Album

by Roland Barthes

  15. Evidently a reference to “L’Encyclopédie de la Pléiade” project that Queneau was in the process of assembling, the first volume of which appeared in 1956. Barthes did, in fact, participate in it. His article “Le Théatre grec” appeared in the 1965 volume, Histoire des spectacles (OC, vol. 2, 724–44).

  16. Apparently there was a misunderstanding; Barthes does not follow up on this proposal.

  17. There is no trace of such a study in the Barthes archives.

  18. Roland Barthes was a student researcher in lexicology at the CNRS, beginning in late 1952.

  19. Barthes lost his CNRS grant for his thesis in lexicology at the end of 1954 and applied for a new grant in sociology, which he obtained in 1955. In the meantime he worked at Éditions de l’Arche, thanks to Robert Voisin (see the “Author of the Theater” section, p. XXX).

  20. A promise Barthes did not keep.

  21. Barthes participated in the major conference on “the structuralist debate,” organized by René Girard at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in October 1966.

  22. In reality, Barthes’s article in Combat dates from August 1947. Astonishingly, Béguin anticipates by a month a new series of articles by Barthes in Combat that will become part of Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, the first of which appeared November 9, 1950.

  23. Barthes’s text titled “Michelet, l’Histoire et la mort” did, in fact, appear in the April 1951 issue.

  24. Jean-Marie Domenach (1922–98) was an intellectual close to Emmanuel Mounier, and was the noted author of Retour du tragique (Seuil, 1967). He became friends with Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault.

  25. No text by Barthes on Cayrol appeared in the December or January issue of Esprit. This must refer to a long article, almost essay length, titled “Jean Cayrol et ses romans” that appeared in the March 1952 issue of Esprit.

  26. The title Barthes chose was “Le Monde où l’on catche,” published in Esprit in October.

  27. On Cayrol, see our note, p. XXX.

  28. In the Dolomites, north of Venice, where Genet stayed to treat his rheumatoid arthritis, contracted during his time in prison. He probably stayed with his Russian patron, Gala Barbisan, who owned a chalet there. See Catherine Robbe-Grillet, Jeune mariée: Journal, 1957–1962 (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 122.

  29. The abbreviation is crossed out in the letter.

  30. This “mythology” appeared in the February 1955 issue of Les Lettres nouvelles under the title “Pour une histoire de l’enfance, enfants-vedettes, enfants-copies, jouets.”

  31. Of course Genet means Marguerite Duras, who lived with Dionys Mascolo on Rue Saint-Benoit.

  32. Jean Guéhenno (1890–1978) published L’Évangile éternel: Étude sur Michelet with Grasset in 1927.

  33. André Frénaud (1907–93) was a French poet, in particular the author of Il n’y a pas de paradis (1962).

  34. Frénaud’s letter probably addressed Mythologies and the “final text” in particular, that is, “Le Mythe, aujourd’hui.”

  35. Jean Lacroix (1900–86), French philosopher, was the teacher and friend of Louis Althusser. Barthes probably met him at Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet, where he came to give a lecture on friendship in 1943.

  36. Robert Coiplet, journalist at Le Monde and former representative for the Vichy censorship board at Le Temps, published a very critical review of Mythologies in Le Monde on March 9, 1957. Jean Lacroix’s article appeared on May 5 that same year.

  37. See photos, page XXX.

  38. There was, in fact, quite a violent exchange between Jean Paulhan and Roland Barthes; Paulhan, using the pseudonym of Jean Guérin, attacked Barthes in La Nouvelle NRF in June 1955, and Barthes responded to him in Les Lettres nouvelles in July–August. See OC, vol. 1, 569.

  39. Robert Pinget published Le Renard and la Boussole with Gallimard in 1953.

  40. Upon the death of his maternal grandmother, Noémie Révelin, in July 1953, Barthes moved into her apartment on the Place du Panthéon until spring 1954.

  41. © Catherine and Jean Camus. Having learned of Barthes’s very critical text on Le Peste before its publication, Albert Camus responded to it through an open letter to Barthes that appeared in the January issue of the Bulletin du club du meilleur livre following a review by Barthes titled “La Peste, annales d’une épidémie ou roman de la solitude?” Barthes published a response to that open letter in the April issue of the same journal. See OC, vol.1, 540–47 and 573–74.

  42. Robert Carlier (1910–2002) was the founder of Éditions du Club du Meilleur Livre, which issued the journal with the same name.

  43. Les Lettres nouvelles, edited by Maurice Nadeau.

  44. Marcel Péju was the office manager for Les Temps Modernes.

  45. Marcel Arland accepted Barthes’s invitation but had to cancel his visit at the last minute for personal reasons.

  46. The book must be Planétarium, published by Gallimard in May 1959.

  47. See “Le Grain de la voix” (1972) and “La Musique, la voix, la langue” (1978) in OC, vols. 4 and 5, 150–53 and 524–27.

  48. On the review, see Marco Consolini, Théâtre populaire, 1953–1964: Histoire d’une revue engagée (Paris: Éditions de l’IMEC, 1999).

  49. See the letter to Jean Cayrol from July 1953, p. XXX. The article in question is “Pouvoirs de la tragédie antique” (Théâtre populaire 2 [July–August 1953]).

  50. Guy Dumur (1921–91), writer and drama critic, member of the editorial committee for Théâtre populaire.

  51. Morvan Lebesque (1911–70), journalist and essayist, member of the editorial committee for Théâtre populaire.

  52. Jules Roy had just published La Bataille dans la rizière with Gallimard. In fact, a play by Arthur Adamov, Le Professeur Taranne, appeared in the July-August 1953 issue of Théâtre populaire (see the following letter).

  53. The play by Jules Roy that Barthes alludes to is titled Les Cyclones and does, in fact, address the army’s attempts at ultramodern airplanes. It was published by Gallimard in 1954.

  54. Here Barthes is criticizing Roy’s presumed stoicism, through Vauvenargue’s (1715–47) moralism.

  55. Barthes is on vacation in Groningen in the Netherlands, where he writes this letter and the two that follow.

  56. Le Professeur Taranne.

  57. Jean Duvignaud (1921–2007), one of the review’s founders.

  58. “Pouvoirs de la tragédie antique.”

  59. The Groupe de Théâtre Antique de la Sorbonne, which Barthes founded after the war.

  60. In the VIe arrondissement in Paris.

  61. August Baumeister (1830–1922).

  62. Margarete Bieber (1879–1978).

  63. Michel de Ghelderode published “Les Entretiens d’Ostende” in the March–April 1954 issue.

  64. Name illegible.

  65. Jean Duvignaud published “Trois petits mythes du théâtre bourgeois.”

  66. Jean Laude published “À l’origine du drame.”

  67. The March–April 1954 issue of Théâtre populaire published a French translation of the play by Heinrich von Kleist.

  68. Roland Barthes published a simple note on Ruy Blas directed by Jean Vilar (OC, vol. 1, 486–88), but the same issue ran a text by Vilar, “Ruy Blas: Notes pour les comédiens.”

  69. In early April Barthes had to go to Avignon to give a lecture for the branch of the Amis du Théâtre Populaire that had just been created. See “Avignon, l’hiver,” France Observateur, April 15, 1954 (OC, vol. 1, 472–75).

  70. Jean Paris, the author of a Hamlet published by Seuil the year before, which Barthes reviewed (OC, vol. 1, 472–75).

  71. The editorial in the March–April 1954 issue was, in fact, written by Jean Paris on the subject of an exchange between the Comédie-Française and the Moscow Ballet.

  72. Jean Rouvet, senior official at the Ministry of Culture, was then the administrator of Jean Vilar’s TNP.

  73. This concerns the “Amis du Théâtre Populaire.” On the conflicts—especially the i
deological ones—between the Amis du Théâtre Populaire and the TNP as represented by Jean Rouvet, see Émile Copfermann, Le Théâtre populaire, pourquoi? (Paris: Maspero, 1965), 64–72.

  74. The subject proposed by Barthes appeared in the editorial in the next issue.

  75. Michel Zéraffa (1918–85), writer and essayist, researcher at CNRS, also literary critic for France Observateur and Lettres nouvelles.

  76. Barthes attended the Nîmes drama festival. See his columns on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, directed by Raymond Hermantier, in Théatre populaire, July–August 1955.

  77. This must be Jean-Paul Richard and his wife; Richard was born in Marseille and owned a house there.

  78. Barthes is probably alluding to a text related to the Hungarian anti-Soviet revolution of 1956.

  79. Etchetoa is the name of the villa in Hendaye where Barthes was then staying.

  80. The first play by George Schehadé, Histoire de Vasco, was performed by Jean-Louis Barrault’s company on Monday, October 15, 1956.

  81. Barthes was in Zurich for a cultural-political meeting organized by Ignazio Silone and Maurice Nadeau, following the cultural “thaw” linked to relations with Khrushchev. Georges Bataille, Albert Béguin, Jean Duvignaud, and a certain number of intellectuals and apparatchiks from Russian and central Europe were present. Maurice Nadeau mentions the event in his fine portrait of Ignazio Silone in Grâces leur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011), 179–80.

  82. There were many tensions at the review that pitted the formalists against the political activists, the Brechtians against the Vilarians, the theoreticians against the practitioners. Jean Duvignaud did not support the Brechtian turn of Théâtre populaire, especially after the publication of the fifth issue in January–February 1955, devoted to Brecht, with a very radical editorial by Barthes (“La Révolution brechtienne,” in Essais critiques; OC, vol. 2, 314–16). Jean Duvignaud no longer wrote for Théâtre populaire after March 1956, although he and Barthes remained connected through another undertaking, the founding of the review Arguments, with Edgar Morin, that same year.

  83. See the review that Barthes published in Théâtre populaire in May 1958 on the production of Ubu roi by Jean Vilar at the TNP (OC, vol. 1, 929–32).

  84. Barthes is speaking here of his work on fashion for the CNRS.

  85. Barthes is probably referring to the prefaces to Racine’s plays published in 1960 by the Club Français du Livre (volumes 11 and 12 of Théâtre classique français), which became the first part of Sur Racine (1963). In the March 1958 issue of Théâtre populaire, Barthes published a study titled “Dire Racine,” which became the second part of the book.

  86. In the September–October 1955 issue on the production of Ubu by Gabriel Monnet.

  87. A reference to payments Voisin made to Barthes every two years for his work for Théâtre populaire (see the letter to Jean Cayrol from July 1953, p. XXX).

  88. Roger Pic (1920–2001) was a photographer whose photographs of Brecht’s production of Mère Courage were the subject of Barthes’s commentary in the 1959 third quarter issue of Théâtre populaire (OC, vol. 1, 997–1013), and especially of the preface to Mère Courage published by Éditions de l’Arche in 1960, with photos by Pic (OC, vol. 1, 1064–82).

  89. The sale of the villa, Etchetoa, located in Hendaye, inherited by Barthes’s mother from her family, and not actually sold until 1961.

  90. John Willett (1916–2002), English translator of and commentator on Brecht’s work. He published The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht with Methuen in 1959.

  91. Jacques Robichez published Le Symbolisme au théâtre with Éditions de l’Arche in 1957.

  92. In his preface to Bertoldt Brecht’s Mother Courage, with photos by Robert Pic, Barthes quotes Walter Benjamin: “Rupture is one of the fundamental methods of formal elaboration” (OC, vol. 1, 1075), translated by Anna Bostock as “interruption is one of the fundamental methods of all form-giving” in “What Is Epic Theater?,” which appears in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 19.

  93. Based on the novel by Maxime Gorki, Brecht’s The Mother was produced by Brecht at the Théâtre des Nations (OC, vol. 1, 400–2).

  94. Système de la mode, which was not published until 1967.

  95. In 1960, Barthes published several texts on fashion, preliminary to Système de la mode.

  96. In 1960 and 1961, Barthes published only one article in Théâtre populaire, on Genet’s Le Balcon (issue 38, second quarter 1960).

  97. It was T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), an American and then naturalized British poet, in his famous text on Dante: “A state of mind in which one sees certain beliefs, as the order of the deadly sins, in which treachery and pride are greater than lust, and despair the greatest, as possible, so that we suspend our judgment altogether.” Eliot, “Dante,” in Selected Prose (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 221–22.

  98. Allusion to Victory, the novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1915.

  99. “Aujourd’hui ou Les Coréens” appeared in France Observateur on November 1, 1956, a review of Vinaver’s play, which opened October 25, 1956, at the Théâtre de la Comédie in Lyon, produced by Roger Planchon (OC, vol. 1, 666–67).

  100. That is, for the performance on October 27.

  101. Jean-Marie Serreau did a production of Le Coréens at the Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui (Alliance Française) in January 1957, parallel to Planchon’s. Barthes mentions this production in “Note sur Aujourd’hui” (OC, vol. 1, 646–49).

  102. Written by Vinaver between 1957 and 1958, this play was produced for the first time only in 1980, by Gilles Chavassieux at the Théâtre des Ateliers in Lyon. It was first published in March 1958 in Théâtre populaire.

  103. The play in question is Iphigénie Hôtel, written at the same time as Les Huissiers and first produced in 1977 by Antoine Vitez at the Centre Georges-Pompidou.

  104. An allusion to Vinaver’s play Iphigénie Hôtel (see the preceding letter).

  105. Stories by Ueda Akinari, written in 1776 and considered to be among the most important works of eighteenth-century Japanese fiction.

  106. This is a reference to Barthes’s review of Michel Foucault’s Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Plon, 1961) that appeared in the November 1961 issue of Critique and was reprinted in Essais critiques (OC, vol. 2, 422–27).

  107. Georges Plekhanov (1856–1918), Russian Marxist theoretician, Notes sur l’histoire de la littérature française de Lanson, and G. Lanson, L’Histoire de la littérature française (Hachette, 1898), 394–97.

  108. Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956), eminent German Romanist, author of Balzac (French translation published by Éditions des Syrtes, 1923).

  109. A reference to Georges Duhamel.

  110. OC, vol. 5, 233.

  111. A reference to Karl Marx: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. Joseph O’Malley (1844; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 3.

  112. An Edith Piaf song.

  113. A popular singer (1889–1978), still very famous at that time.

  114. “Le Grand voyage du pauvre nègre,” sung by Édith Piaf (1936).

  115. Report by Roland Barthes from July 1949; Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nantes, Bucharest (Institut Français, no. 126PO/1/23).

  116. The name of Ivan Mitchourine was associated with that of Trofim Denissovitch Lyssenko when Lyssenkoism was developed in 1948, which was intended to suppress genetics, deny the existence of genes and chromosomes, and promote a proletarian overhaul of biology and agriculture.

  117. Romanian People’s Republic.

  118. Alexandru Rosetti (1895–1990), linguist and rector at the university from 1946 to 1949.

  3. The Great Ties

  1. In a letter to Robert David from January 1946, Barthes wrote this abou
t his encounter with Fornié: “I am learning a lot here from a fellow, Fornier [sic], a militant returned from the camps, tough and sensitive intelligence, a frightening world for me who remains silent, gasping for breath, but he’s teaching me much because he claims to sense in me a certain intellectual integrity (so he says), and thus, though very reserved, he’s very open with me.” Later in “Réponses,” Barthes pays homage to this friend in naming him as one of those who introduced him to Marxism (OC, vol. 3, 1026).

  2. The book is Littérature présente (Corrêa, 1952), a collection of articles that appeared in Combat and Le Mercure de France.

  3. Alain Robbe-Grillet published “Le Chemin du retour” in the August 1954 issue of Les Lettres nouvelles. This short story was reprinted in Instantanés (Minuit, 1962).

  4. The psychiatrist Cyrille Koupernik (1917–2008) published an article entitled “Le Pavlovisme sent la poussière” in France Observateur 226 (September 9, 1954) on “ Le Grand Robert,” a famous hypnotist on whom Barthes had written a text.

  5. In fact, Barthes published “Le Grand Robert” in Les Lettres nouvelles in October 1954. The “second article” that Barthes substituted for the one on Le Grand Robert for France Observateur was a fierce criticism of Le Figaro’s drama critic, Jean-Jacques Gautier, titled “Comment s’en passer,” which appeared in the October 3, 1954 issue (OC, vol. 1, 517–19).

  6. The mythology on the Tour de France, which appeared in Les Lettres nouvelles in September 1955 under the title “Le Tour de France comme épopée,” and was reprinted in Mythologies (OC, vol. 2, 756–64).

  7. Barthes was then giving classes at the Sorbonne’s Centre de Civilisation Française.

  8. No doubt the one on “Le Guide Bleu” that appeared in Les Lettres nouvelles in October 1955.

  9. The board of Lettres nouvelles that Nadeau directed.

  10. Le Prix de Mai had just been started by Alain Robbe-Grillet with Georges Bataille, Maurice Nadeau, Louis-René des Forêts, Nathalie Sarraute, and Roland Barthes as judges. On Théâtre populaire, see the correspondence with Robert Voisin, who edited it. Arguments was a review founded in 1956 by Edgar Morin, Roland Barthes, Jean Duvignaud, and Colette Audry.