Despite the refinements of modern means of communication, the relationship between Anglo-American and continental—especially French—literary criticism remains a star-crossed story, plagued by a variety of cultural gaps and time lags. The French have only just gotten around to translating an essay by Empson, and by the time American works of literary theory or literary criticism appear in Paris they often have lost much of their youthful freshness. There is more good will and curiosity in the other direction, yet here too a mixture of misguided enthusiasm and misplaced suspicion blurs the actual issues. Even some of the most enlightened of English and American critics keep considering their French counterparts with the same suspicion with which English-speaking tourists might approach the café au lait they are being served for breakfast in French Provincial hotels: they know they don't like it but aren't entirely certain whether they are being imposed upon or if, for lack of some ritualistic initiation, they are perhaps missing out on a good thing. Others are willing to swallow French culture whole, from breakfast coffee to Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, but since intellectual fashions change faster than culinary tastes, they may find themselves wearing a beret and drinking Pernod at a moment when the French avant-garde has long since switched to a diet of cashmere sweaters and cold milk. The Critical Essays of Roland Barthes that have just become available in excellent English translations date from 1953 to 1963; Mythologies goes back to 1957 and appears in a regrettably abridged version. I cannot help speculating about all the things that could go wrong in the reception of texts that now combine a nostalgic with a genuine but out-of-phase revolutionary quality. Perhaps the most useful function for an American-based view of Roland Barthes may be to try to anticipate unwarranted dismissal as well as misplaced enthusiasm for the aspects of the work with which Barthes himself may no longer be so pleased. Barthes has been introduced to Americans as possibly "the most intelligent man of our time" to paraphrase Susan Sontag and any man needs and deserves protection from the expectations raised by such hyperbole.
For despite the emphasis on structure, code, sign, text, reading, intratextual relationships, etc., and despite the proliferation of a technical vocabulary primarily derived from structural linguistics, the actual innovations introduced by Roland Barthes in the analytic study of literary texts are relatively slight. Even in his more technical works, unfortunately not yet available in English, such as S/Z (the analysis of a brief narrative text by Balzac), and the various articles on narrative technique published in Communications, the contribution to practical criticism is not as extensive as the methodological apparatus would lead one to expect. The work of "pure" structuralists such as the linguist Greimas and his group or of some among Barthes's most gifted associates, such as Gérard Genette or Tzvetan Todorov, is more rigorous and more exhaustive than Barthes's—though it is only fair to point out here its avowed indebtedness to him. Hence the risk of disappointment or overhasty dismissal for the wrong reasons. Barthes is primarily a critic of literary ideology and, as such, his work is more essayistic and reflective than it is technical—perhaps most of all when the claim to methodological precision is most emphatically being stated. The close integration of methodology with ideology is an attractive characteristic of European intellectual life ever since structuralism became a public issue in the sixties—and, for better or worse, French writers on literature are still much closer to being public figures, committed to articulate positions, than their American counterparts. Barthes played an active part in the recent Battles of the Books and his work bears the traces of his involvements. It has to be read and understood as an intellectual adventure rather than as the scientifically motivated development of a methodology. He is at least as interested in the reasons for advocating certain technical devices as in their actual application; hence the polemical, proselytizing tone of many of his essays, hence also the many interviews, pamphlets, position papers, etc. His work should be read within the context of the particular situation within which it is written, that of the ideological demons underlying the practice of literary criticism in France. This situation is idiosyncratically French and cannot be transposed tel quel (c'est le cas de le dire) to the American situation. It does not follow however that the story of Barthes's intellectual itinerary is without direct interest for American readers.
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