Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts

by Roland Barthes

  36. The greek letter Phi seems to designate the sentence here.

  37. Greek name for On the Sublime by Pseudo-Longinus.

  38. Dictatum or Ars Dictaminis: a collection of Latin composition techniques adapted from ancient rhetoric between 1070 and 1250 to respond to the needs of medieval society.

  39. La Révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1974). After summarizing the main points in the “Syntax and Composition” chapter, Barthes traces Julia Kristeva’s argument step by step. Kristeva shows that the sentence is constructed like an ideological object that Mallarmé deconstructs by calling into question the predication, linearity, and normativity, and thus renewing, with the “holophrase,” this mode of expression in which the original drive arrives at the “most solid refuge of symbolic normativity: syntax.”

  40. See our note 2 on p. XXX.

  41. On this opposition, see Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973).

  42. La Somme athéologique I, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 5:204–5.

  43. Antoine Roquentin, the main character in Sartre’s La Nausée (Gallimard, 1938), is fascinated by the sight of a chestnut tree root and thus becomes aware of contingency.

  44. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet, ed. Jacques Suffel (Paris: Flammarion, 1966).

  45. The in-text citations to Fontanier are to Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 51.

  46. Gustave Flaubert, Extraits de la correspondance, or Préface à la vie d’écrivain, ed. Geneviève Bollème (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 262.

  47. Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. Bernard de Fallois (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 247.

  48. Dire et ne pas dire: Principes de sémantique linguistique (Paris: Hermann, 1972).

  49. Barthes discovered Louis Hjelmslev’s work—his Essais linguistiques were published in 1959—at the time when he was writing the mythologies, in the 1950s; see also Roland Barthes, Élements de sémiologie (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1965). While Saussure conceived of the sign as the unity of signifying and signified, Hjelmslev distinguished the form of content (thought) and the form of expression (phonic chain).

  50. In “Le monde objet” (1953), Barthes describes “the nature of classical Dutch painting, which has washed away religion only to replace it with man and his empire of things. Where once the Virgin presided over ranks of angels, man stands now, his feet upon the thousand objects of everyday life, triumphantly surrounded by his functions” (OC, vol. 2, 283).

  51. This sentence from Georges Bataille does not appear in either of the two notes on page 12 of the third volume of the Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). Nevertheless, the “sentence” comes up in the first note and this is what Bataille writes: “I speak as well, but in speaking I do not forget that speech not only will escape me, but that it does escape me” (“Preface to Madame Edwarda”).

  52. This is certainly Barthes’s slip; he must mean Flaubert here, not Mallarmé.

  53. Barthes’s notes remain inexplicit: “Diagrammatic function: emphasis through displacement of the adverb to the beginning (far from the verb), logical rupture of time and place.”

  54. In fact, post hoc, ergo propter hoc: after that, therefore because of that. The motivating force behind narrative activity is the confusion of consecutiveness and consequence, “what comes after being read in the narrative as caused by (“Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,” 1966; OC, vol. 2, 840–41).

  55. Barthes explains this allusion a few lines further on.

  56. “It seems that historical discourse involves two regular types of shifters. The first type we might call shifters of listening. This category has been observed, on the level of language, by Jakobson, under the name testimonial and under the formula CeCa1/Ca2: besides the event reported (Ce), the discourse mentions both the act of the informant (Ca1) and the speech of the “writer” who refers to it (Ca2). This shifter therefore designates all mention of sources, of testimony, all reference to a listening of the historian, collecting an elsewhere of his discourse and speaking it.” Roland Barthes, “Le discours de l’histoire,” 1967; OC, vol. 2, 1251.

  57. Barthes creates the neologism “onomothete,” no doubt evoking the “nomothete,” which he uses metaphorically (in Athens, a nomothete was a member of the legislative committee that revised laws).

  58. In “L’effet de réel” (1968), Barthes analyzes how certain concrete notations in Flaubert’s Un coeur simple (1877)—“a pile of boxes,” which is meant to avoid signification in order to directly denote the real—end up signifying realism.

  59. Moire is a very reflective silk fabric. The metaphor recurs in Barthes to designate the way meaning in a literary texts shimmers and disperses.

  60. “The and that Flaubert works magnificently is the and of movement that accompanies or signifies over the course of a description or narration the shift to a higher tension, to a more important or dramatic moment, a progression: ‘Meanwhile clouds had gathered; the tempestuous sky roused the electricity that was in the people, and they kept whirling about of their own accord with the great swaying movements of a swelling sea; and one felt that there was an incalculable force in the depths of this excited throng, and as it were, the energy of an element.’ (Éducation, 453).” Albert Thibaudet, “Le Style de Flaubert,” in Gustave Flaubert (Paris, Gallimard, 1982), 265–66.

  61. From 1974 to 1976, that is, parallel to the seminar on Bouvard et Pécuchet, Barthes devoted his seminar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to Discours amoureux, published by Seuil in 2007, from which he would draw Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977). In the postscript of this last work, titled “How This Book Is Constructed,” Barthes defines the “figure” of amorous discourse like this: “These fragments of discourse can be called figures. The word is to be understood, not in its rhetorical sense, but rather in its gymnastic or choreographic acceptation; in short, in the Greek meaning: schema is not ‘schema,’ but in a much livelier way, the body’s gesture caught in action and not contemplated in repose: the body of athletes, orators, statues: what in the straining body can be immobilized. So it is with the lover at grips with his figures: he struggles in a kind of lunatic sport, he spends himself, like an athlete; he ‘phrases,’ like an orator; he is caught, stuffed into a role, like a statue. The figure is the lover at work” (OC, vol. 5, 29).

  62. In a famous passage in L’Être et le Néant, Sartre describes the attitude of a café waiter who overplays his role and whom he presents as an example of “bad faith.” Sartre, L’Être et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pt. 1, chap. 5, section 2, “Les Conduites de mauvaise foi.”

  63. Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique: L’Avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1974).

  64. Les Malices de Plick et Plock, a black-and-white comic strip by Christophe that appeared in Le Petit Français illustré from 1893 to 1904, recounts the adventures of two gnomes who pull many pranks and have many misadventures before learning their lesson.

  65. Barthes regularly returns to Freud’s “wolf man”: the patient’s castration fantasy goes back to witnessing the “originary scene,” that is, coitus between his two parents. See, in particular, Barthes, Le Discours amoureux: Séminaire à l’École pratique des hautes études, 1974–1976, followed by Fragments d’un discours amoureux: Inédits, ed. Claude Coste (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 603.

  66. Georges Bataille, L’Oeil pineal, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).

  67. Pécuchet creates monstrous vegetables by inadvertently mixing up seedlings (Bouvard et Pécuchet, chap. 2).

  68. “Fading”: Barthes uses this English term and Lacanian concept very freely, with regard to the voice in particular. Fading is one of the figures in Fragments d’un discours amoureux: “Painful ordeal in which the loved being appears to withdraw from all contact, without such enigmatic indifference even being
directed against the amorous subject or pronounced to the advantage of anyone else, world or rival” (OC, vol. 5, 145).

  69. The whole of this book by Sartre addresses the bêtise. Barthes condenses the quotation. Sartre writes, “and who feels addressed? No one. Or rather, yes, one man. The strangest thing is that he is the audience and does not seem to realize it. It is the author himself. Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857, Bibliothèque de philosophie 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 635.

  70. Berthe, the daughter of Charles and Emma Bovary, who remains orphaned at the end of the novel.

  71. On this question, see “Proust et les noms” (1967), reprinted in Nouveaux Essais critiques in 1972.

  72. In Saint Genet: Comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), Sartre analyzes how Genet forms for himself an identity in conformity with the images that others form of him.

  73. Tableau de la France: Géographie physique, politique et morale appeared in 1875. In “Chimie de la France” (1953), Barthes offered the following commentary: “Le Tableau de la France itself, which is usually given as the precursor for geographies, is in fact the account of a chemistry experiment; the list of the provinces in it is less description than a methodical inventory of materials, necessary substances for the entirely chemical elaboration of the general nature of France. It is a bit like the list given at the beginning of a good recipe, if you will: take a little Champagne, a little Picardy, a little Normandy, Anjou, and Beauce, make them revolve around a central nucleus, the Île-de-France, absorb them in this negative pole and you will have the superlative nation of Europe: France. That is what Michelet does; once the elements are listed, described, weighed, and judged, he proposes the principle for blending them: thanks to that very specific polarity surrounding the negative center of France with a belt of marches, that is, positive (and thus incomplete) Frances, France is only a chemically infinite nation, it exists only in that void maintained by the very arrangement of its parts” (OC, vol. 1, 311).

  74. Barthes explains this term in “Comment vivre ensemble,” his first course at the Collège de France; Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble: Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens: Notes de cours et séminaires au Collège de France, 1976–77 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 109. In the southwestern France, in the Gascon patois, the word “chaouchoun” refers to a spoiled, temperamental child.

  75. In his seminar on amorous discourse, Barthes refers regularly to the work of the psychoanalyst Mélanie Klein: “Triumphalism (recognized and described by Mélanie Klein with regard to certain moments in infantile depression, which, as we know, is closely related to amorous Discourse): the Self artificially reinforces and invests in itself. Whatever happens, I always remain Myself (see Médée by Corneille)” (OC, vol. 5, 240). On “triumph,” see Mélanie Klein, Essais de psychanalyse (Paris: Payot, 1968), 349.

  76. The neologism “bathomology” recurs in Barthes’s work, and designates the plurality and gradual steps of the effects of meaning (bathmos means “degree” in Greek).

  77. The “logic of Port-Royal” commonly refers to La Logique, ou l’Art de penser by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole (tied to the Port-Royal abbey and Jansenism), published in 1662. These analyses that make language the expression of thought would serve as reference point until the mid-nineteenth century.

  78. See our note 51, p. XXX.

  79. “Et cetera. Et cetera. / Mallarmé did not like that word-gesture. He banned it. As for me, I tasted it and was surprised. The mind has no more specific response. It itself is what this interlocution makes happen. / No Etc. in nature. Total enumeration. The part for the whole does not exist in nature—The mind cannot bear repetition. It seems made for the singular. Once for all. As soon as it perceives law, monotony, it deserts.” Cahiers, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 983.

  80. This is the first sentence in Anus solaire (1927), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 81.

  81. “The later skeptics hand down five modes leading to suspension, namely these: the first based on discrepancy, the second on regress ad finitum, the third on relativity, the fourth on hypothesis, the fifth on circular reasoning.… The mode based upon regress ad finitum is that whereby we assert the thing adduced as proof of the matter proposed needs a further proof and this again another, and so on ad finitum so that the consequence is suspension as we possess no starting-point for our argument.” Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933) 1.15.99.

  82. The vessel Argo, on which Jason and his companions embarked to seek the Golden Fleece. Roland Barthes often repeats this reference. See in particular “Le vaisseau Argo” (1975): “Frequent image: that of the Argo (luminous and white) of which the Argonauts gradually replaced each piece, so that they ended up with an entirely new ship, without having to change its name or its form” (OC, vol. 4, 626). The ship and the perpetual calendar are structures that are endlessly renewed without ceasing to be themselves.

  83. “It is the story of these two fellows who copy a kind of critical encyclopedia as farce.” Gustave Flaubert, letter to Edma Roger des Genettes, August 18, 1872, in Correspondance (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 4:559.

  84. Bordas and Alpha edited encyclopedias meant for the general public. In the early 1970s, the Alpha encyclopedia published weekly installments to be bound into volumes.

  5. Exchanges

  1. OC, vol. 1, 196–202.

  2. Recherche de la base et du sommet, followed by Pauvreté et privilège, appeared that year with Gallimard in the “Espoir” series edited by Albert Camus.

  3. Barthes alludes to Char’s collection and his title with regard to New York (OC, vol. 1, 938).

  4. The dedication Char wrote in Dans la pluie giboyeuse (Gallimard, 1968) is reproduced in the images, p. xxviii.

  5. See the note regarding Michel Butor, p. XXX.

  6. Letter from December 28, 1962, see p. XXX.

  7. Michel Butor and Georges Perros, Correspondance, 1955–1978 (Nantes: Joseph K., 1996), 220.

  8. Barthes left the apartment at Place du Panthéon for the one on Rue Servandoni, where he lived until his death.

  9. Georges Perros left Rue Obeuf in the Meudon Bellevue district to go live in Saint-Malo. He would return to Meudon between 1956 and 1959, before his permanent exile to Douarnenez in Brittany.

  10. See the letter to Robert Voisin from March 1954, p. XXX.

  11. On February 26, Barthes submitted his project titled “Research on the Social Signs and Symbols in Human Relations (in the Contemporary French Domain)” and, thanks in part to enthusiastic letters of support from Fernand Braudel and Lucien Febvre, Barthes obtained a position as research assistant that lasted until 1960.

  12. Barthes went to London for a series of BBC broadcasts.

  13. The postscript to Mythologies, titled “Le Mythe, aujourd’hui.”

  14. See our note 3 in the letter to Robert Voisin from September 28, 1956, p. XXX.

  15. Georges Perros was in Douarnenez at the time.

  16. Éditions de l’Arche, where Barthes was literary advisor in 1954–55.

  17. Postcard showing a panoramic view of La Spezia.

  18. Olivier de Meslon, mentioned in a letter to Jean Cayrol from April 1956 (see p. XXX).

  19. The letter was sent from Saint-Jean-de-Luz.

  20. See the card to Michel Butor from the same time and our note 5 on Middlebury College, p. XXX.

  21. The postcard shows Long Island.

  22. Robert Voisin. Georges Perros was then staying in Brittany in Touldriz, in the region of Douarnenez. See Butor and Perros, Correspondance, 22–23.

  23. One of the prefaces for the volume of Racine’s plays for the French Book Club. Sur Racine itself did not appear until 1963.

  24. Barthes was a research assistant at the CNRS from 1955 on, but each year he had to reapply for funding.

  25. The postcard shows a Vermeer painting titled The Little Street (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1658).


  26. See the preceding letter.

  27. Barthes was then immersed in his structural research on fashion.

  28. The postcard shows a still life by Heyman Dullaert (1636–84).

  29. As we have seen, Georges Perros left Meudon, where he had lived since 1956, for Brittany. Financial reasons, as this letter indicates, explain this departure. He lived on Rue Émile-Zola in Douarnenez until summer 1960, and then, still in the same city, on Rue Anatole-France in the Richepin project.

  30. Barthes was no longer able to renew his position as research assistant at the CNRS.

  31. Barthes’s situation was resolved in January 1960 by his acceptance into the École Pratique des Hautes Études (see the letter from February 7, 1960, p. XXX).

  32. Gérard Philipe, with whom Georges Perros was very close, died November 25, 1959.

  33. On September 23, 1959, François Darbon produced Les Séquestres d’Altona at the Théâtre de la Renaissance; on October 28, Roger Blin staged Les Nègres at the Théâtre de Lutèce (world premier).

  34. The play by Armand Gatti was performed by the Théâtre National Populaire at the Théâtre Récamier, produced by Jean Vilar, October 23, 1959.

  35. Barthes had been working on a doctorate since 1955 with Georges Friedmann, at the sociology research laboratory of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, on writing style. Hence Friedmann was his thesis “advisor.”

  36. The status of “head of work” was more or less equivalent to that of research assistant. Barthes was part of the “economic and social sciences” laboratory.

  37. Barthes would publish a few articles in Les Annales, for example, in the September-October 1960 issue, the review of Histoire de la civilisation française by Georges Duby and Robert Mandrou, published in 1958 by Armand Colin (OC, vol. 1, 1059–63).

  38. The Klossowskis.

  39. See the letter from Roland Barthes to Michel Butor from February 14, 1960, p. XXX.

  40. Gaëtan Picon (1915–75), writer and art critic who worked under the direction of André Malraux, then minister of culture.

  41. This is the first time the book’s definitive title appears. It would not be published until 1967.