Histrionics and rhetoric give Barthes' essays a look of originality that they do not always possess. They capture attention by their emphatic style but often add little to what literary historians have already said in studies that maintain better balance and are more wary of specious generalizations. This is already evident in his first work, Le Degré Zéro de l'Ecriture, a dazzling piece of argumentation in which he attempts to isolate from language and style a distinct socio-historical aspect that he calls "writing." He pushes his investigation of language problems further in Mythologies and takes up the subject of social myths. In the introduction to Michelet par lui-même and in the essay on Racine, he tries his hand at literary "psychoanalysis." In his faults and virtues, Barthes typifies the French New Critic. He also offers a fine example of the techniques most in vogue as well as the prejudices and shibboleths that characterize the new school.
Whether his studies take the direction of sociology or psychoanalysis, they depart from the work itself, from the author's writing rather than from his life…. Style is always his point of reference, the subject of his research. As he declares in the introduction to Michelet par lui-même, his concern is not with history or biography but only with the work. What he aims to do is to discover in it those basic, recurring themes which may constitute a pattern of obsessions or preoccupations. Thus, in noting Michelet's allusions to qualities, conditions, phenomena, and the like, Barthes hopes to expose Michelet's literary psyche or, as Barthes himself expresses it, arrive at Michelet's basic "coherence." Likewise in his Racine, Barthes works exclusively with the texts, but here the results of his analysis have only the most indirect bearing on the personality of the author. Jung rather than Freud (or Marx) seems to guide him as he reduces Racine's theater to archetypal patterns and interprets their significance…. For Barthes, Racine's characters are not persons but figures acting out elemental myth material; the interest of his theater is not psychology but the representation of fundamental relationships and conflict between primitive forces.
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