Roland Barthes is a sort of serious joke. It first appeared in a series called x par lui-même—for example, Michelet by Himself, to name the volume for which Barthes happens to have been responsible. So to ask a writer to do his own "par lui-même" was part compliment, part gag, and Barthes followed up by reviewing the book himself in the Quinzaine litteraire, under the heading "'Barthes by Barthes' by Barthes." But the joke is serious because there is more to it than literary frivolity or once-off publicity value. Asking Barthes to do something so close to autobiography is no light challenge; for to anybody holding his views on writing (and this remains true however they change) autobiography ought to be anathema. Consequently the book is partly about the problem he must have in writing it and partly about other and related problems such as the difference between what, as a writer, he thinks ought to be done and what in fact he does.
Barthes is an extraordinary virtuoso though people who read him in English—a language, incidentally, in which he takes very little interest—may be skeptical about this remark. It remains true. Highly original, extremely fertile and inventive, he really does represent, in a peculiarly qualified way, a new kind of writing, and he continually discovers new ways of writing about writing. He is not a philosopher, not a linguist, not a poet, not a novelist and even not an essayist. His ideal "text" is not controlled by an author at all. He "dreams of a world which would be exempt from meaning (as one is from military service)," and the ideal text would also be without meaning and without style. Yet he is, and knows he is, a conscious stylist and heavy with meanings.
His work is therefore full of paradoxes (though the very idea of an author's Work is of course as intolerable, theoretically, as the idea of an author). That shelf of books constitutes a potent, old-fashioned, presiding personality, even as the books themselves disown the notion. Always looking for the totally unstructured text, he himself is always concerned to communicate. "I write classic," he admits. "I am on the side of structure…." He is, of course, well aware—comfortably, I think, not painfully—of these contradictions. His prose, however brilliant, is somehow professorial. The voice of so many avant-gardes is carefully modulated, full of the tones of the past. "At best," I once heard him say, "I am the arrière-garde of the avant-garde." He admires texts most which are uncoded, free of inherited notions of structure—they offer more opportunities for perversity, fetishism, that orgasmic reading experience he calls jouissance. But he moves most easily among the "classic" texts which offer the duller, more continuous, more orderly rewards of simple plaisir.
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