Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts

by Roland Barthes

  4. Jean Huerre and Sadia Oualid: classmates of Barthes.

  5. The Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière, ancestor of the present-day Parti Socialiste, was then led by Paul Faure and Léon Blum, while Frédéric Brunet then led the Parti Socialiste Français (1919–35), which brought together the right wing of the socialist movement.

  6. There were two Jaurès anthologies at the time: Pages choisies by Paul Desanges and Luc Mériga (Reider, 1922), and Morceaux choisis by Émile Vandervelde (Alcan, 1929).

  7. Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française (Librairie de L’Humanité, 1922).

  8. L’Armée nouvelle was published by Rouff, 1911.

  9. Édouard Herriot (1872–1957), a member of the Parti Radical, was president of the Conseil in 1932.

  10. A mistake by Barthes. There is no article by that title in La Vie littéraire by Anatole France, but there is a “famous” one published as “L’Esprit normalien” in the posthumous book by Jules Lemaître (1853–1914), former student of the Rue d’Ulm: Les Contemporains: Études et portraits littéraires (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1914).

  11. Barthes alludes here to Un Amour de Swann.

  12. Barthes is referring to the Spanish dancer Teresa Boronat (1904–2011), whose stage name was La Teresina.

  13. Both by Nicolas Berdiaff, the first appeared in 1931 from Éditions Je Sers, and the second the following year from Éditions Demain. Barthes alludes to De la dignité du christianisme in 1975 in connection with Bertolt Brecht: “Brecht et le discours: Contribution à l’étude de la discursivité” (OC, vol. 4, 789).

  14. A text by Barthes inspired by the figure of Diodorus of Sicily.

  15. Barthes began writing a novel in 1934, whose hero, Aurélien Page, offspring of a provincial bourgeois family, gradually comes to understand that family’s tyrannical structure.

  16. The house in Bayonne, Allées Paulmy, now gone, is mentioned in the beginning of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, where Barthes provides a photograph of it (OC, vol. 4, 586–87).

  17. Berthes Barthes, Barthes’s grandmother, “good, a provincial: steeped in the bourgeoisie,” whom Barthes talks about in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (OC, vol. 4, 590).

  18. This text from Barthes’s juvenilia has not been found.

  19. This is “Divertissement in F Major,” dedicated to Philippe Rebeyrol, dated January 17, 1934.

  20. The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche appeared in a French translation in 1901 as L’Origine de la tragédie dans la musique ou hellénisme et pessimisme, published by Mercure de France.

  21. A classmate of Barthes and Rebeyrol who belonged to a prominent family of Protestant ministers, the Monods.

  22. An allusion to the work of Robert Shumann, Davidsbündlertänze, which features “the march of David’s companions against the Philistines,” that is, against bourgeois conformists in the Romantic reading.

  23. Roland Barthes suffered his first attack of tuberculosis in May 1934, with a lesion in his left lung. He was first in Bayonne and then, prevented from taking the baccalaureate, he was sent to Bedous in the Pyrenees for a free cure in September 1934 until summer 1935. He lived there with his mother and brother Michel.

  24. Gaston Doumergue (1863–1937) was president of the Conseil from February to November 1934, when he resigned.

  25. Charles de Saint-Évremond (1614–1705). Barthes must have been reading the Oeuvres mêlées, published by Techener in 1865.

  26. The Gospel According to Luke.

  27. The League of Nations, precursor to the United Nations.

  28. Thermopyles is one of the names for Saint-Étienne-de-Baïgorry.

  29. Named after the owner of the building; Barthes mentions it (mistakenly transcribed as “Carricq”) in “Biographie,” in Le Lexique de l’auteur (Paris: Seuil, 2010), 256.

  30. Clément Vautel (1876–1954), writer, journalist, author of popular novels, among them La Petite-Fille de Madame Angot (Albin Michel, 1934).

  31. Barthes’s mistake, August 13, 1935, was a Tuesday.

  32. “Un je ne sais quel charme encore vers vous m’emporte” (Polyeucte, 2.2).

  33. Jean Brissaud, classmate of Barthes and Rebeyrol, the son of Doctor Brissaud, who treated Barthes for his tuberculosis until 1946.

  34. The name given to Sorbonne students who were members of the medieval theater group started by Gustave Cohen.

  35. Line by Giosuè Carducci (1835–1906) in “Idillio maremmano,” in which Carducci mocks romantic speculations.

  36. Philippe Rebeyrol had gone to Lyon for the examination in history, postponed because of the war, and had just passed it.

  37. Louis Séchan (1882–1968), Hellenic scholar, professor at the Sorbonne. It was before him and Paul Mazon that Barthes defended his graduate thesis, “Evocations et incantations dans la tragédie grecque,” in October 1941.

  38. The spelling adopted in the first French translations of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky for the character Myshkin.

  39. Barthes has his first serious relapse of tuberculosis in October 1941 and was first treated in Paris by Doctor Brissaud, who then sent him to the sanatorium for French students in Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet in early winter 1942.

  40. Michel Delacroix, son of philosopher Henri Delacroix, was a classmate with whom Barthes took singing lessons given by Charles Panzéra. Michel Delacroix died October 28, 1942. Assy is located in Haute-Savoie.

  41. Barthes was confined to bed rest in Paris from October 1941 until February 1942.

  42. “Temporal” in the sense that mysticism gives to this word, that is, related to the worldly realm.

  43. Jean Girodon was a student with Barthes at the Louis-le-Grand Lycée.

  44. For example, “a girl with whom I could hardly achieve an erection and only discharged when thinking of another,” in Oeuvres intimes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 709.

  45. In early February 1945, Barthes left Saint-Hilaire-du-Trouvet with a group of patients for the sanatorium in Leysin, Switzerland, a major center for treating tuberculosis and home of the Clinique Alexandre.

  46. A reference to Pascal’s phrase “I will also have thoughts in the back of my head,” in Pensées (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 404, fragment 659.

  47. Barthes’s graduate thesis on Greek tragedy, with Paul Mazon at the Sorbonne, which he defended in October 1941.

  48. Linked to the Swiss banking system, the “clearing” permitted exchanges between banks without requiring money orders or any other means of sending funds.

  49. Barthes spoke of him in a long interview titled “Réponses” (OC, vol. 3, 1025). On May 3, 1936, this group’s first performance of Perseus took place, with Barthes in the role of Darius. See Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (OC, vol. 4, 613); and “Lettre au sujet du Groupe de théâtre antique” (OC, vol. 2, 25–26).

  50. Jacqueline Mazon (1918–2008) was the niece of the great Hellenist Paul Mazon, the professor of Barthes and Jacques Veil.

  51. There is no Wednesday March 24, 1944, but in any case it was indeed in March 1944 that Barthes made a visit to Paris, after which, upon returning to Saint-Hilaire, he had to remain immobile for a long time because of a new pulmonary attack.

  52. Removal of one or a group of ribs in the case of a failed pneumothorax.

  53. A tomography is an exploratory procedure using radiology that allows one to observe a cross section of an organ or tissue at a given depth.

  54. Illegible.

  55. Existences was the magazine for the Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet sanatorium. Barthes had already had several pieces published in it, beginning in 1942. He published “En Grèce” in the July 1944 issue (OC, vol. 1, 68–74).

  56. In the inclined position, the patient lies flat with feet higher than the head in order to relax the lungs.

  57. René Cohen was a doctor at the Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet sanatorium.

  58. Canetti’s book, Le Bacille de Koch dans la lésion tuberculeuse du poumon, appeared in January 1946 in the monograph series from the Institut P
asteur.

  59. Gilbert de Rham, a great Swiss surgeon born in 1899, was the author of a Traité sur la Thoracoplastie (Imprimeries réunies, 1944).

  60. Robert David (see the letters addressed to Robert David).

  61. Illegible.

  62. Again, referring to Robert David.

  63. October 10.

  64. One line is missing.

  65. One line is missing.

  66. We do not know what the CED is, probably a European center or committee for health or education that approached Georges Canetti.

  67. The end of the letter is missing.

  68. A word is missing.

  69. The word here in French, fricarelle, means erotic practices between women and, by extension, lesbian love itself.

  70. One line is missing.

  71. One line is missing.

  72. Daniel Douady (1904–82) was the first doctor and first director of the Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet sanatorium, beginning in 1933. Barthes had already done a postcure in his establishment in Paris between January and July 1943.

  73. One line is missing.

  74. A section of the chapter “Sa Majesté la femme” from Michelet par lui-même (1954) is titled “Lesbianisme de Michelet” (OC, vol. 1, 393–94).

  75. The end of the letter is missing.

  76. Speleostomy was a method of healing tuberculosis invented by Doctor Bernou at the Châteaubriant sanatorium (Loire-Atlantique) that, in response to the failures linked to pneumothorax and thoracoplasty, consisted of healing up pulmonary cavities with silver nitrate.

  77. Barthes is alluding to the editorial by Sartre in the first issue of Temps modernes, which appeared in October 1945, reprinted in Situations II (Gallimard, 1948). See the letter from December 20, 1945, to Robert David. Temps présent, a weekly publication founded by Stanislas Fumet in 1937, reappeared in 1944 after having been banned during the Occupation. It was supported by the Dominicans who were connected to the Éditions du Cerf.

  78. Barthes is alluding to his article, “Le Style de L’Étranger” (by Camus), which appeared in the journal Existences in July 1944 (OC, vol. 1, 75–79).

  79. Sursis, the second volume in the Chemins de la liberté (Gallimard, 1945), has a printing date of August 31, 1945.

  80. Mouvement républicain populaire, Christian-Democrat party founded in 1944.

  81. Olivier Messiaen (1908–92) had just given the first performance of Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine (1943–44) in December 1945 and was considered a Christian composer.

  82. Barthes will make much use of this idea henceforth, especially in period of Mythologies. See, for example, “The Vaccine of the Avant-Garde,” Les Lettres nouvelles, March 1955 (OC, vol. 1, 563–65).

  83. André Siegfried (1875–1959), historian and sociologist; Pierre Emmanuel (1916–84), writer and poet.

  84. A nickname for one of the patients at the Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet sanatorium.

  85. As we have seen, Doctor Brissaud has followed Barthes’s disease since Paris.

  86. For example, like the convoy from Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet of which Barthes was part.

  87. OC, vol. 2, 254.

  88. Barthes’s mistake; there is no Thursday, December 8, 1944. It must have been Friday.

  89. A piece of the letter is missing.

  90. Illegible because the letter is damaged here.

  91. André Mosser, medical student and patient at the sanatorium.

  92. One line is missing.

  93. The pianist Vlado Perlemuter (1904–2002) fled France in 1943 because of anti-Semitic persecution and took refuge in Switzerland, where he contracted tuberculosis, from which he recovered in 1946 after the war (see the following letter).

  94. The end of the letter is missing.

  95. Barthes is alluding to the “right extrapleural pneumothorax” that he had just undergone at the Clinique Miremont in Leysin, which took place Wednesday, October 10. In a letter from Thursday, October 18, Barthes describes the aftermath of the operation: “Wednesday 10 absolutely not suffering from the operation, complete calm—Thursday, Friday: the worst of the suffering: breathlessness, erratic pulse, asphyxiaton; I thought I was done for (will tell you about that, too). Saturday: draining, relief, fatigue, discomfort, misery […].”

  96. Duet with Perlemuter took place in the second half of September (see the preceding letter).

  97. A part of the letter is missing.

  98. On Barthes’s return from the Clinique Miremont to the sanatorium in Leysin.

  99. Doctor Klein was the head doctor at the sanatorium.

  100. Cut.

  101. Sartre’s editorial appeared in the first issue of Temps modernes, published in October 1945 (see the letter to Georges Canetti from December 20, 1945). In a letter to Robert David from December 17, of which we have only a fragment, Barthes took up the question of the opposition between the analytical mind and the synthetic mind: “Try to find the first issue of the review, Les Temps modernes. There you will read a very fine manifesto by J.-P. Sartre; you will see how the analytical mind, the bourgeois mind, the mind of 89 […], and how the modern world seems to call for a more ‘totalitarian’ concept of man. It is very clear that 89, whose death echoes across the continent, will have its last stronghold in the legal mind, in the legal structures, cherished offspring of the Revolution and high priests of the analytical, bourgeois mindset. Thus, within the citadel of the Law, there must be revolutionary minds, applying revolutionary methods to the very subjects of the Law. You will be one of them, I am sure of it. One can be a revolutionary and very gentle. I really hope that, more and more, the new Revolution will be a question of work rather than of blood.”

  102. Le Sursis (once again, see the letter to George Canetti mentioned earlier).

  103. The end of the letter is missing.

  104. Tuberculosis cures required patients to be exposed to fresh air and sun.

  105. In January Barthes wrote “two pages” on Albert Camus at the request of a certain Russo, an Italian intellectual who edited a journal in Milan, about whom we have not been able to uncover any information.

  106. In a letter to Robert David from January 18, 1946, of which we have only a fragment, Barthes lays out this dialectic in detail: “Love, you see, is a kind of inverse reason, and therein lies its terrible, and terribly beautiful, nature. Love has all the characteristics of reason. It is the most logical action possible, accepting no compromise and basing its progression on a logical line of thought. In reason, logic has the power of royalty; in love, it has the power of tyranny. I cannot do otherwise than accept the panic (before a word, or silence), not through intellectual fidelity to a principle, but through the absolute pressure of an inner dialectic that for me merges with love itself.”

  107. This is the title of a famous book by Maurice Barrès (“devoted to love and pain”) published by Juven in 1903.

  108. A word is missing.

  109. The Milhits were one of the Swiss families that Barthes often visited, in addition to the Chessex and Sigg families. He also visited their daughter Heidy in Berne. Their house in Lausanne is where, we assume, Barthes wrote this letter to Robert David.

  110. A word is missing.

  111. Grasset, 1929.

  2. The First Barthes

  1. Barthes arrived in Alexandria in November 1949 and taught at the university.

  2. Charles Singevin (1905–88), whom Barthes met in Bucharest, was a philosopher and author of Essai sur l’un (Seuil, 1969) and many articles. He spent a major part of his career in French institutions abroad.

  3. Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–92), linguist and semiotician. In 1948, he had just defended his doctoral thesis on the vocabulary of fashion, under the direction of Charles Bruneau. He was then an assistant professor at the Alexandria University.

  4. That is what Barthes eventually did, by starting on a thesis in lexicology in autumn 1952 under the direction of Charles Bruneau, thanks to which he became a student researcher at CNRS and received a gr
ant.

  5. After his return from Egypt, Barthes worked at the Department of Cultural Relations for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  6. In 1947, Barthes had contemplated a training course in social services and public education.

  7. In 1956, Philippe Rebeyrol was a cultural consultant in Cairo. This is undoubtedly an allusion to the failed Anglo-French invasion in November 1956 following Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal—which Barthes calls “sinister buffoonery” here.

  8. Following the uprising of the Hungarian people against the Communist dictatorship in October 1956, Soviet troops invaded Hungary and surrounded Budapest on November 4. The repression left twenty-five hundred Hungarians dead. A large portion of the anti-Stalinist left supported the uprising. The founding of the journal Arguments by Edgar Morin, Roland Barthes, Jean Duvignaud, and Colette Audry in December 1956 marked the left’s renewed opposition to Stalinism.

  9. The uprising in Poland in June 1956, harshly repressed, produced a sort of “thaw” with Gomulka’s speech in Warsaw in October in which he strongly criticized Stalinism.

  10. See their exchanges later in the chapter.

  11. La NRF reappeared under the name of Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française in 1953, and readopted its current title in 1959.

  12. After publishing “Le Degré zéro de l’écriture” and “Faut-il tuer la grammaire?” in August and September 1947, Combat published five articles by Barthes that would constitute the core of the book to be published by Seuil, but not until 1953. The first of them was titled “Triomphe et rupture de l’écriture bourgeoise” and appeared November 9, 1950. Thus Queneau wrote to Barthes the very day the article was published. At the end of the introductory paragraph Maurice Nadeau wrote, “He [Roland Barthes] has made no secret of having to oversimplify and exaggerate his views, and he expects they will raise questions.” Queneau is cited in a list that includes “Flaubert, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, les Goncourt, les Surréalistes, Queneau, Sartre, Blanchot or Camus.”

  13. It is still a question of the manuscript for Le Degré zéro de l’écriture.