1972: Appearance of Nouveaux Essais critiques, preceded by the reissue of Le Degré zéro de l’écriture. Meets Tony Duvert in February and Jean-Louis Bouttes in April. Shooting of the short film Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (six minutes, thirty seconds) by Jacques Scandelari and André Téchiné, produced by Pathé. Writes Le Plaisir du texte in the summer, which will appear in the Tel Quel collection in 1973.
1973: Supports Tony Duvert’s book Paysage de fantaisie for the Médicis Prize, for which he has just served as judge. Teaches classes in Paris broadcast from New York University. Meets and becomes friends with Patrick Mauriès. Makes friends with Christian Prigent. Also meets Frédéric Berthet during a conference in Lyon in January.
1974: Plays the role of the narrator in a work by André Boucourechliev, Thrène, recorded January 19. In March becomes friends with Renaud Camus. Travels in China with Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, François Wahl, and Marcelin Pleynet from April 11 to May 4. Publishes “Alors, la Chine?” in Le Monde on May 24, a piece that will be severely criticized. Begins his seminar on the “lover’s discourse” which he will continue the following year.
1975: Seminar on Bouvard et Pécuchet at the Paris 7 University in spring. Meets Cy Twombly on May 25 through the intermediary of Yvon Lambert. Writes on this artist in September–October of the same year. Becomes friends with Antoine Compagnon. Publication of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Begins analysis with Jacques Lacan on June 29, which he breaks off after three sessions. Begins piano lessons with his friend André Boucourechliev.
1976: Elected professor at the College de France, March 14, as proposed by Michel Foucault, for the chair of “Literary Semiology.”
1977: Barthes gives his inaugural lecture at the College de France on January 7. Meets Hervé Guibert in early February, and then Yann Lemée, the future Yann Andréa, in May. Cerisy Colloquium titled “Prétexte Roland Barthes” led by Antoine Compagnon, June 22–29. Publication of Fragments d’un discours amoureux in the month of March. Returns to the question of photography already broached in the 1960s with texts on Richard Avedon, Daniel Boudinet, Bernard Faucon, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others. Death of Barthes’s mother on October 25. Begins his “Journal de deuil.”
1978: In February, Barthes participates in musical analysis seminar (“Le Temps musical”) with Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, directed by Pierre Boulez. In April, plan for a literary conversion, plan for a novel. In autumn Barthes begins his course “La Préparation du roman,” which he will continue in the year 1979–80. In summer Barthes plays the role of William Thackeray in the film by André Téchiné Les Soeurs Brontë, released in 1979. Begins the “Chronique” in December, which he will publish each week in Le Nouvel Observateur; abandons it in March 1979.
1979: Second encounter with Cy Twombly in the month of April. Appearance of Sollers écrivain. From late August until December Barthes makes a series of sketches of plans for the future work “Vita Nova.” Writes a preface for Tricks by Renaud Camus. Meets Gilles Châtelet in October.
1980: Appearance of La Chambre claire. On January 27 goes to Bologna to give a short speech at an award ceremony for his friend Michelangelo Antonioni. Plans to stay in Venice for the Pop Art exhibition scheduled to open March 22. On February 25, Barthes is hit by a van while crossing the street in front of the Collège de France. Dies on March 26 in La Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital.
1
From Adolescence to the Romance of the Sanatorium
1932–46
1. Roland Barthes to Philippe Rebeyrol (IMEC)
The relationship between Philippe Rebeyrol (1917–2013) and Roland Barthes is quite exceptional in Barthes’s history since, as the selection of letters offered here shows, their correspondence extends from adolescence, from the 1931–32 school year when they were both in the second level at the Louis-le-Grand Lycée, to the time of Barthes’s death when Rebeyrol was the French ambassador in Athens.
We are only publishing a small number of the letters from Barthes to Rebeyrol, which are housed at the IMEC (Rebeyrol’s letters have not been found). The first one dates from August 1932, the last one from March 25, 1979 (in which Roland Barthes cancels his plans to visit Tunis as the invited guest of Rebeyrol, who was the French ambassador there, because he wants to write the book that has not yet been titled La Chambre claire). Admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1936, graduating with a history degree in 1941, Philippe Rebeyrol became a diplomat after the war. He was of great help to Roland Barthes during his return from the Leysin sanatorium. In addition to his significant diplomatic career, Philippe Rebeyrol maintained his intellectual life as well, as is clear from the many texts that he wrote on Baudelaire, Manet, and Spinoza, some of which still remain unpublished.
* * *
[Bayonne,] August 13, 1932
My dear friend,
I was waiting to be completely settled here in Bayonne before writing to you. That happened quite some time ago now, since I left Paris very soon after you did, that memorable July 13 (Speeches, E*** Prize, letter from the Prince of Conti to Molière, Goodbyes, etc.)1 If I haven’t written to you sooner, it’s because, first of all, I lead a very busy life, and then because I’m afraid I’ll bore you and remind you of your bad comrade from a bad past. I have decided to, nevertheless, because I hope that you will answer me and tell me what has become of you, what you’re doing and thinking about (I don’t want to pry). As for me, I’m in the process of becoming an ascetic; I read very erudite things, I educate myself, I meditate. Which, in short, makes me a decidedly boring fellow. As for what I’m doing, I do many things: I read (not so bad). I play music and—I am very proud of this—I’m learning Harmony (which is even more difficult than Math). I also play a little bridge but I am really very bad at it. For me, the ideal hands are the ones where I’m the dummy. Finally, I walk a bit along the coast, and I’m hoping to spend a few days in Spain, if the good weather holds. As for what I’m thinking about, it’s simple, I am always thinking about the same things. Often it’s politics, but I have no one to talk to. Nevertheless I’m trying to convert my grandmother, who reads Le Figaro, to Socialism. She has already confessed that she would prefer revolution to war. Of course she does not know that I’m immersed in Jaurès (I hope that doesn’t compromise him).
I have not abandoned my literary loves, which are—as you know—some Mallarmé and much Valéry. You absolutely must listen to the Prelude à l’après-midi d’un faune by Debussy while reading Mallarmé’s eclogue at the same time: it’s perfect. I will not go on too long about it, because I don’t know if you have the same admiring and enthusiastic feelings toward Valéry. Maybe you have found another star that outshines Narcissus.2
In which case, let me know, we can debate it on the sidewalk of the Rue de Rennes. However, I think the real truth is that you are hardly thinking of all this during vacation, and you’re right. But I’m a fussy old man who, when he has a new craze, wants to tell everyone about it and you would be surprised if I could (I employ a language against purism, you remember) write a letter without mentioning Jean Jaurès and Valéry. With regard to poetry, and at the risk of inviting your wrath, I hope that you’re writing it again and that you would like to share it with me. You know, I do not say this with any irony; I am speaking very seriously. Besides, we have agreed once and for all, I believe, that being in accord on this subject, we can speak of it quite freely and frankly.
Excuse my three pages, my running on, my egoism. But you must read between the lines that I think of you often and I hope for your news very shortly. And if you need inspiration in order to write to me, may it arrive soon. Anatole France says that the beginning of the school year reunites students who have much to tell one another.a3 Will that be the case for all of us? I hope so, and also hope that we might arrange to get to know each other a little better than just during breaks and on the Rue de Vaugirard. Don’t you agree?
&nb
sp; My dear friend, I’ll close now. My regards to your parents, please, and to you, my very affectionate thoughts.
Barthes
I received two letter, each as kind as the other, from Oaulid and Huerre. Two good friends (along with others) whom I am happy to know.4
Allées Paulmy
Bayonne
* * *
[Bayonne,] August 30, 1932
My dear friend,
Let me congratulate you on having defended the passion of the great poet. I doubt that you convinced your interlocutors because interlocutors are never convinced. But if that’s how it is, it doesn’t matter; it’s enough if only the initiated are never disappointed. And if I had needed some kind of initiative to fathom Valéry, I believe your argument would have provided it for me. I understand you very well: Valéry’s great charm is how, in the work of inquiry, he unites the reader’s thought to his own, in such a way that the thought actually comes alive only if the reader contributes his share. If he does not form this bond, this communion of ideas and feeling, Valéry remains dead to him, incomprehensible, snobbish (when someone doesn’t please you, he is a snob or poseur). I don’t want to say that we are inspired by the gods in understanding (since our rich French language has only this word to express the idea), in understanding, I say, Valéry, but he awakens in us something very poetic, very new, and very beautiful; can we accuse him of obscurantism? Sensible understanding is no longer, I think, the supreme sensation of happiness felt by man. I have the intuition that there is something beyond. I have just today read an article—maybe you’ve read it as well—on Valéry and his origins; on his mother’s side, he comes from an old Genoese family. One of his ancestors played an important role in the history of Genoa. His father was Corsican. I knew that Valéry had lived in and loved Genoa, but truly it seems to me that his poems are a thousand miles from the Italian spirit.
You ask me what I’m reading and what I think of Jean Jaurès. I might have a hard time not getting carried away. Until today, I was a socialist—very pretentious for a boy of sixteen—partly as a way to contradict the whole reactionary, nationalist clan. Having read Jaurès, it is impossible to maintain a lukewarm position, the middle course so dear to the French. Jaurès makes socialism an expression of such magnitude, such power and truth, almost of such sanctity, that one cannot resist it (as for me, I had no intention of resisting it). Reading the works of Jaurès, we see that he answers—having anticipated them—all the objections—the poor objections that, eighteen years after his death, and because of his death, miserable, vicious journalists are going to raise against the sincerity, integrity, and nobility of socialism as he defined it. Blum’s socialism is, for that matter, fairly far removed from Jaurès’s; that is what I presented when, in our school’s government, I established a distinction between SFIO and Socialiste Français.5 But probing more deeply, we see that in Jaurès’s work, it is much less a matter of politics than of humanity, which is why it’s so admirable; everything he says is wise, noble, humane, and, above all, good.b So his “Discourse à la Jeunesse” on peace is a masterwork of eloquence and emotion. Also wonderful are the pages he wrote in four days of war (and his death); they clarify remarkably the attitude of the socialists in that period, so discredited by a hateful spirit that exploits the misfortunes of a people and the goodness of a man. Nevertheless I will admit to you that, if one were to be frank and not daunted by a few small moral difficulties, Jaurès-the-conciliator is very difficult—impossible—to reconcile on one particular subject. If one has the courage it takes, this creates one of those small spiritual crises whose absence we deplore in some among us. But let’s save that for our future conversations (because I hope there will be some). So I’m reading a fairly thick collection of Jaurès’s selected writings.6 You know that Jaurès wrote hardly any books (aside from a Histoire de la révolution, I believe).7 L’Armée nouvelle, which makes up very sizable volumes, is simply collected articles from L’Humanité.8 But the book I’m reading is quite well done and I do not need to tell you it’s at your disposal. Because you will like Jaurès (I think—all political considerations aside—because even at his best, Herriot is very far from Jaurès).9 He fills me with enthusiasm and now I feel that I admire him, him and the socialism he fashioned—and understand it very profoundly. Besides he was a brilliant Normalian and that is something we cannot help but admire.
I’m reading a few works on ancient Greece and especially on music in the Greek language; I have made some surprising discoveries. I admire you for your erudite readings. As for me, I’m still reading Anatole France, La Vie littéraire (where there is the famous article on the Normalian mind), Le Vie en fleur, Thaïs, and I reread L’Île [des] pingouins and the Contes de Jacques Tournebroche.10 I have also reread nearly all of Racine’s plays, who is to me as Voltaire is to you (am I wrong?). I reread L’Introduction à la vie dévote; it’s not as boring as I thought. Believe it or not, I have taken a liking to Baudelaire (but not to make Valéry jealous). And last, a writer I must tell you about is Marcel Proust. First let me tell you I like him, to avoid ambiguities. Many people find him boring because his sentences are very long. Proust is at heart a prose poet, which is to say, from a simple prosaic act, he analyzes all the sensations and memories that this act awakens in him, as an observer might study all the successive circles emanating from a stone thrown into water. He makes this analysis with much feeling, sadness, sometimes with spirit; there are descriptions of the life in the provinces (in Du Côte de chez Swann) that—I assure you, I who am there—are startlingly true. That whole part of his work is very interesting and touching to me. I liked the second volume less, which contains the actual affair, and for which I think I’m a little too young.11 A final word, you must not be surprised at failing to find the correspondence between Mallarmé’s poem and Debussy’s music, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. I simply wanted to say that Debussy’s work, which is foremost an evocation of Mallarmé’s poetry, illuminates it, in its entirety, with much art. Besides, as you say, the work of Debussy is very beautiful, and so this true bond appears between Music and Poetry. Speaking of music and poetry, the other night in the casino in Biarritz I saw a Spanish dancer—La Tersina—who completely thrilled me.12 I rank her, for dance, with my great gods of music and poetry: Beethoven and Valéry.
My dear friend, I must apologize again for my excessively long letter and my inveterate egoism; I only talk about myself. Nonetheless I wish you all good things. Write to me, please, as you were willing to do this first time, because, if I haven’t already said so, your letter made me infinitely happy.
In waiting for your response, please accept, my dear friend, the assurance of my sincere friendship.
R. Barthes
While writing to you, I have received two books that I will thus add to the readings I’ve mentioned: two works translated from Russian, De la dignité du christianisme et de l’indignité des chrétiens and Le Christianisme et la lutte des classes.13
* * *
Bayonne, January 1, 1934
My very dear friend,
Your letter was as welcome as ever, and excuse me for not having answered it immediately. I’m happy to know that far, far from Paris, you have once again become the physical body that, before all else, we are (this is an idea developed in the first part of Diodore ou la journée antique).14
But let’s take a look at the ideas your letter suggested to me:
Despite the fact that I’m in Bayonne, I am no longer thinking about my novel at all.15 I am absolutely sure that I will not continue with it; I’ve made that decision and my reasons are many. First, there is too much that pleases me about my life here, the sweet pleasures of this house where I’m pampered like a true cloistered Anatole France, for my potential novel to be colored with the same bitterness, the same acerbic rancor that I may have imagined a few months ago.16 At my age, one does not yet say, “I am getting older,” but finally one has to admit that we evolve and our virile indignation finds objects de
eper than the turpitudes of a certain social class. I mean that now my grandmother’s stories, told with much spirit, amuse me and disarm my anger.17 That is, I think, the practical reason. The theoretical reason is that, personally, if I had to write something, that something would always strive to be within the framework, within the “tonality” of Art, whereas the novel is, by definition, an antiartistic genre. Form is basically secondary to it and psychology necessarily overpowers aesthetics in it. I’m not blaming the novel for this, let me add; everything has its place. But I myself seem to have a certain concept of the literary work of art that still remains unconfirmed. I tried to give an example of it in “La Journée antique.”18 Sadly, it’s childish, already outdated, and unfinished. You can read it anyway, if you’d like. Thus, for the moment, I have only a few projects: I’m in the process of composing a light divertissement for piano, which I will play for you, if you’d like.19 Then I want to write a sonata. But what would make me especially happy is if you would write me something that I can put to music. Accept, don’t duck out of it, you are more than capable of it; and if you shrink from extracurricular intellectual endeavors, to whom can I turn, I ask you? So think about it, please, and we’ll talk about it as soon as school starts again; I would really like to attempt an actual intellectual partnership between us.
You see, for the moment, I’m taken up with music; nonetheless I’m thinking of (which is to say, I would like to be) writing something on Art, which, in my mind, I used to called “The Birth of Orpheus.” But the greatest temptation for me is to address my famous question—the division of Christian and Pagan. I must bore you with this refrain. Imagine, after being all on fire over paganism because of reading Nietzsche on Apollo and Dionysus, I am now caught up in the Christian wave, under the influence of Pascal, whom I’m reading.20 He is a wonderful man, and I believe that he has really captured me. I’m beginning to have deep, urgent ideas on the Christian virtues that I have often condemned. I see real grandeur and high philosophical meaning in humility (although my letter is no example of it), and humans seem to me so inane that charity seems like an act of heroism that is certainly not easily accomplished. Most of all, in Christianity I see something like the highest form of effort, of struggle. For my part, I would not advise seeking peace or consolation in it, but rather the torment that cannot be pacified, the thirst that cannot be quenched, etc. Thus, one arrives (does this make sense?) at a sort of Christian Pyrrhonism that is obviously paradoxical. Which is to say that what you say about Puritanism and Catholicism is very interesting to me; I find it very accurate. But since my heresy has bordered on indifference for some time, I have lost touch a bit with the Protestants. And certainly someone like Monod must know more about these questions than I do.21