If a consistent theory of criticism emerges in [the] discontinuity of perspectives offered by Barthes … throughout his career, it very probably depends on what might be coined a zero-degree hermeneutics comparable to the concept of zero-degree style which he originally proposed almost three decades ago. As he advocates for literary form, his critical theory seems to be suspended in interspace between the methodologies which dominate it, but without really bringing these into harmony with each other. The critical act verges on each of them, but short of fusion and in a pattern of temptation and quick abandonment which actually seems to have accelerated throughout his career. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, for example, he described his rejection of orthodox belief ("doxa") as a mode of "cruising," and in his last book, Camera Lucida, published in 1980, he finally turned to photography for a vision of permanence which eluded his literary methodology. In The Pleasures of the Text Barthes missed the opportunity to arrive at an affective synthesis based on the fundamental and almost self-evident premise that both the bliss and pleasure of literary experience (which he tried to distinguish from each other) are comparable to physical gratification as conscious byproducts of tension reduction—or, in a more global sense, of anxiety reduction as mediated by literary form. If Barthes had tried to explore this connection, he could well have established a basis for integrating psychology and stylistics, and with clear implications relevant to the Marxist theory of alienation—a synthesis which might have suggested a much more coherent theory of explication. But this of course wasn't his intention. Like the obsessive seducer who must keep his mistresses apart from each other, Barthes seems to have drawn upon each of these fields with no expectation of sustaining a close relationship or of letting any of them converge so their coincidental ties might be revealed. Instead, he touched upon each dedicated to the precarious task of keeping them proximate but isolated as "zero degree" involvements. (p. 53)
By far the most obvious rejection of Sartre's theory of engagement … was made by Roland Barthes in his first book, Le Degre Zero de l'Ecriture, published in 1953 and translated in 1967 as Writing Degree Zero…. Barthes proposed here a formal compromise that anticipated the structuralist perspective perhaps a decade before it crystalized and acquired widespread popularity as an intellectual movement. With a typically Gallic mixture of elliptical pronouncements, he delineated a critical theory which stretched in scope from Sartre's notion of political commitment at one extreme to a formal, non-political theory of language and style at the other. Within these rather wide limits he could range as a "critic in motion," never staying at a position long enough to develop its ramifications with any thoroughness, but swiftly and almost imperceptibly shifting to a new orientation, often radically different if not the exact opposite. His political views appear to have remained militant enough to provoke attacks by Dieguez and others, but his real interest came to its focus on language and style, formal dimensions of literature which he found to be independent of history. He was apparently struggling within himself at an initial stage of transition from engagement to structuralism, not fully prepared to accept his apostasy and still somewhat confused about his course of direction as a critic. Anticipating his later concern with a linguistic model of experience, he seems to have been trying to explain Sartre's theory of engagement in terms of Saussure's theory of language, and in lieu of synthesis to have nervously shifted back and forth between the two. His indecisiveness actually prefigured the ambivalence he was later to find essential to the identity of the tragic hero. By means of this vacillation, he progressively reduced the theory of engagement until it lost its impetus as a moral obligation and became instead an impediment to the formal lucidity he considered the primary objective of literature. His uncertainty thus obliged his rejection of engagement, though he often returned to its theme with renewed fascination. Unable to free himself entirely from its demands, he obsessively sought its denial, an engagement to undermine engagement, and this pattern of reaction formation offers, I think, the key to his development as a critic.
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