Barthes the Early Years 6. Writing Degree Zero (1953) the ethics of form

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1 Barthes the Early Years 6. Writing Degree Zero (1953) the ethics of form Michelet remained, with Empire of Signs, Barthes s favourite book among his own writings, and his interest in the nineteenth century historian never diminished. When he was asked to revisit Michelet to mark the centenary of his death in 1974 i, Barthes argued his continued relevance and stressed the need to read him anew. In his emphatic homage to Michelet in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1977, Barthes also recalled the key role that Michelet had played in his intellectual development: It is my joy to encounter in this place the memory or presence of authors dear to me and who teach and have taught at the Collège de France. First, of course, comes Michelet through whom, at the start of my intellectual life, I discovered the sovereign place of History in the study of man, and the power of writing ii. History and writing : these two words also lie at the heart of Writing Degree Zero, which had appeared in 1953 year and whose success had made it possible for Michelet to be published by Le Seuil. In the 1950s Le Seuil was not the major publishing house that it has since become. Gallimard, the leading publishers at the time, had been approached, but had rejected Writing Degree Zero. As was the case for the book on Michelet, the idea for Writing Degree Zero dated back to the 1940s. Barthes had first described the flat, descriptive, neutral form of expression adopted by Albert Camus in The Outsider as colourless writing in an article published in 1944 by the students review of Saint-Hilaire-de-Touvet, Existences iii. Then, having come across the concept of degree zero in the work of Danish linguist Viggo Brøndal, Barthes coined the phrase writing degree zero to refer to that particular style, and used it, to striking effect, in August 1947 as the title of his first article for Combat. Long associated with Albert Camus, Combat had been the underground Paris newspaper of the French Resistance movement and became the most respected French daily newspaper after the war. Barthes had submitted his article at the invitation of Maurice Nadeau, then editor of its literary page, whom he had met in July 1947 at the instigation of Georges Fournié, his Trotskyist friend at Leysin. While sharing a holiday with Nadeau and his family that summer, Fournié and his wife had invited Barthes for the day with the express purpose of introducing him to Nadeau. In his Memoirs iv, Nadeau describes Barthes as an attractive man with light coloured eyes and a beautiful gaze, whose reserve suggested hidden strengths and had won him over. This encounter proved decisive for Barthes. It marked the beginning of his journalistic activities a useful source of additional income and of his long-term

2 collaboration with Maurice Nadeau. He provided Barthes with an invaluable opening onto the vibrant journalistic scene of the post-war period, which enabled him to make new contacts and friends, and to contribute to the intense debate about the place of literature in post-war French society. Following the banning of all newspapers that had been complicit with the Nazi occupation, a range of newspapers and magazines committed to building a just economic order in a free society had sprung up. Barthes s first article for Combat was about Camus s The Outsider. Soon Barthes was writing articles and book reviews for other independent publications, such Esprit, and his fruitful collaboration with Nadeau continued for many years. Indeed, another four chapters of Writing Degree Zero first appeared as articles in Combat in The book was widely and favourably reviewed, and soon the phrase degree zero became common currency. Writing Degree Zero was in many respects a breakthrough, and Barthes s brilliant, eager, clear prose a revelation. Writing Degree Zero was an attempt to reconsider the issue of political commitment in literature as discussed by Jean-Paul Sartre in What Is Literature? (1948) from a Marxist point of view. v Barthes s opening chapter is significantly entitled What is writing? vi Barthes saw literature primarily as a linguistic construct and he established a clear distinction between language, style and writing (écriture). He defines language as the undivided property of all men and women, our common inheritance as social beings at a particular point in history; far from being the prerogative of writers, language consists of a set of norms, such as grammatical rules, within which the writer has to work. Style is also a given: writers have no more freedom when it comes to style than they have with language, for it is the result of a biological or biographical impulse, another reflex response involving no choice ; contrary to language, which is social, style is personal: imagery, delivery, vocabulary, spring from the body and the past of the writer ; it is made up of the kind of themes and personal obsessions that Barthes identified in Michelet s work. In contrast to both language and style, modes of writing (écriture) are presented as the only area where the writer is able to exercise choice: whereas language is a set of boundaries delineating a field of action, and style as an inner necessity, writing is an act and, as such, belongs to the realm of intention. Writing, as defined by Barthes, is where the personal meets the social; where writers commit themselves and can affirm their ethical, social and political values, hence the notion that it is an act of historical solidarity. Where Sartre conceived of written language as a transparent medium, a pure instrument in the service of ideas, and focused on the subject-matter of works of literature,

3 Barthes saw it as opaque, and placed the issue of commitment at the level of form in the broadest sense of the term, in all its material, linguistic manifestations. Where Sartre, in his discussion of the place of literature in contemporary society, had been essentially concerned with the relationship between writer and readership, Barthes focused on the act of writing as a constant struggle to cleanse literary form from past ideological associations and reinvigorate it. In a significant chapter entitled The triumph and break-up of bourgeois writing, vii Barthes charted the emergence and decline of a classical mode of writing which stood as the universal model in France until the industrial revolution and the social and political upheavals of These events confirmed the emergence of three distinct social classes still very much in evidence when Barthes was writing: the bourgeoisie (or upper middle-classes) empowered by the 1789 revolution; the petty bourgeoisie (or lower middle classes) that embodied a degraded version of bourgeois values; and finally the proletariat (or working classes). The decline of classical French writing in the mid-nineteenth century was seen by Barthes as proof that this particular type of écriture was the result of specific historical circumstances, and that it was not as self-evident, natural and inevitable as it originally claimed to be. It was not reflecting reality in the only possible way; it was emphatically moulding reality in the interests of the dominant classes the lawyers, merchants, politicians etc., with which writers readily identified and whose aspirations and self-confidence they echoed in their work. The rise of modern capitalism and the beginnings of socialism from the 1830s onwards undermined such identification, and as writers felt the need to redefine their position in relation to dominant ideology, numerous new forms of writing appeared. The political significance of the new literary works was not simply derived from their content or the authors stated political allegiances, but from their formal characteristics: Barthes saw each mode of writing as the initial act whereby the writer acknowledges or repudiates his bourgeois condition. viii In the ensuing review of the new modes of writing that had appeared in the previous hundred years, Barthes singled out the neutral, or degree zero of writing, as an ideal form. ix The use of the perfect tense, first-person narrative and essentially descriptive stance inaugurated in 1942 by The Outsider seemed to be the perfect example of what the neutral could be. It was, suggested Barthes, the very antithesis of the nineteenth-century naturalist novel, which claimed to represent the real but whose characteristics notably the choice of a linear, retrospective third-person narrative in the past historic tense from the point of view of a distant, all-knowing narrator were, in fact, the height of artificiality. Realist novels

4 could be described as reactionary in themselves because, irrespective of their content which might be overtly critical of contemporary society, they did not question conventional notions of cause and effect; they were written in such a way as to comfort the reader, thus creating a false sense of security and ultimately reinforcing the established social and political order. Even more scathing, in this respect, was Barthes s attack on the hackneyed style, laden with metaphors ( Joy sang in his muscles, his fingers danced, light and powerful, quoted Barthes) and peppered with elements of popular speech, that was practised by contemporary French communist writers in the name of social realism: unable to create forthwith a free writing, suggested Barthes, they kept alive a bourgeois writing which bourgeois writers [had] themselves condemned long ago. For him, the neutral was also distinct from attempts to practice art for art s sake that use an overwrought narrative style that plainly flaunts an aesthetic of artificiality or, in the case of poetry, disrupt poetic language to the point of disintegration. While the neutral mode of writing, as described by Barthes, aimed to dissociate itself from the habitual clichés and disengage literary language from a history to which it did not subscribe, it did not seek to escape the responsibility of form in literature. The adjectives used by Barthes to describe this ideal colourless writing freed from all bondage to predefined, ideologically tainted forms free, innocent, honest, pure, pristine, fresh bore witness to the notion of écriture as the ethics of form but inevitably pointed to its ephemeral nature. For writing as Freedom is a mere moment : soon the writer, taking his place as a classic, becomes the slavish imitator of his original creation, society demotes his writing to a mere manner and returns him a prisoner of his own myths. x Hence the tragedy of literary writing and the utopian nature of Barthes s yearning for the neutral. If Writing Degree Zero is remembered at all today, it is more often than not because of its striking title and Barthes s later achievements. Many French readers only remember it as a book on the use of the past historic tense in French literature. True, its narrow focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature limits its scope. There is also something undoubtedly dated in Barthes s copious use of the word bourgeois to refer both to the establishment and their values, and to rail against the degraded form of those values embodied in petty bourgeois ideology. Barthes himself commented in 1971 that it was simplistic on his part to label classical literature reactionary, and that even literature that is extremely conservative in its form and content is never completely reactionary. xi In the course of the same interview, he also explained that he was more comfortable with Michelet than with Writing Degree Zero because the history of writing that he was outlining in the latter was

5 modelled on a conventional view of history, later questioned by his contemporaries, notably Michel Foucault. xii At the time, however, despite his pessimistic view of how little room for manoeuvre the modern writer had to assert his freedom and political commitment, Barthes s emphasis on the material, linguistic aspect of the relationship between history and literature, and his scrutiny of how things signify, as opposed to what they signify, was breaking new ground. Until then, as Michael Moriarty points out, literary history was a history of authors and of texts, linked with contemporary events or a vague background, the relations of which to literary production were never properly theorized. xiii Not satisfied with Sartre s history of the relationship between writer and readers, and, before him, Paul Valery s history of the function of literature, Barthes went much further by showing that representing the social realities of a given period or expressing social and political views is far from being the only way for a writer to make a stand, and that form is, in the strongest possible sense, not immaterial. Subsequently, a number of Marxist thinkers did explore the relationship between ideology and literature. Curiously though, in the current debate on post-colonial literature where it would seem to be most relevant, there is hardly any trace of Writing Degree Zero s legacy. Barthes s discussion of language, style and écriture reveals concerns that will reappear time and time again in his work and can be considered as his own themes or obsessions. Nearly a quarter of a century after the publication of Writing Degree Zero, for instance, Barthes gave his second series of lectures at the Collège de France the title Le Neutre. xiv But in the short term, his concern with commitment, and the place of art in a new society, focused more closely on a collective art form contemporary theatre and the techniques of the stage where his critique of realism and his longing for unencumbered and non-alienated forms found fertile ground. Text by Mireille Ribière (July 2012) i Michelet aujourd hui (1973), Œuvres complètes, Paris, Seuil, 1994, vol. 2, p and Modernité de Michelet (1974), ibid, vol. 3, p ii Leçon (1978), translated as 'Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France' in A Roland Barthes Reader, edited with an introduciton by Susan Sontag, Vintage 1993 (2000), p iii Réflexions sur le style de L Étranger (1944), Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p

6 iv Maurice Nadeau, Un souvenir de Montmorency : Roland Barthes in Grâces leur soient rendues, Paris, Albin Michel, 1990, p v For further details about Sartre and Barthes, see Chapter 6 of Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes. Structuralism and After, London, Methuen & Co. Ltd, vi Le Degré zéro de l écriture (1953), translated as Writing Degree Zero, Jonathan Cape, 1967, p vii Ibid., p viii Ibid., p. 51. ix Ibid., p x Ibid., p. 65. xi Interview: A Conversation with Roland Barthes, Sign of the Times (1971), in The Grain of the Voice, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, p xii Ibid., p xiii Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes, Polity Press, 1991, p. 43. xiv Le Neutre, translated as The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France ( ) by Rosalind Krauss, Columbia University Press, 2005.