Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts

by Roland Barthes

  We must never forget in our commentaries and digressions that our point of departure is the shattering obviousness of an object of language that we have cut from its discursive artifice, its ideological artificiality.

  1

  “As the temperature had climbed to thirty-three degrees, Bourdon Boulevard was absolutely deserted” (p. 31).44

  1. Form in the Traditional Sense

  —We note a binary cut with two well-separated limbs since they are nearly as long as one another; we almost have a metrical organization.

  —The cut is reinforced by the é/è phonetic opposition (degrees/desert).

  —It is a matter of a “logical” cut (in the classical sense of the word, as in treatises on rhetoric): with a subordinate and main clause. Fontanier speaks of the subordinate clause (Fontanier, p. 51) if the proposition (subject and predicate) is related to the general sense of the main clause and does not apply specifically to the subject or the attribute (in this case, it is a matter of an incidental proposition).45 Here we note a logical relationship par excellence: the causality (as). The cause and its effect create a logical saturation, a “complete and finished meaning,” according to the canonical definition of the sentence (Fontanier, p. 52).

  2. Disconnection

  Flaubert’s sentence is eminently disconnectable, yet without being gnomic, lapidary. Its status is subtle, in a subtle and solid in-between; it is neither maxim nor inextricably held in the weave of other sentences. It is extricable, extractable. It has something like the scent of maxim (but only the scent). This sentence is the insignificant promoted to the order of pseudomaxim.

  From then on, the sentence is copiable. It calls for the copy. The monumental (lapidary gnomism) is turned, collapsed into its practical joke: the copy (see copies of Venus de Milo, the Eiffel Tower). The sentence plays at eternity: the sentence of tomorrow, of forever, infinitely copiable. Flaubert knew it; he copied this sentence for his niece: “To his niece Caroline: ‘It is to obey you, my Loulou, that I have sent you the first sentence of Bouvard et Pécuchet. But, since you describe it or rather dignify it with the name of relic, and since false ones must never be worshiped, know that you do not possess the true (sentence). Here it is: “As the temperature had climbed to thirty-three degrees, Bourdon Boulevard was absolutely deserted.”’ (1874)”46

  Disconnectable, copiable, the sentence is a parody of itself. Moreover, here, through connotation, it constitutes a parody of scientific discourse (33 degrees). This parody of the scientific serves here as emblem for the whole book (as parodic variations on the discourse of scientific popularization). It is already a bit like Bouvard and Pécuchet were saying this sentence. Ensuring an emblematic, diagrammatic, and inaugural function, it provides and establishes the tone. It recalls the function of the prelude, or the proem, when the rhapsodist tries out a passage before really beginning.

  3. Ellipsis and Catalysis

  Let us proceed in approaching the sentence object. Proust will be very helpful to us here. Let us read what he says about Balzac’s sentence—which he clearly saw transgressing the nature of the sentence—and then we will compare a contrario our sentence from Flaubert: “Not conceiving of the sentence as made of a special substance from which must be eliminated and no longer be recognizable all that forms the subject of conversation, of knowledge, etc., he adds to each word the notion that he has of it, the thought that it inspires in him. If he speaks of an artist, immediately he says all he knows, through simple apposition.”47

  In other words, Balzac catalyzes: he saturates (even though the sentence—as we know through Chomsky—is not saturatable). His mode of catalysis is apposition (Proust practices comparison). “Idle chatter” returns to the register of speech (in contrast to the sentence, writing).

  Flaubert practices the ellipsis (“special substance”). He does not appose. He makes causality dominate (“as,” “considering them stupid,” sentence no. 6), from which he makes the very armature of the sentence (conforming to the ideology of the ratio). For him, the sentence is like an object, a microsystem having its internal hierarchy (as opposed to Balzac, who accumulates multiple incidents). All logic must be contained in the sentence. The sentence is a logical envelope (its origin, its matrix is very much the proposition: a logical notion, not a grammatical one).

  What Balzac would have catalyzed, Flaubert evacuates; Flaubert’s one simple sentence would have provided a whole first paragraph (climatic considerations regarding Paris, sociology of the Paris summer, topography of the Bastille and Gare de l’Arsenal area).

  It’s useful to note the relationship to science, to scientific discourse. Balzac is closer to science than Flaubert is. The ellipsis is not scientific; to be elliptical is not a good thing. The ellipsis assumes that one has chosen another value system—art. In art, the implicit is (at least in classical art, it was) a value.

  Or again: silence. Without ever being hermetic, the Flaubertian sentence lets silences be heard. Silence is the constitutive place of the sentence, as of music.

  Let us note again a major research and conference topic: the implicit. See the book by Ducrot, Dire et ne pas dire.48

  4. Anacoluthon of Two Truths

  However, not everything is simple, orthodox, and conforming to a logical ratio in Flaubert’s sentence. This sentence is very sly (hence its appeal). On the level of content (on the form of content, see Hjemslev),49 we find a rupture in the construction, an anacoluthon between two types (two registers) of truth: (1) a physical, thermometric truth (33 degrees), (2) a phenomenological truth that corresponds to what the subject sees (“completely deserted”). We discover a prosaic truth, a descriptive tautology, almost a conversational remark. Once the two truths are stated, their link is sanctified by logic (“as” is the degree zero of all subordinations: cum). Here again we find “art”; the sentence is description supported by reason. It is the space of great Dutch painting (inert physical space combined with the trembling of the “lived”).50 But always with a slight parodic smile that opens the dislocation of languages.

  Or again: the combination of description and cause constitutes a form of mixed thesis. One states the fact, one states the cause, one plays at the truth. But the dislocation (the parodic) comes from an accident of unevenness. There is the fall of the pure, noble cause matched, through the eternal abstraction of the sentence, to the flatness of the effect. No need to measure in degrees (33 and not 30 or 35) to understand that it is too hot for people to go out! We can imagine the gag: solemnly consulting a thermometer and discovering that Bourdon Boulevard is deserted!

  The anacoluthon is a kind of linguistic hold that fixes, that solidifies a state of things. There we return to the shattering through the detour of irony. Bataille: “If necessary, there is certainly no better means of treating the rational than with the help of that involuntary irony of sentences, which marks a simple state of things” (OC III, p. 12, note).51 This absolutely defines our sentence: it posits the state of things, gives it a rational turn, all of it caught in the irony of the sentence (the sentence as irony)—this irony being, if not involuntary (too psychological a word), at least uncertain, indistinguishable.

  5. Truth/Bêtise

  The sentence might be like a tableau vivant of truth. Let us recall the theory (from Kristeva) of the Mallarméan antisentence. Mallarmé52 maintains a thetic moment, as possibility of truth and thus of denotation (there is a denoted referent: the deserted Bourdon Boulevard). Flaubert proposes a fixed, frozen (if we can say that in this case!) representation of the thetic, the denoted, the truth. The sentence is like a tableau; or again, the sentence (Flaubert’s sentence) is an object (ob-jectum), a gift set before us, set on the table (pro-positio). Whereas that formal parody of truth through the thetic nature of the sentence is the bêtise itself. Our sentence is a (sly) production of bêtise. The bêtise is not the error, on the side of error. The bêtise needs the thetic; it is a truth copied, frozen: a doxa, the doxa (for Cicero, the sententia goes back the doxa, to that
which is sententious, which is our sentence).

  Thus we understand the scent of this sentence: the aesthetic production of an endoxal object of language.

  2

  “Suddenly a drunk staggered across the footpath; and, on the subject of workers, they began a political conversation. Their opinions were the same, although Bouvard was perhaps more liberal” (p. 32).

  1. Form (in the Traditional Sense)

  This is not a sentence in the typographical, official sense (between two periods), but in the macrosemantic sense as presentation of a full, closed meaning.

  So this sentence is different from the first one: no cut, no meter. The form is not in the “structure” but only and completely in the launch of the sentence. With Flaubert, we must note the major place of adverbs (at the beginning or at the end). Here, the opening of the sentence is through an adverb, abrupt: Suddenly. Ensuring a diagrammatic function, the sentence finds its emphasis through the displacement of the adverb to the beginning (far from the verb), imposing a logical rupture of time and place.53

  Be careful, however: the displacement of the adverb, which often marks the “special substance” of the sentence (Proust), especially in Flaubert, can be obeying nonanalogic, nonimitative motives. The adverb can be displaced in order to, in some way, get rid of it, clearing the sentence for the coming of the noun or verb phrase. Thus it is a matter of a true presentation (art production, preparation).

  2. Metonymy

  The “logical” armature is a metonymic chain: drunk workers politics. Thus this is not true logic (the noble logic of causality). From the perspective of the ratio and the sentence, metonymy, like normative structure, is a cheap logic, a parody of logic. The bond of location is taken for a bond of implication: post hoc, propter hoc.54 Metonymy corresponds to a narrative logic. The metonymic chain gets started with an external release mechanism (see animals and children).55

  From then on, we can understand the value of this specifically Flaubertian operator: “and.” “And” is a metonymic operator; pure contiguity is given the alibi of a grammatical—thus pseudological—link (the sentence as a place where grammar and logic are supposed to coincide, according to a classical conception). A tenuous but existing link, a sort of place, degree zero of metonymic movement, “and” has it both ways. It has the appearance of a logical enumerator (which adds equal units: the worker is thus supposed to be equal to the drunk, logically) and the function of a joiner of spaces, heterogeneous objects (a specifically metonymic function). It is the articulation, the movement of the body (of the child, the animal) that turns its head suddenly in response to an incongruous signal. A drunk? A worker.

  3. The Voices

  To write—to produce a writing, a text—is to produce a statement in several voices (many fictions of origin for the stated) and to confuse those voices more or less, pass from one to the other without warning, make them more or less indistinguishable. Flaubert is a classic writer; the voices are multiple, subtle, but just about distinguishable:

  (a) A drunk staggered across …: This is the voice of the witness, the typical narrator. Let’s not forget (see Jakobson)56 that certain languages have a special mood for reporting what one sees, what one saw, that for which one bears witness: the testimonial.

  (b) And, on the subject of workers … : We note an ellipsis (and a metonymy): “drunks” refers to “workers.” We perceive Flaubert’s voice as he possesses, through his status as writer and his own “vocation,” a critical knowledge on the discourse of others. Flaubert knows the routines, the channels of conversation, the prejudices (drunks/workers), and he reproduces them as a realist artist of language. This is the voice of mythology, of parody, of irony, the voice of the specialist in endoxal discursivity, of the archivist of stereotypes, received ideas, fashionable ideas (in Balzac, we might have found here a whole moral and social apposition on the proletariat and wine).

  (c) A political conversation: the stated imposes the abstraction of a genre: the political conversation. Thus, we hear the voice of an abstracter, a poser of genres and names, a namer, an onomothete,57 a nominalist voice on the way toward a possible stereotype: the “political conversation” (with the quotation marks). Nomination, at this level, implies a distance.

  (d) Their opinions were the same: it’s a matter of the narrator’s voice, the reporter’s voice. But at the beginning, it was a matter of the narrator-witness. Here, it’s a matter of a narrator-historian who begins to interpret, to generalize, compare, manipulate the meanings.

  (e) Although Bouvard was perhaps more liberal: we find the same voice again of the historian, but of a particular variety and type, that of the scrupulous historian. This historian cancels out the narrator-demiurge; he doesn’t know everything and he acknowledges that. He thereby substantiates the external existence of a referent. This realist artifice allows the probable to be reinforced, creates a “reality effect.”58 Let us note that the effect of the real does not necessarily depend upon the precision of detail or the certainty of evidence, but precisely on its modesty, on its scruples. One seems more accurate in saying, “I may be biased,” and more honest in saying, “I could be wrong.” “Perhaps” is, according to the cultivated doxa, the word that best substantiates the real. Through that voice, one enters the complex space of narrative imagination.

  All these quick, fragile voices form a kind of moire.59 Let us draw from this analysis the feeling that in good narrative methodology, the study of points of view (as a prestructural phase of the structural analysis of the story) must subtilize in the extreme the fabric of voices. The Flaubertian sentence is a very complex, but nevertheless analyzable stereophony.

  4. The Doxa

  In this sentence, we find three clear doxa: (a) the drunk-worker link, (b) the worker-political link, (c) the political conversation itself, forever rich in stereotypes. (In politics, opinions are never revolutionary; revolution itself is an object of doxa.) The sentence thus connotes—in fact—an appropriation of the doxa (by Bouvard and Pécuchet). The doxa as object of theft; it cannot be destroyed, only stolen. Bouvard and Pécuchet inhabit it, by force. They are the squatters of the doxa (their vice, their originality, by which they are going to become paradoxical, is that they change doxa a hundred times).

  3

  It’s useful to reclarify the link between sentence and pleasure. It’s not a matter of an introspective task, of gradually knowing why it gives me pleasure. Rather it’s a matter of using pleasure as release mechanism for all ideas, all leads, without yet knowing if they are good.

  “Bouvard had the advantage in other ways. His hair watch-chain and his manner of whipping up the mustard sauce revealed the graybeard, full of experience, and he ate, the corners of his napkin under his armpits, giving utterance to things that made Pécuchet laugh” (p. 34).

  1. Form

  Once again we encounter the Flaubertian “and.” Thibaudet characterizes it as “the and of movement.”60 But that’s a bit brief. In fact, the “and” marks an anacoluthon in the rhetorical thread.

  Canonically, “and” links equal, homogeneous units, phrases of the same grammatical nature (a trick for Latin versions). No doubt here, “and” links two properties. It is grammatical, but on the level of discourse, there is rupture, heterogeneity. “And” links a metalinguistic generality (revealing the graybeard) and a contingent, fragmented notation. It is, literally, unsound. Unless there is distortion between form and content: “and” in fact linking two examples of the “graybeard.”

  In any case, it’s trouble. “And” creates a troubling shift in the rhetorical organization (the type is converted into species). We will note the troubling accolade:

  2. The Scene Is Kitsch (Hair Watch-chain, Mustard Sauce, Napkin Under Armpit)

  But it corresponds more exactly to a lower variety of kitsch: vulgar kitsch.

  Kitsch (Munich, 1860) comes from the southern German Kitschen: to throw together, to make new furniture from old. Kitsch refers to the negation of the authentic (
to pass off something else in place of what was specifically asked for) according to a connotative, not denotative, phenomenon.

  Ordinarily one encounters the connotations of objects, of settings. Here we have objects as well as behaviors (whipping the mustard sauce, placing his napkin). Let us note here, in the aesthetic analyses, the primacy given to the object, since there is an aesthetic, not even of gestures, but of behaviors, that is to say, functional gestures. What can be the artificiality, the inauthenticity of a gesture, its past reference? We may recall that the schema is the attitude of the body in action (athlete, orator, statue).61 The idea of a schematology is very important for Bouvard and Pécuchet.

  Kitsch is achieved in an assemblage of objects: a collection, a display, the exhibit of a whole. It is connected to the notion of display (exaggerated show, “making a fuss”). That is very much the case; Bouvard is on full display. Display corresponds to the complexity of objects present at a certain moment in a whole. This is the Flaubertian sense of enumeration; there is always a sense of kitsch. It is impossible to really understand Flaubert without referring to kitsch (see the stereotype and the bêtise).