inspiration in Goldmann’s work.

27 “A world vision is, in fact, the conceptual extrapolation in the most coherent possible manner of the real, emotional, intellectual and even motory tendencies of the members of a group. It is a coherent pattern of problems and replies which is expressed, on the literary plane, by the creation through words of a concrete universe of beings and things” (Goldmann 1964:314-15).

31 John McKeane’s (2015) paper focuses on similarities between Lucien Goldmann’s analysis of Phaedra and what Barthes does with that same play in On Racine. Even though his scope does not exactly fall within mine, he does point towards similarities between both authors. McKeane (2015:7) points out how Barthes’ section ‘The Racinian tenebroso28’ corresponds to Goldmann’s thinking of tragedy “as a genre of contrasts, a thinking that is couched in terms of light and dark”. However, Barthes’ chiaroscuro intends to reconcile the opposites that are light and dark, whereas Goldmann does not believe in this sort of balance, and insists upon the irrecuperability of drama. McKeane (2015) makes a cogent argumentation for this relation between both authors and his paper shows how, at least when it comes to that specific part of On Racine, there is a definite intertext to Goldmann present.

Besides that, arguably there are other similarities to be found between The Hidden God and On Racine. In one of the first passages of the chapter ‘Tragic Vision in Racine’s Theatre’, Goldmann (1964:313) writes: “For me, literature, art, philosophy and, to a great extent, the practice of a religion are essentially languages, means whereby man communicates with other beings, and who may be either his contemporaries, his future readers, God, or purely imaginary readers”. Taking into account that a language, for Goldmann, is determined by social class conventions and thus only able to express a certain worldview, one can be reminded of Barthes’ commentary of the political aspect of language (of French critics) in Criticism and Truth, the aspect of ‘clarity’ of language. Clarity is ideologically based; as for Barthes it is a sort of political approval by a class of its own language: “it is a matter of writing in a certain kind of sacred idiom, related to the French language […]. The idiom in question, named ‘French clarity’ is a language whose origin is political” (Barthes 1966:10). Thus both Goldmann and Barthes believe in the idea, with their respective and different nuances, that language and politics (social class) are inherently inseparable from each other.

Goldmann observes the problem with autobiographical (old) criticism – the fact that it is wrong to search for the meaning of the literary work in the life of the author – similarly to how Barthes voices his concerns with this approach. Goldmann states that up to that time (and still) there is no exact scientific manner or scientific knowledge of psychology that allows a researcher to fully understand and study an individual. Barthes does pose to use psychoanalysis in On Racine, however in relation the form of the text, not the actual psyche (also Barthes’ conception of psychoanalysis is based on Lacan, which is more structuralist

28 Tenebroso as a form of claire-obscure, a reference to the famous painting style of Carravagio.

32 than Freudian psychoanalysis). “Moreover, the literary historian has to deal with a man who has been dead for a long time, and about whom any incidental information which he may obtain - in addition to the author's actual works - will also be drawn from people long since dead” (Goldmann 1964:314); it is the sort of criticism we could also find with Barthes in his objections to the Old Critics.

Nonetheless, Goldmann does focus on the author, which is crucial in order to explore the worldvision expressed in the text. The author is not seen as an individual, but as a member of a group, a social class, therefore it is not autobiographical (however, one could ask himself how Goldmann was to determine the social class in which the author circulated without at least studying the man’s biography29). With that in mind, Goldmann sees two necessary levels of communication within the literary text: “(1) the correspondence between the world vision as an experienced reality and the universe created by the writer; and (2) the correspondence between this universe and the specifically literary devices - style, images, syntax, etc. - used by the writer to express it” (Goldmann 1964:315). Disregarding the first observed level, the second is almost exactly the form of criticism that Barthes creates in On Racine: the textual universe, the inner world of the drama, which is explained through the recurring images, style etc.; the difference being that Barthes accounts for the images, but does not attribute these as expressions of the author; they are simply there in the text. This has basically to do with the different conceptualisations Barthes and Goldmann have of the author: Goldmann seems to uphold the ‘poeta vates’ ideal, whereas Barthes only regards upon the entity that wrote the text, but did not put meaning in it. This dichotomy is visible in their respective analyses of Racine’s texts.

Besides this, Goldmann believes his practice can only be applied to works of the past, given that there is no way of correctly characterising modern society, as it is too close by to be properly observed. This idea is quite contrary to what Barthes believes; surely in On Racine Barthes does study works of the past, but later on his scope will turn towards more modern

29 “Only the exceptional individual, who identifies himself to a very great extent with certain fundamental tendencies of the social life of his time - and who, on one of the many planes of expression open to man, achieves a coherent awareness of what, among the other members of his group, remains vague and confused, and contradicted by innumerable other tendencies - only such a man, only the creator of a valid work, can be understood by the sociological historian” (Goldmann 1964:315). Here we still see the Romantic ideal of the ‘poeta vates’: the poet/author as a sort of divine creator, capable of interweaving all possible influences from life into one piece of art. This Romantic ideal is completely gone in Barthes (in On Racine definitely theoretically, in ‘The Death of the Author’ in both theory and practice).

33 and contemporary writers, like Valéry and Proust. Barthes’ practice, contrary to Goldmann’s, is not bound in time and can be applied to the most recent of works, which has to do with the different approach of these two authors. At first sight it may seem, especially in relation to On Racine, that there are rather strong similarities between both critics, however they mainly differ on most points; Goldmann could perhaps thus have been a source of positive and ‘negative’ inspiration, in the sense that Barthes might have felt that certain crucial aspects of Goldmann’s theory did not suffice in the way he wanted to look at texts.

Where Barthes observes several main motives throughout the Racinian tragedies, Goldmann (1964:317) claims there only to be three: “they are always God, the World and Man”. Discussing which is wrong or right would be pointless, however it seems as if Goldmann chose these three motifs to serve the purposes of his own analysis; these main traits are perfect if one would want to distil a world vision from Racine’s plays. Contrary to Barthes, it feels as if this is a ‘forced’ perspective: the elements have to be present in any sort of way whatsoever. In that sense, the critic supresses the possible meanings of the text in order to fit a preconception. Barthes, even though On Racine does have its internal flaws (see infra), on the other hand steers clear of such a method; instead he chooses to let the text speak for itself and then draws out what he believes to be main motifs. Although this is also a one-perspective approach, Barthes stresses the importance of open interpretation and admits that in no way his interpretation is the right one (even though textually he does not leave much room for that), while Goldmann does not mention the possibility of another possibly alternative interpretation.

2.3.3 On Racine: authentic, or a mere corrected copy?

Ironically enough, Goldmann does concern himself with time in Racinian tragedy, the same topic Poulet chose for much shorter analysis of Racine (see 2.3.1). Both of Barthes’ sources thus look at how time functions in Racinian plays but oddly enough, Barthes himself does not (or very rarely so) mention this aspect. It leaves us with a question as to why that is: did he not consider the subject matter interesting enough for his own work, did he feel as if it was studied enough already, or was it out of rebellion (or maybe even a certain respect for) against his fellow critics? As interesting as that may be, it does not really matter in light of this study, but it is significant in the way that for the most other parts Barthes does seem to have been influenced (either positively or negatively) by either Goldmann of Poulet.

34 As it seems, Goldmann and Barthes do not seem to share much, theoretically speaking. There are certain aspects that could potentially have steered Barthes in a certain direction, but the influence seems to be lesses than Poulet’s. However, one could argue that Barthes read Goldmann closely and decided to correct whatever he found to be ‘wrong’; it looks like Barthes moved in opposite directions of Goldmann, which could be an indirect criticism, as he does list Goldmann in the opening paragraphs of On Racine and in certain other texts that are concerned with his own form of structuralism. The biggest and most obvious difference being that Goldmann is still working on the basis of a Romantic vision of the author, which is completely theoretically absent in Barthes. Davis (2004:13) points out another difference between Barthes and Goldmann (and in a way also Poulet) when he writes that “Barthes shares Goldmann’s and Mauron’s desire to find the unity of Racinian tragedy; but unlike them, he denies that it should be located outside the texts themselves, in ideological or psychological forces. Rather, Barthes’s study proposes a sort of structural anthropology of the Racinian world, as he analyses the signifying system underlying each of the plays”.

When it comes to Poulet, there do seem to be some parallels to be made, even stylistically. We know from the opening passages of On Racine and ‘The Two Criticisms’ that Barthes considers Poulet as one of his ‘own’: he mentions that Poulet, amongst others and himself, is an adherent of ideological criticism, in contrast to academic (thus Picardian) criticism, which is the object of Barthes critique. However, through this short exploration of Poulet, it is hard to substantiate what Poulet’s influence on Barthes might have been. Perhaps the basic structuralist notions that subtly underlie his work, the text-inherent approach of his criticism, his structured manner of organising texts in such a way that they can show similarities with each other, his complex style of writing, etc.; all of these characteristics of Poulet can in a way be seen in Barthes’ work as well. The question whether or not this is simply coincidental, or Barthes, who carefully observed, studied, appropriated and subtly executed a similar style of criticism as Poulet, is a tough one to be answered. With respect to On Racine, I would argue that Barthes did at least take a very hard look at Poulet and took from him what he thought would sufficiently support his own type of criticism, as there are too many similarities for it all to be coincidental; note that I here talk about the style of argumentation, the same underlying concepts of interpretative criticism, but not the actual interpretations, which differ from each other substantially.

35 But perhaps the most significant difference lies in their different conceptualisations of the concept ‘author’. For Goldmann, the author is clearly an entity of Romantic ideals; a sort of mythical writer that is capable of voicing everything of his life into his work, thus creating an image that can be held representative for a certain world vision of people of the same social class as the author. For Poulet, the author is still significant as well, as the critic needs to enter into the mind of the author in order to interpret the literary work, or rather he tries to duplicate the author’s mind in his own and uses the author’s language, as well as his own, to achieve his phenomenological analysis. For Barthes, the author is of no actual importance, other than supplying the literary work (at best); it is the critic or reader that interprets the work, void from worldly assumptions, without looking to the author’s biography, or recreating his mind in order to analyse the literary work. These are three completely different author images, in which Barthes proves to be actually fully authentic.

Does this then imply that On Racine is a mere annotated and corrected copy? No; Barthes’ own form of structuralism is significantly different from both Poulet and Goldmann and cannot be considered a simple combination of the two. It does seems as though Barthes did observe and study both critics very well, but decided on his own forming his own theory on the basis both lacked certain aspects he found to be crucial in order to ‘correctly’ interpret a text. On Racine gives a much deeper interpretation of Racine than either Goldmann or Poulet and Barthes proves to be authentic on several points. Therefore, even with its influences, On Racine is more than just a copy; it became an authentic and new form of structuralist criticism in its day.

36 3 [EXIT Barthes]: Guiding the Author to his Deathbed

3.1 The Autopsy Report: A Short Genesis of ‘The Death of the Author’

You will remember how Plato, in his project for a Republic, deals with writers. In the interests of the community, he denies them the right to dwell therein. […] Since Plato the question of the writer’s right to exist has not often been raised with the same emphasis […] Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht

All beginnings are difficult; Barthes’ essay ‘The Death of the Author’ has, to say at the least, unclear, maybe even obscure origins. Molly Nesbit (1987) explains in her article ‘What Was an Author?’ the particular publication history of Barthes’ text. Contrary to the public idea, ‘The Death of the Author’ was first published in 1967, in Aspen nos. 5+6 an American magazine, one year before its publication in France, in Mantéia V. It would not be strange, if it were not that Aspen was kept in a white box and represented the advanced modern culture, with contributions from Marcel Duchamp, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Richter and Samuel Beckett. So Barthes’ essay is boxed in, between “twenty-eight pieces, nothing more than a pamphlet stuck between movies, records, diagrams, cardboard cut-outs, and advertisements’ (Nesbit 1987:241). Despite these many ‘big’ authors, the magazine partially focused on the denial of old-style authorship. However, this was not the magazine’s only goal, as it also tried to define modern form:

[Aspen] exposes modern form as a complex of machinery, marketing, impersonality, rationality, power, and scientific truth; it takes these materials over and tries to work with them; it beautifies and on occasion mimics the practices of the non-cultural zones. It asserts its own position as a cultural product tentatively engaged with a larger, uncultured but technologically sophisticated world. The box shows how authors, including modernists, can do critical work. (Nesbit 1987:243)

So far Barthes’ essay seems in place, it is critical work. Yet, in contrast with the other contributions (see Nesbit (1987) for a detailed overview), it is out of place. Aspen shows “modern form as a complex of machinery, marketing, impersonality, rationality, power, and scientific truth; it takes these materials over and tries to work with them; it beautifies and on occasion mimics the practices of the non-cultural zones”, which drives Barthes away; while Aspen showed that modernists, including authors, can do critical work, Barthes reacted against authors, and by extent all artists, who try to claim any position in culture. He does not

37 develop a new kind of theory with regard to language or literature, but instead pursues the idea of authorless literature.

At the time ‘The Death of the Author’ was written, as Burke (1998:21) explains, Barthes was also busy preparing another publication, namely S/Z (1970); an extremely fine detailed, microscopic even, analysis of ‘Sarrasine’, a short story by Balzac. In this analysis the perspective of the author would be completely erased by the perspective of the reader; the reader in a way becomes the author of the text. It is not surprising that ‘The Death of the Author’ had to predate this text; otherwise Barthes would not have had a theoretical foundation for this analysis.

Criticism has not treated ‘The Death of the Author’ kindly: in the following years critics would vehemently respond to Barthes, attacking him for killing the author, however without much attention to the actual details of the essay or reference to any of the arguments of ‘The Death of the Author’: examples can be found in Gass (1984) and Keefer (1995) – one could say perhaps cowardly written after Barthes was unable to respond. Keefer (1995:78) does not value ‘The Death of the Author’ as a highly important event when he says: “Reports of the death of the author have been greatly exaggerated”. He cannot see past the paradox in which Barthes, after his actual death (and I also think during his life) has become the Author he himself claimed to have died in his essay; the men who Keefer appropriately calls the ‘Four Henchmen of the Authorial Apocalypse’ (Barthes, Derrida De Man and Foucault) are given a god-like status, thus becoming the object they denounced so heavily.

Keefer (1995) clearly does not believe in the author’s death; however it seems throughout his article that he has no regard for the innovative aspect for Barthes; he is simply annoyed by the denouncement of the Author as an imperative entity. Besides that, there is a difference to be made between the metaphorical author and the physical writer Barthes, which is perhaps the main point; the writer does not die, the author dies in the text; ergo he should simply not be visible in his work, a critical distinction Keefer fails or refuses to see. Nevertheless it cannot be said that the general idea of Barthes’ essay – which Keefer and others he mentions in his paper have misunderstood – has not been important.

38 William Gass (1984) - not providing a very detailed analysis of his article - is in certain aspects quite similar to Picard30: his paper contains rather personal attacks and despite making claims on certain inconsistencies (which are to some extent correct), Gass himself however writes an essay which does not hold much objective claims and is inconsistent in his own right. Gass (1984:11) considers the removal of the author as a “social and political gesture, not an aesthetic one”31. This refers to a popular misconception, regarding the publication date of Barthes’ essay. Many believe the climate of the time (les événements, intellectual revolts and student protests in France in May 1968) to be fundamental for Barthes’ statement, which however is less true. Given that he wrote his essay in 1967, yet only published it in France in 1968, the unrests did, at least, not fully influence him, yet proved a dramatic and suitable background for his idea. It would be unwise to say that revolutionary social order had no impact at all, but the inception of ‘The Death of the Author’ can be traced back to as far as 196332, as I want to show in what follows, with the publication of On Racine.

3.2 The Tragedy of the Author: Barthes on Racine

3.2.1 ‘Racine Spoken’

As I pointed out earlier, ‘Racine Spoken’ is in fact the oldest of the three essays that are collected in On Racine, and therefore predates the main essay ‘Racinian Man’. In that sense, analysing ‘Racine Spoken’ might prove valuable to see whether it contains any traces of Barthes’ idea of the ‘authorless interpretation’, as this essay is two years older than the main text, which is ‘Racinian Man’.

30 See supra ‘The Quarrel’ 31 See Hix, Harvey. "Morte D'Author: An Autopsy." The Iowa Review 17.1 (1987): 131-50. Print. for a detailed analysis of the opposition between Barthes’ and Gass’ ideas regarding the death of the author. 32 Perhaps arguably even to 1953, with the publication of Writing Degree Zero (Barthes’ first publication) although after examining the literature, I find the evidence to substantiate this would be significantly less conclusive than the arguments that can be made in regard to On Racine (1963). As Allen (2003:9-24) notes in Writing Degree Zero Barthes still believes in the author: “Authors exist and make their choices within language. More importantly, they exist within literary language which has pre-existing forms, conventions, genres and codes. […] All authors create their works out of a struggle with the already established language of literature”. That the writer is indeed still of much importance to Barthes is visible from the opening paragraphs:

Hébert, the revolutionary, never began a number of his news-sheet Le Père Duchêne without introducing a sprinkling of obscenities. These improprieties had no real meaning, but they had significance. In what way? In that they expressed a whole revolutionary situation. Now here is an example of a mode of writing whose function is no longer only communication or expression, but the imposition of something beyond language, which is both History and the stand we take in it. (Barthes 1984:3)

39 Barthes (1963:141) opens his text with a rather poignant observation: “It appears that today’s public consumes Racine in a purely anthological fashion. In Phèdre it is the character of Phaedra one comes to see, and even more than Phaedra, the actress herself: how will she ‘do’ it? Some critics […] date their careers by the Phaedras the have seen”. Some sarcasm jumps of these lines, especially the last one. Barthes’ ironic question reveals already that he has an issue with this: clearly he does not agree that one would go to see a play to see an actress perform a role. Barthes goes on to explain how the written theatre text becomes ‘alive’ through the performance and the choices that are made in order to have a production of the text.

Barthes wants to see a radical popular theatre that attracts the masses, delivers a high cultural repertoire and has an avant-garde dramaturgy. The TNP production of Phèdre succeeds to attract the masses and is of a high cultural status, however Barthes (1963:141) writes: “The public (though I dare not say ‘the popular’) Racine is this mixture of boredom and diversion, that is essentially a discontinuous spectacle”. Barthes reveals that the TNP performance does not qualify for him as ‘popular theatre’, the reason being that its dramaturgy is far from avant- garde. The anthological delivery of the Racinian text is, according to Barthes a “traditional element of the bourgeois aesthetic” (1963:142). This is in obvious conflict with Barthes’ ideals about a radical popular theatre, which should oppose everything that is bourgeois.

In the line of this anthological delivery, Barthes voices the problem with this kind of bourgeois aesthetic, which is namely that “it believes that the truth of an ensemble can only be the sum of the individual truths that constitute it, that the general meaning of a line, for example, is nothing but the pure and simple addition of the expressive words that compose it” (1963:142). This has as an effect that the actor feels the need to intervene in the flow of the language, according to Barthes, by ‘bringing out’ a word, suspending an effect, signifying that what he is saying is important, has a certain hidden meaning, etc: Barthes calls that speaking a text. According to Barthes, this is based on a misconception that it is the actor’s job to “connect a psychology and linguistics, according to the [...] prejudice that regards words as translating thought, but [the actor] also imagines both this psychology and this linguistics to be composed of discontinuous elements that correspond to each other before corresponding within themselves” (1963:142). Barthes thinks it problematic that the actor gives meaning to the text of the play simply by emphasising words, which are underlined or italicised by the author. Basically what Barthes is criticising here is interpretation based on author’s intentions,

40 although not in so many words. Clearly this is quite an issue for Barthes, as he spends about almost three full pages of the nine on this very problem.

“Preoccupied by the interpretation of his text detail by detail, the actor no longer addresses anyone, except some tyrannical god of Meaning”, Barthes (1963:143) writes; because of the actor, which is the mediator between the authorial text and the performance, Barthes spouts criticism at the actor, who reads too much meaning into the text where he should not, at least in the critic’s eyes. Other than that, Barthes believes that the alexandrine is a ‘distancing’ technique, because it relieves the actor of the responsibility of being musical; therefore Barthes regards it as a deliberate separation between the signifier and the thing signified. Yet, the actors try to reduce this distance by trying to make the alexandrine into natural language by making it musical. Here we see the clear influence of Brecht in Barthes view on theatre: the ‘distancing’ technique, as used in many a Brechtian play, can be achieved even in this classical piece of theatre, it even has a medium to do so, however the actor/producer has chosen to do the opposite, which clearly annoys Barthes: “A Racinian actor who knows what the alexandrine is does not have to sing it: the alexandrine sings by itself if it is left free, free to manifest its essence as alexandrine” (1963:145).

Barthes then continues with his actual review of the play itself, the previous paragraphs being rather ‘subtle’ and indirect criticism of that same play. Disliking Maria Casarès’ performance as Phèdre, he does note that it is extremely difficult to act that specific role because the character is aesthetically divided. Casarès however, made the mistake to enact the psychological element, causing the performance to be a failure, as “Maria Casarès’ Phaedra never did anything but conceive herself. […] Casarès playing Phaedra as if she were personally involved” (Barthes 1963:146). Cuny, the actor who plays Theseus, does get some praise by Barthes, he seemed to have understood how the Racinian play should be enacted and seemed to have been the only light in the otherwise failure of a play. Barthes (1963:147) goes on to define how tragedy should be performed: “to perform tragedy, it is necessary and sufficient to act as if the gods existed, as if one had seen them, as if they had spoken: but then what a distance from oneself to what one says!”. What Barthes is thus saying, is that the actor should perform his role, fully convinced as if he were the character, yet without losing sight of the fact this persona is not himself. Barthes wants there not to be an identification between the characters and the audience, in order for the audience to be able to think critically about the play: this again is a pure Brechtian thought.

41 Racine is certainly a very impure, even baroque author […]; his work is sharply divided, aesthetically unreconciled; far from being the radiant summit of an art, it is the very type of a transitional œuvre, in which death and life struggle against each other. […] it seeks to give the themes of the bourgeois theatre an eternal status, to transfer to the credit of the psychological theatre the greatness of the tragic theatre, which at its origin, we must not forget, was a purely civic theatre: in the myth of Racine, eternity replaces the City (Barthes 1963:149).

Barthes makes this rather ‘odd’ remark on Racine’s oeuvre; as it seems here, Barthes seems to believe that there is no way in which the entire Racinian oeuvre can be reconciled, however that is exactly what he tries to do in ‘Racinian Man’, the essay from 1960 and the first essay in On Racine. In Racine the bourgeois have tried to create a myth of their ideals and standards, for which Barthes dislikes the whole Racinian theatre as it is performed at the time. The question rises as to why he then did try to bring together all Racinian plays in a structuralist analysis of Racine’s oeuvre. Perhaps he wanted to debunk the efforts of the bourgeois theatre, which tried to establish itself through the creation of Racinian myth. Strange though it may be, ‘Racine Spoke’ holds the main seeds for an (attempt to an) authorless analysis of Racine’s oeuvre in ‘Racinian Man’, as pointed out above.

3.2.2 ‘Racinian Man’33

On Racine is Barthes’ first structuralist analysis of an author, or rather of his works, in which he focuses on a text-immanent approach, where using Lacanian psychoanalysis (which is in itself structuralist), Barthes attempts to create a ‘Racinian anthropology’:

[…] the analysis presented here is not concerned with Racine at all, but only with the Racinian hero: it avoids inferring from the work to the author and from the author to the work; it is deliberately a closed analysis: I have put myself in Racine’s tragic world and tried to describe its population (…), without reference to any source in this world (to be found, for instance, in history or biography). What I have attempted to reconstruct a kind of Racinian anthropology, both structural and psychoanalytic: structural in content, because tragedy is here treated as a system of unities (‘figures’)

33 From here on out, when I talk about On Racine in this part and the following parts, I refer to the main essay of this work, namely ‘Racinian Man’. I will indicate where necessary when I am talking about the other parts of the work, either ‘Racine Spoken’ or ‘History or Literature?’, to avoid confusion.

42 and functions; psychoanalytic in form, because only an approach ready to acknowledge the fear of the world, as I believe psychoanalysis is, seems to me suitable for dealing with the image of man confined. (Barthes 1963:vii-viii)

This opening paragraph clearly shows that Barthes is avoiding auteurism: the interpretations of Racine’s plays should not be linked with the biographical events in his life, or with any historical events that may have occurred at the time the plays were put to paper. But it also reminds us of Brecht: what Barthes is trying to achieve in his analysis is what Brecht tried to achieve in the production of his plays: to create a certain distance (from the author) in order to make room for multiple possible interpretations and critical thinking. Brecht’s influence is proving itself right from the beginning passages of this essay. Also the structure is a dead giveaway: when reading through Poulet’s work and reading Miller’s article it became clear that Barthes idea of examining the internal structures of Racine’s oeuvre matches Poulet’s ideas on how different texts within the oeuvre of one author are part of a bigger internal organisation (cf. supra 2.3.1).

Yet this passage also contains a perhaps contradictory idea: the use of psychoanalysis. One could wonder whether if Barthes using psychoanalysis as a theoretical framework is not problematic: psychoanalysis, if seen as a mental concept, is pro factum an outer-world source and not suitable for his text-immanent approach; yet, if we conceive of psychoanalysis as a theory – carefully defined in its own literature – to explain given behaviour inside every human being, thus also in fictional creations, (as they are based upon mankind) it seems to be less problematic, as this can be seen as a means of intertextuality; the fictional behaviour of the characters only occurs within the text, therefore it is part of the internal world and can thus be explained within that world. However, one would have to acknowledge a certain degree of self-reflection of the author in his characters in order to use psychoanalysis (how else would one reflect human behaviour in fiction), which again is in conflict with Barthes’ own statement. Yet without a theoretical framework, there are no grounds for any kind of analysis, so perhaps this is a necessary paradox.

Literary criticism should not occupy itself by trying to work out what the author meant or how the text relates to the author, as writing, for Barthes (1963:ix), is “to jeopardize the meaning of the world, to put an indirect question that the writer, by an ultimate abstention, refrains from answering”. There is an infinite possibility of answers; each separate reader

43 gives a different (or even multiple answers) through his own history, language and freedom. The author is not yet completely absent here, however, clearly Barthes does not value him as highly important to the process of interpretation as would have been the case in ‘Critique Universitaire’.

Barthes talks of the ‘fatal duplicity’ of the writer and the critic, both of which are needed in order to speak about the plays of Racine today: “In short, the fatal duplicity of the writer, who asks when he appears to be answering, must correspond to the duplicity of the critic, who answers under cover of an interrogation” (Barthes 1963:ix). There is still a part to be played by the author here, yet it is not a grateful one: he is merely a scribe who uses a form to ask a question without offering the answer; the answer has to be filled in by the reader or critic. This implies that whatever might have been written by the author – his ‘intentions’, insofar as he can be said to have them – are of no importance when trying to interpret a literary work. This is significant as Barthes (1963:ix) only regards “works that designate a meaning in question” and to which “the world must answer [it]’s question assertively, must endow with its own substance the meaning proposed” are qualified to be subject to interpretation.

Notwithstanding this statement of intent, Barthes seems to stray from his own definitions throughout his work, specifically in ‘I. Racinian Man’. There is first of all the troubling and ambiguous use of the name ‘Racine’. It is unclear in what sense Barthes is using this name: (a) is it a hypernym and does it serve to enclose all of Racine’s plays or (b) is it simply used as the name for the author himself. If the latter is the case, Barthes defies his own statement of intent from the foreword. There are instances throughout this first essay that serve (a), e.g. “Racine’s theatre is not a theatre of love”, and others that serve (b), e.g. “Racine specified that the apparent motives of a conflict (…) are illusory” (Barthes 1963:25); sometimes even within the same page, as these examples show.

There are even instances where Barthes goes fully out of his way to refer to Racine’s life: “We know the importance of ingratitude in Racine’s life” (Barthes 1963:26), whereupon an interpretation is linked to the author’s biography: a clear violation of his own intentions. This reminds of sociological analyses by Lucien Goldmann, with his structure of forces; generalizations based on sociology are used to explain certain character traits; yet again, in this case this causes conflict. Sociology refers to outer-world real human behaviour, which is

44 then mapped onto fictional characters, therefore it essentially refers to something outside the text, which Barthes claimed he would not do.

Other examples include: “Racine himself seems to have experienced the world (except during his last two years) as opinion: he made his way only by the attention of the Great, and explicitly wrote only to receive that attention” (35), “It is as if Racine constructed his entire theatre on this model, […], the peripeteia, and only afterwards invested it with what is called psychology” (42), “Reiterative time is to such a degree God’s time that for Racine it is the time of Nature itself” (50). This one is especially hard to ignore, given that it seems that Barthes here is handing back to the author the power of intention/meaning, which he took away in the foreword. Besides referring to Racine himself, Barthes also – yet seldom – makes references to the outer world as for example when he discusses ‘Racinian division’ and links it to a Christian idea: see Barthes (1963:36). There are plenty of places where metaphors of ‘Father and Son, ‘Good and Evil, ‘God’ are being employed by Barthes: these might also in conflict with his statement of intent, but I do not want to use these instances as arguments, since I believe a valid claim can be made that these are intertextual references to The Holy Script, in which case it would not be a violation to his own ideas. However, it can at least be said that these are cases dubious uses of language (which might be one of the grand definers of Barthes language after all).

The perhaps most striking observation throughout this first of three essays, is that Barthes does not seem to leave much room open to interpretation. What seems to be the most troubling about his analysis is perhaps the abundance of defining sentences; phrases Barthes uses that leave no room for interpretation. That is problematic since he claimed and even argued for open interpretations, yet while reading ‘Racinian Man’ the reader does not get the feeling, at any point, another interpretation is possible, Barthes makes that impossible. While he claims that multiple interpretations of a work are possible, that different answers can be given to the question(s) the work proposes, he himself constantly makes use of literary strategies to show that his interpretation is valid, but at the same time this also make his interpretation conclusive, as if it might be the only correct answer. With phrases such as “I merely observe …” (9), “here reality is always ambiguous, …” (15), “The Racinian Eros expresses itself only through a recital, …”, “Imagination is always retrospective, …” (17), “Every Racinian hallucination presupposes …” (19) “it is this doubling which constitutes all

45 Racinian erotics, …” (23), etc., it seems like Barthes is giving decisive answers, not just one interpretation amongst many.

It is especially the generalisations that prove to be difficult, like “thus tragedy is essentially an action against God, but an action infinitely suspended and reversed. All of Racine lies in that paradoxical moment when the child discovers that his father is wicked, yet wants to remain his child” (Barthes 1963:45). Surely Barthes does not want us to believe that literally all of Racine is defined by this same motif? Strangely enough, Barthes also shows doubt, when he writes for instance “Such is perhaps the optative meaning of all those trios of lovers who pass through the tragedies” (51). It seems as if the analysis is meant to conflict within itself, there are too many instances that cannot be reconciled for it to be coincidental. Perhaps it lies in the motive behind its writing, as I already mentioned at the end of section 2.2.2, or it may simply be that Barthes was more interested in exploring new theoretical grounds instead of performing an actual analysis; it might be just a huge example rather than proof of his theoretical statements. The problem is we cannot know for sure; however, his third essay ‘History or Literature?’ is solid, as was his second, ‘Racine Spoken’, both written on different occasions and published in different journals. Interestingly, those were ‘real’ journal articles (Racine Spoken being more of a review), while ‘Racinian Man’ was ‘only’ an introduction to a new publication of Racine’s oeuvre; perhaps Barthes felt this did not need to be as perfect because of its mode of publication? It is plausible, yet not possible at this time to prove.

3.2.3 ‘History or Literature?’

In the third essay/chapter of On Racine, ‘History or Literature?’, Barthes explains what is wrong with contemporary Racinian, or rather literary criticism in general. First of all, Barthes does not believe in ‘a literary history’ that tries to link literature with history, which is nothing more to him than a succession of writers, a chronicle at best. What is to a certain degree possible is a literary history outside of the works themselves, according to Barthes. Literature is not a simple historical product, it has a paradoxical essence: “being both the sign of a history, and the resistance to that history. […] Everyone senses that the work escapes, that it is something else than its history, the sum of its sources, influences or models: a hard, irreducible core, in the undefined mass of events, conditions, collective mentalities” (1963:155). In that sense, literature contains two postulations for Barthes, a historical one, literature as an institution, and a psychological one, literature as a creation. Literature thus requires two different methods of study: the historical one (which seems to be the critique

46 universitaire for Barthes) and the psychological one (the method of la nouvelle critique). The problem of literary histories is that they have confused these two different aspects, “encumbering literary creation with petty facts of history” (Barthes 1963:155). Barthes puts forward that his only aim is now to confront these two disciplines, in order to create nothing more than a little order.

History cannot explain what happened inside the author’s mind at the time of the creation of the literary work; therefore it is meaningless and ineffective to even try and do so. Barthes goes on to point at what the historical discipline should do and offers certain examples of historians, who more or less did their job well according to Barthes. However, Barthes has certain remarks and wants to clarify what they should and should not do: for example, the study of the milieu of the author can certainly be interesting, but if one wants to actually study a milieu, the individual withdraws, and one should be careful not to accord too much of this milieu to the author, which would then prove that the author is a genius. It is easy to see as to why Barthes would find this problematic; the author is at best the scribe, the one who may have invented the text, but not the one who put meaning into it, not the genius poeta vates:

(…) [B]y focusing on the author, by making the literary “genius” the very source of observation, we relegate the properly historical objects to the rank of nebulous, remote zones; we touch on them only by accident, in passing. In the best instances, we indicate their existence, leaving to others the responsibility of dealing with them someday; the essentials of literary history thus fall into default, abandoned by both the historian and the critic. It is as if, in our literary history, the man, the author, takes the place the event holds in historia historians: important to know on another level, he nonetheless blocks the whole perspective; true in himself, he induces a false vision. (Barthes 1963:159)

Barthes follows this with giving an example from Picard’s work (see first quote from 1.2), which he deems part of the university critics and is unable to transgress this ‘false vision’ on the author. Although this is not meant as a personal attack towards Picard, but as an illustration and structural argument in his essay, it might have been the spark for ‘The Quarrel’. Barthes point here is that literary history should be a study of the functions of literature, such as the production, communication and consumption, not a study on the level of the individuals who have written the literary works. Barthes concludes his essay ‘History or Literature?’ with a good synthesis of what he thus thinks should happen within literary

47 criticism: “if one wants to install oneself inside Racine, with whatever qualification – if one wants to speak, even if only a word, about the Racinian self – one must expect to see the humblest scholarship suddenly become systematic, and the most prudent critic reveal himself as an utterly subjective, utterly historical being” (1963:172).

The actual main point of this essay has been examined earlier in this paper (cf. supra 1.2), as it concerns the critique universitaire versus nouvelle critique-debate. Barthes iterates his frustration with the focus on history and biography of the ‘old' critics, which should be a history of either functions or creations:

Although our scholarly criticism (…) still remains, […], loyal to the (organic, not structural) notion of genesis, it so happens that Racinian exegesis tends to deal with Racine precisely as a system of significations. From what viewpoint? That of allegory (…). […] Racinian criticism does not discuss whether it might not be more interesting to study allegorical language as a phenomenon of the period than to examine the probability of this or that key [= historical or biographical allegory]. What we retain is simply this: the work is regarded as the language of something, here a certain political fact, there Racine himself. The trouble is that decipherment of an unknown language for which there is no document analogous to the Rosetta stone is literally improbable, unless we resort to psychological postulates. (Barthes 1963:163-64)

Although Barthes is very keen on making clear that this is not the way to go, he himself sins in some ways to his own theory. This passage conflicts with what Barthes did in the first essay: should we see his references to Racine as investigations in allegorical language, or simply as ‘mistakes’? This question is open for further debate and it would not be wise to not try and make a conclusive argument about it here. It is difficult to say to what extent this matters if we want to regard upon On Racine as the deathbed of the Author. The critical reception has shown and used some of these inconsistencies to argue against Barthes’ new method of interpretation (cf. Picard)34.

34 The problem with the critical reception of On Racine (now and then) is perhaps the same as with that of ‘The Death of the Author’, as discussed by Burke (1998:21):

On the one hand, its dictates have been accepted unreflectively, and recourse to Barthes will be used to ‘argue’ the death of the author without the arguments proposed in the seven pages of his essay being themselves held up to any critical scrutiny. On the other hand, and just as unfortunately, ‘The Death of the Author’ has seldom provoked more than derisory dismissal

48 In an interview for Le Figaro littéraire (14-20 October, 1965) Barthes discusses Picard’s claim that he used biographical criticism himself, and rejects it. His answer to the question is not a true answer: Barthes tries to make a distinction between his ‘biographical claims’ and those Picard uses. However, his argument is very limited and seems not to be able to uphold itself:

But it is not the same thing to say, ‘Orestes is Racine at twenty-six,’ and to mention that Racine made a habit of a certain ingratitude, a widespread character trait which appears in known events of his life and makes possible such a statement as: ‘The importance of ingratitude in the life of Racine is well known.’ What could all people who are twenty-six years old have in common? That's a prime example of the kind of biographical criticism that establishes a systematic relation between the author's life and his work. New psychological theories35 challenge this kind of explication, which certain academics are still using. (Barthes 1981:39)36

from its opponents. Critics who have passionately contested its thesis have rarely so much as disturbed its smooth surface.

Similarly, it is perhaps the case that On Racine has been used to either contest or defend Barthes’ statements, without any real critical investigation of his arguments made. As we can observe in Picard (1965), attacks are rather personally-based and without much grounded, objective criticism – with the exception of the mentioning some of Barthes’ inconsistencies, which I listed earlier – while defenders of Barthes seem to accept whatever he has written without much critical scrutiny. A historical example can be found in a contemporary of Barthes and Picard: an article called Roland Barthes and the Nouvelle Critique by David Funt (1968), and a more current example can be found in, paradoxically, Burke who uses On Racine to argue that this is Barthes’ first step towards non-‘man-and-the-work analyses’, yet he is not further critically engaged with the work, which – as pointed out through this analysis – contains some major inconsistencies in that specific area. Jonathan Culler (2001) also discusses On Racine in his introductory book to Roland Barthes, but also does not seem all too critical; he fails to point at the inconsistencies of the book as well. Surely there might be critical analyses of Barthes’ text that have dealt in more detail with these conflicts, however they seem to be rather scarce as they did not come up during this research and – deducing this from Burke (1998), whose research is clearly quite profound – if one of the most ‘famous’ literary theoretical essays of all time has not been held up to ‘any’ critical scrutiny (Burke’s words), it is perhaps also possible to a certain extent that On Racine, a much less popular publication, has escaped from being critically analysed, with the exception of being publically scolded (cf. supra ‘The Quarrel’). 35 Barthes does not explicitly mention what these new psychological theories are; it is not unthinkable he is referring to Lacan and Kristeva. However, this is just hypothetical, as Barthes does not expand on this himself. Perhaps a look into the notes from the interviewer might clear this up. 36 I wondered if the obscurity and rather vagueness of Barthes’ response was perhaps due to a loose translation of the original French interview; therefore I looked up the original wording:

Mais ce n’est pas la même chose de dire: ‘Oreste, c’est Racine à vingt-six ans’, et de rappeler que Racine a pratiqué une certaine ingratitude, trait de caractère fort répandu, qui transparaît dans des expériences connues et rend possible une constatation du genre: ‘On sait

49 This statement is to say at least obscure: there is no apparent ‘clear’ difference between both quotes in Barthes’ response. If it explains this one quote by Barthes himself, it does not justify other interpretations in On Racine (see my earlier examples), which rather clearly are at the very least partially biographically based. Yet, these essays overall form a conclusive statement against the interpretation methods of the old criticism, without completely writing off the importance of the author, which is still somewhere present in his work. It is perhaps of this presence, that we cannot regard On Racine as a full precursor to ‘The Death of the Author’, but we could see its essays as the sheets of the Author’s deathbed.

Perhaps we should listen to Paul De Man’s reflection on Barthes, when he says that “Barthes is primarily a critic of literary ideology and, as such, his work is more essayistic and reflective than it is technical […]. […] It has to be read and understood as an intellectual adventure rather than as the scientifically motivated development of a methodology” (1990:179). Even though it is unclear which particular works De Man is referring to, it might be of certain value here. Barthes’ On Racine is theoretically stronger that its actual execution, which could be explained with De Man’s statement above. Perhaps this is most visible in the third essay of On Racine, namely ‘History or Literature?’, in which Racine is only used to voice a theoretical point, but not to substructure an actual properly executed analysis of his oeuvre. It thus feels like ‘Racinian Man’ is an analysis, not to support the theory, but as an example of what it should be like if one would put Barthes’ structuralist theory to the test, how the practices of it would be implemented in an actual analysis.

3.3 Save the Author… Or Let Him Suffer? (‘Criticism and Truth’)

In Criticism and Truth (1966), the follow-up of On Racine – its defensive theoretical complement against the ‘critical’ attacks of Picard and others – Barthes’ statement of intent towards how we should deal with the author is clearer and more coherent than in his earlier text: where On Racine contained many internal conflicts, this is not the case in Criticism and Truth. A possible explanation might be that Barthes had more time to think about how to

l’importance de l’ingratitude dans la vie de Racine.’ Mais qu’y a-t-il de commun entre tous les gens qui ont vingt-six ans? C’est le type même de la critique biographique qui établit une relation systématique entre l’œuvre et la vie de l’auteur. Les nouvelles psychologies interdisent ce genre d’explication dont se servent encore certains universitaires. (Barthes 1981:42, Le grain de la voix. Entretiens 1962-1980. Editions du Seuil, Paris)

As can be derived from the quote, the French is not any less obscure than is the English translation of the interview; so that leaves the doubt in place on how this response legitimises Barthes’ use of biographical elements in his analysis.

50 respond to the allegations of Picard and others at the time and therefore made sure that this theoretical defence of On Racine would be flawless. In this work “(…), Barthes reiterated his desire for a more systematic approach to literature […], declaring that a science of discourse could only be established if literary analysis took language rather than authors as the starting- point of its enquiry” (Burke 1998:20). This text, only written one year before ‘The Death of the Author’, might be considered the true precursor of the latter.

Although in Criticism and Truth Barthes’ main interest is the language of criticism, here too the presence of the author seems to fade; the author as an entity controlling language disappears and “becomes a void around which an infinitely transformed discourse is woven” (Barthes 1966:xix). The most interesting part of this pamphlet for my present purposes is the section ‘The Science of Literature’, in which Barthes doubts the notion of the author as guarantor of the meaning of the work. Yet, this is not a new feature, this message was already implicated in the strategy of On Racine, which – even with its analytical imperfections – suggested at least a similar idea of the author not being the entity that controls meaning. In the actual analysis Barthes (in general) did not rely on the author to distil meaning from the texts; that function was reserved for the critic, although not in that many words.

But in Criticism and Truth Barthes takes this idea one step further: the origins of the work are mythologised, as the real inception of the work is untraceable. The author is the origin of the physical work, but the meaning(s) is beyond his intention and functions on a level of human and mythological37 significance, beyond and outside of the author. Here we have the first mention of the actual death of the author:

Even more: we are asked to wait until the author is dead so that we can treat him with ‘objectivity’; a strange reversal indeed: it is at the very moment when the work becomes mythical that we are supposed to regard it as a precise phenomenon. Death has another significance: it renders unreal the author's signature and transforms the work into myth: the truth contained in anecdotes completely fails to catch up with the truth embodied in the symbols. […] And we are right, for we refuse thus to allow the dead to hold the living in their grip, we free the work from the constraints of intention,

37 Barthes explains myth as follows: “‘The myth is discourse which seems not to have any true emitter who would be responsible for the content and claim the meaning: it is thus enigmatic” (L. Sebag, "Le Mythe: Code et Message", Temps modernes, March 1965)’ (Barthes 1966:42).

51 we rediscover the mythological trembling of meanings. By erasing the author's signature, death founds the truth of the work, which is enigma. (Barthes 1966:30)

Through the (metaphorical?)38 death of the author it becomes possible to release the work from its constrictive chains of meaning and set it free to be interpreted as the reader, any reader seems fit, as long as the given meaning is “capable of being accepted by the symbolic logic of humankind, just as sentences in French are accepted by the ‘linguistic feeling’ of the French” (Barthes 1966:31-32). This idea shows profound echoes with what Barthes writes in ‘The Death of the Author’, with that exception that Barthes still recognises the author here as part of the writing process, but no longer as the authority that provides meaning to the text.

3.4 A Dramatic Genius or Modern Aesthete? (Critical Essays)

This is quite a turn in the different direction of what we could still read in ‘The Two Criticisms’, from Critical Essays, published only two years earlier, where the author is still much more present, which can even be seen already in the ‘Preface’ to the book, where Barthes discusses how the meaning of a text is created: “For the meaning of a work (or of a text) cannot be created by the work alone; the author never produces anything but presumptions of meaning, forms, and it is the world which fills them” (Barthes Critical Essays 1964:xi). What is striking, here, is that Barthes actually says and opens his book by giving the author at least very partially some power over his own writing; the author can presume meanings but it is the world (or the reader for that matter) who has to fill in the blanks, connect the dots. The task of the reader or the critic would become “the art of filling; […], that the critic experiments with fillings, trying out on an author or a work the languages and contexts that are available” (Culler 2001:35). We find a similar phrase in On Racine, which suggest that even there, there is still to some extent a certain shimmering presence of the author throughout his analysis: “Let us test on Racine, by the virtue of his very silence, all the languages our century suggests” (Barthes 1963:x).

In the essay ‘The Two Criticisms’ in Critical Essays, we get a, perhaps vague, comparison between the canonical author Racine and a modernist, namely Proust. After On Racine, Barthes had still referred to Racine when necessary and to defend that specific, but otherwise

38 The translator notes that at the time at the Sorbonne, where Barthes had studied Classical Languages, the custom still prevailed that no theses could be written on authors who were not dead yet (Barthes 1966:42).

52 he changed his focus to modernist writers, which is not surprising, since they already have the goal to try and let their work speak in its own right, with an absence of the voice of the author. In ‘The Two Criticisms’, Barthes brings Racine and Proust together:

[…]: to expend prodigies of ingenuity, rigor, and tenacity to discover whether Oreste was Racine, or whether the Baron de Charlus was the Count de Montesquiou is thereby to deny that Oreste and Charlus are essentially the terms of a functional system of figures, a system whose operation can be grasped only within the work; the homologue of Oreste is not Racine but Pyrrhus; the homologue of Charlus is not Montesquiou but the narrator precisely insofar as the narrator is not Proust (Barthes "The Two Criticisms (1963)" 1964:252).

This tells us that neither Racine nor Proust, are actively involved with the meaning of their work: for Barthes neither of these two authors have any say in how their works get to be interpreted and given meaning to them. Thus where originally the classic author would be involved with his own work, whereas the modernist author would try to write himself out of the text, what Barthes here proposes would close the gap between the canonical author and the modernist author; basically, Barthes makes this into a generalisation of the author on the whole, without regard for his historical differences. It is about the system of figures, the functions of the text, the form, and the author, both baroque and modernist, has no intention of meaning, nor can he be used to distil meaning from the work. This idea leans again more towards the premises of ‘The Death of the Author’, yet it was written in the same year as On Racine, which still gave the author some credit. Interesting here is the following quote from ‘The Two Criticisms’:

In short, it is the work which is its own model; its truth is not to be sought in depth, but in extent; and if there is a relation between the author and his work (who would deny it? The work does not descend from Heaven: only positivist criticism still believes in the Muse), it is not a pointillist relation which accumulates parcellary (sic), discontinuous, and "profound" resemblances, but on the contrary a relation between the entire author and the entire work, a relation of relations, a homological not an analogical correspondence. (Barthes "The Two Criticisms (1963)" 1964:252-53)

53 It is as if trying to solve a puzzle, of which the pieces are scattered through time and space. Strangely, it seems as if Barthes in this essay advocates a sort of relation between the author and the work, but outside of the author himself, and immanent to the work, as he clearly defends a text-immanent approach in the rest of the essay. The difficulty here might be how to interpret ‘homological 39 ’: in a psychological sense that would mean behavioural characteristics that have common origins in either evolution or development, anthropologically it would be about the analogy between human beliefs, practices or artefacts owing to genetic or historical connections and sociologically, a structural 'resonance' between the different elements making up a socio-cultural whole. Either one of these interpretations could be used for a text-immanent interpretation, yet it would seem that all these possible meanings of homological still seek relations outside the work, even though Barthes would have us to have these interpretations work within the literary text itself, this nonetheless seems problematic: so does the other create these homological relations, or are they simply there because of his human nature, and the text functions still within its mythical realm? The answer is not given, or it is at least as obscure as the question; what is ‘the entire author’?

3.5 Finally, the Author dies… (The Death of the Author)

We would have had to wait for the answer until the publication of ‘The Death of the Author’, although the answer will not be completely satisfying, as there is no such thing as an author, as the author is the reader. If we replace ‘the entire author’ with ‘the reader’ or ‘the critic’ in the last quote, it makes sense: the reader is the author of his own interpretation of the text, therefore enters a relation with the work, which can never be analogical, and thus homological. It fits if we regard upon writing as “that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Barthes 1977:142). Writing begins when the identity of the author is lost, making interpretations and thus immanent relations possible.

The author has become the object of a residual antitheology, as Burke (1998:23) calls it, similar to what Nietzsche did in The Joyful Wisdom: the Author is dethroned from being an almighty creation that provides meaning (like God), dies and “liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, 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” (Barthes 1977:147). It

39 As prof. dr. Jürgen Pieters pointed out to me, the term ‘homological’ also reminds of Lucien Goldmann, who discusses homological relations between a work of art and a worldview/ideology.

54 is in the Nietzschean setting of ‘The Death of God’ that we have to read ‘The Death of the Author’: a metaphorical usurpation by man upon the Author-God, an assassination of this divine being by the reader. The Author needs to be removed, to heave up the limitation on interpretation that he imposed, to free the text from its constrictive bondages:

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. 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. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic. (Barthes 1977:147)

If we substitute this last conceptualization of the Author, in the quote above from ‘The Two Criticisms’, things become perhaps clearer: the entire author is the author that needs to be found within, beneath the work, not the material author, or actually just the hand of the person who wrote down the words, seeing as Barthes (1977:146) states that:

Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, (…), that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, (…), the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin - or which, at least, hap no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.

It must be said that while Barthes is perhaps the first to actually use the words ‘The Death of the Author’, he ignores some critics and critical movements who had, at the very least, been questioning the authority of the author, like T.S. Eliot (“objective correlative”), Osip Brik and Opoyaz40 and certain Prague Structuralists, only to name some. Perhaps Barthes is not killing the Author; he is creating an Author to kill, on a misconception that ‘everyone’ worships the Author as a deity.

Notwithstanding, Barthes stresses that prior to his essay, the Author had been kept alive, but he points at some literary figures that anticipate his idea to some extent, namely Mallarmé, Valéry, the Surrealists and Proust. On the importance of Proust, Barthes (1977:144) says the

40 See Burke (1998:26)

55 following: “Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model”. Yet, as Burke (1998:28) notes: “Barthes neglects, however, to explain why this reversal of customary literary causality should imply – or even tend toward – the diminution of the author”. Again, obscurity colours Barthes’ language, making it improbable to provide a clear answer.

But perhaps ‘The Death of the Author’ is about nothing more than one thing; devout from previous inconsistencies, internal conflicts of obscurities, perhaps in its most essential form it is about nothing more than the affirmation of and providing an open platform for the reader and the critic. As was clear in Criticism and Truth, Barthes is obstinately advocating the place and importance of the critic in the process of interpreting a work, and in that sense ‘The Death of the Author’ might be the epitome, the finite text in which Barthes tries to argue the critical importance of the reader and / or the critic. The clearest example of the fact that Barthes inconsistent attitude towards the Author is problematic is in the book that followed in 1971, S/Z. Here he practices the principles put forward in ‘The Death of the Author’, while at the same time, he recalls the author:

The Author himself – that somewhat decrepit deity of the old criticism – can or could someday become a text like any other: he has only to avoid making his person the subject, the impulse, the origin, the authority, the Father, whence his work would proceed, by a channel of expression; he has only to see himself as a being on paper and his life as a bio-graphy (in the etymological sense of the word), a writing without referent, substance of a connection and not of a filiation: the critical undertaking (…) will then consist in returning the documentary figure of the author into a novelistic, irretrievable, irresponsible figure, caught up in the plural of his own text, a task whose adventure has already been recounted, not by critics, but by authors themselves, a Proust, a Jean Genet. (Barthes 1971:211-12)

The author had to die first, in order to return, although in a much ‘reduced’ form as Barthes would have it. So perhaps, it has never been truly about the author in the first place; of course in a sense Barthes wanted to put an end to positivist criticism, from the likes of Picard and others, and perhaps through the discussions and polemics of the time, the debate got heightened and taken to a higher level, where Barthes felt the need to up the battle through more extreme, shocking ideas, simply to deal with the old critics and got caught up in his own

56 metaphorically, obscure ‘jargon’, which culminated in extremity in ‘The Death of the Author’. The critic always seems to take the first place with Barthes when it comes to analysis and interpretation of the text, together with the importance of structure, forms, writing and language, which are open for discussion since there does not exist such a thing as a ‘prescribed meaning’.

Perhaps an even more striking metaphor is needed to describe the moribundity of the Author. The Author can be seen as a mythological Chronos type of figure. However the Author bears a son, the Reader, and even though this son has been afraid of his father for many years, there must come a time in history where he claims his rightful throne; and so it is inevitable that the Reader will ultimately contribute to the death of his father-figure, the Author. To fully satisfy Barthes with this metaphor we could perhaps think of this metaphorical death in an Oedipal act, conform to Freudian psychoanalysis. It is perchance in this metaphor, we come closer to what Barthes did: to look upon the death of the Author not as just a denouement; there is a new heir to the throne through the Author’s quietus, another form of being, the Reader, and therefore (a partly) modernization of and in literary theory. The Author has been the instance that instigated meaning, especially in positivist criticism, whether it has a factual or theological idea of the author, and this is what Barthes wished to do away with, but maybe not per se the author himself, yet the most clear and out-spoken way to face this old criticism head on was to kill the Author in 1967.

57 4 Conclusions on the Autopsy of the Author

First of all, we must recognise that On Racine was to a certain degree definitely ‘revolutionary’: throughout the discussion of the polemic with Picard, it must be noted that On Racine with its structural analysis of Racine’s oeuvre, without inferring from the author’s life for meaning, was considered as new and even ‘not done’ by academic scholars like Raymond Picard. That means there must have been a certain novelty about Barthes concept of the author, which challenged the then commonly held concept of the author within institutional criticism.

Throughout a short exploration of the importance of theatre in Barthes’ life, it became clear that the importance of Brecht in that period should not be underestimated. The Brechtian theories, and especially the idea that the spectators should be able to think critically about the play they have watched and giving it their own meaning, seemed to have been a decisive influence on Barthes’ work and in the execution of his analysis of Racine. Brecht has thus, at least, indirectly influenced the way in which Barthes would be looking at the author. In his chronologically first essay, ‘Racine Spoken’, the review on Phèdre from 1958, Barthes loathed how the actors had put the meaning of the author in their performance through emphasising certain underlined or italicised words from the original text. This was a first indication, yet not in those exact words, that Barthes had become tired of the traditional author.

This influence from Brecht shows that an idea, how new it may even seem, must always find his roots somewhere else, whether if it is a correction, adaptation, modernization, or rebellion against previous ideas. Barthes admits to being influenced by certain critics, among which he counts Lucien Goldmann and Georges Poulet. Besides certain similarities between these critics, they do all differ in their conceptualisation of the author, as for Goldmann, the author is the Romantic poeta vates and for Poulet, the author’s mind needs to be duplicated in that of the critic. Barthes clearly separates himself from this ‘tradition’ where the author still rules over meaning, and perhaps because he could not find himself in their ideas, combined with his view on the theatre, Barthes decided is was time for the literary author to be put aside.

Having traced what had brought Barthes to euthanizing the author from the meaning of the text, and after having dissected the Author throughout Barthes’ works from On Racine up to ‘The Death of the Author’ onwards, there are certain conclusions to be made. First of all, it is

58 fair to say that any claim on a consistent development of the idea of the dead author is void. In general, one could argue that the author fades to the background, beginning with the opening passages of On Racine in 1963 (and in actuality 1960, the first publication of the first essay ‘Racinian Man’). The actual death of the author is only fully accomplished in the eponymously essay from 1967. This would, however, be too much of a broad generalisation: throughout this research I have found that Barthes’ idea more or less develops chronologically through time, yet there are certain setbacks and fast-forwards, which distort a clear linear development of his concept of the author.

The primary complications start when we look at On Racine: Barthes’ opening statement suggests that he wants to study the Racinian tragedies without regard for the biography of the author and outer-world instances. Yet, there are multiple instances in the work itself, which conflict with his statement of intent. Not only does he refer to Racine as an author – an issue he tries to solve in the interview from Le Figaro Littéraire, without much success – he draws certain interpretations from Racine’s ‘personal life’, refers to outer-world instances and does not leave much room for other interpretations. His idea however resonates through the three, also chronologically, different essays and is most clear in ‘History or Literature?’. In ‘Racine Spoken’ one has to find Barthes’ idea on the author between the lines; it is in there somewhere, but never fully and properly explained as in the two other essays. Internally, On Racine is a mess: besides the topic of Racine, the essays do not fit together; ‘Racinian Man’ is a structuralist analysis of Racine’s oeuvre, while ‘Racine Spoken’ is a review of Phèdre where Barthes comments on performance, and ‘History or Literature?’ only uses Racine to explain the problems and difficulties in institutional criticism. The only consistency throughout On Racine is Barthes’ concept of the author, which is present in all three, and is theoretically (not in practice) the same in all the essays.

Other problems arise when we take a closer look at the essay ‘The Two Criticisms’ (1963), published after On Racine. An interesting comparison arises between Racine and Proust, two writers, who could not be more different, yet through Barthes they become the same in the sense that they are no longer the essential meaning-givers of their work: an idea, which could in the sense be applied to any author; he is not the entity that controls the meaning of his work anymore. This may sound as if it is in line with the ideology of ‘The Death of the Author’, but this gets complicated when we read further in the essay that there is definitely a relationship between the author and his work; “a relation between the entire author and the entire work, a

59 relation of relations, a homological not an analogical correspondence” (see citation in 3.4). Again, a rather problematic statement, because Barthes does not define what this exactly means; at first it seems he does not want the author to have anything to do with the written text, but then makes a claim on a homological relationship between the two. In the linear progression, this is troublesome; we could either regard upon this as a sort of failed succession of On Racine, a setback if we might, or we could take it for what it is and explain this essay with the use of Barthes later texts.

In his interview with the Le Figaro Littéraire from 14-20 October 1965, Barthes tries to explain how he differs from the critical approaches like the one from Picard, without much success. Barthes provides a very unclear answer as to why he refers to Racine to support a certain psychoanalytical interpretation; it is different from when Picard does something similar, but we remain in the dark as to why that might be. Can we use the author’s person to interpret certain aspects or not? Is it okay when you do it under a sociological claim, but wrong when just used biographically? Muddled, we cannot seem to get a coherent picture of what Barthes has in mind and tries to explain.

Then, in Criticism and Truth the author is the origin of the physical work, but the meaning(s) is beyond his intention and functions on a level of human and mythological significance, beyond and outside of the author. Again, this is a good reminder of what will be the main point of ‘The Death of the Author’, yet it conflicts with what Barthes wrote in ‘The Two Criticisms’, where the meaning of the work consists of presumptions of meaning of the author. It has to be said that this is not the same as the author giving meaning, but truth is that this is, at least, partially giving the author back some power.

‘The Death of the Author’ seems to combine previous ideas and is the one essay with the most coherent explanation of all: it looks as simple as the author is dead; long live the reader! The Author, like Nietzsche’s God, had to be usurped by man, the critic in this instance. That is true, yet however there is no account in Barthes essay as to why the author does actually have to ‘die’ in order for the critic to flourish. ‘The Death of the Author’ is this perhaps an overstatement, simply to stress the importance of the critic, to give way to interpretations which shun deriving meaning from a work based on the life of an author.

Chronologically, we cannot say that there is an even linear development of Barthes’ idea of the moribundity of the author: even Barthes’ next publication after ‘The Death of the Author’,

60 namely S/Z, proves that he remains inconsistent as he there recalls the author and brings him back into the picture. There is a red line to be traced throughout the works discussed above, but Barthes is not consistent with every aspect of his own thought. Yet arguably, the basic idea always resurfaces and seems to be ‘completely’ worked out in ‘The Death of the Author’; the author becomes absent and should (in general) not be used to distil meaning from the work. This idea of autonomy for the reader and the openness for interpretation (with a pre- defined framework to support the critic’s interpretation) are traits which return in every single work that has been examined here. Yet, until this day, Barthes remains famous everywhere, amongst scholars and students alike, as the man who killed the author; I would like to think that he did not, but that he described how the Author had to die, that Barthes watched him die before he could rise again.

Victim: The Author Date of death: 1967 Cause of death: Unknown

61 Bibliography

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64 Appendix I

Examples of Picard’s commentary in the opening passages of New Criticism or New Fraud?:

a) One commentator has compared me to Erostratus, that Greek who in order to immortalize his name, set fire to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of Greece. Alas, I have not made my name immortal, and, what is more serious, the false notions of Mr. Barthes (who is not one of the Seven Wonders of France) are thriving; they continue to spread dangerously. (Picard 1965:i-ii)

b) If I have attacked the ‘New Criticism’, and if several articles in France and abroad have approved my initiative, it can only be, (…) in the framework of an international fascist conspiracy. […] If to demand articulate thought and to reject the paralogisms of Mr. Barthes is to be a fascist, it is clear that I am a fascist. (Picard 1965:v)

c) I must repeat here that I have borrowed these expressions [i.e. New Criticism and university criticism] from Mr. Barthes and that I always place them between quotation marks or in italics. […] But since it is the basis of Mr. Barthes’ critical observations, I have been obliged to regard it as a hypothesis, if only to prove that it is a false hypothesis. (Picard 1965:vi)

d) […] Mr. Barthes reduces all criticism to a radical subjectivism; and his rejection of scientific rationalism is affirmed with still greater firmness in Critique et Vérité. Clarity, he assures us, is no more than a reactionary prejudice; what stands to reason is commonplace and banal; objectivity is an empty illusion. (Picard 1965:viii)

In the previous quote (d) Picard has, according to my own reading and understanding of Criticism and Truth, a wrong understanding of what was meant by Barthes; for Barthes, ‘clarity’ is opposed to ‘jargon’. Clarity is the only form of language acceptable to the old critic, the origin of which is political. Barthes claims that the old critic cannot write in any other way because that would imply they would have to start thinking differently. Therefore Barthes redefines clarity as “writing itself, from the very moment at which it becomes writing, it is the happiness of writing, it is all the desire which is writing” (Barthes 1966:12). Jargon on the other hand, which has been repulsed by the old critics, is “a way of imagining (…), a way of approaching metaphorical language which intellectual discourse will need one day” (Barthes 1966:12). Also, Barthes does not reduces criticism

65 to a radical subjectivism; in short, he argues that criticism is (a) a deep reading, (b) discovers certain intelligibility (the same as what Picard claims to be doing) and (c) deciphers and participates in an interpretation, which is not exhaustive. Barthes point is merely that the text has no fixed meaning, which is not the same as radical subjectivism. Barthes simply questions objectivity with respect to interpreting a novel; the evident truths the old critic finds are his own personal choices. The problem with objectivity here is that it is based on the idea that language has one fixed meaning, which is false according to Barthes.

66