S/Z Revisited

"Twenty Years After," announces the title of this symposium with a nod to Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers. Expressed this way, what brings us together today seems a little like a "class reunion," both nostalgic and reverential. What Barthes was, what we were in those days, is caught up in the nostalgia of the anniversary and the memories that are inextricably attached to it. Anamnesis, "the voluntary recollection of past events," according to the short and abrupt dictionary definition, imposes itself right away as figure of speech. Logically, the symposium is about remembering, re-examining, rethinking, reconsidering.

My intention is to conduct this brief exercise as casual observer rather than as impassioned critic, as critic of criticism rather than as interpreter. I do not plan to revisit S/Z myself, as the title of my paper may suggest, but rather to discuss a visit made recently by others to this famous text published by Barthes in 1970, which was, as we all know, the result of two years of seminars at the "l'Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes." In 1998 Thomas Pavel and Claude Bremond published an essay about S/Z entitled De Barthes à Balzac, Fictions d'un critique, critiques d'une fiction. This book was received in France with relative indifference. To my knowledge it did not cause any special debate; the press, including Le Monde, only briefly mentioned it, and the more specialized journals, with the exception of Critique, discretely followed suit. ¹

Pavel and Bremond's essay and its reception are signs of a double phenomenon. Their book is first a belated indication of a certain hostility towards Barthes, as obvious as it is poorly disguised. Despite the many denials it offers, it denounces the disturbance brought about by Barthes, his methods, his way of questioning a text, and his "infinitely lively," to borrow an expression from Philippe Roger, way of thinking the place--the whole place--of literature. ² Pavel and Bremond declaim against this disturbance in a way that is scarcely different from what was heard twenty or thirty years ago; this time in the name of historical perspective, of the history of ideas in their relationship to the figure of the French intellectual; also in the name of proper literary analysis (text and context, plot, and the intention of the author).

The hostility towards Barthes that the essay implies was greeted, however, with polite silence when it became public. The phenomenon serves as an indication, a second indication, of the disaffection of Barthes and of literary theory in the French context. The book by Pavel and Bremond could have stirred a debate; the essay wanted to be critical; as such, it advanced polemical ways of reading which were interesting to hear; and to which it was possible to respond. But as soon as the blow--intended to finish Barthes off--was struck, it (partly) lost its force. It seems that once the gauntlet was thrown down, no one accepted the challenge. Had the authors aimed at a target that, for a long time, had only the blurred outlines of a ghost? If theory is dead, does that mean that criticism is, in its turn, dying?

This peculiar situation can be discussed in two parts. I will attempt to decipher briefly the action which Pavel and Bremond tried to accomplish. I will then come back to the reception that the book did not receive.

The title of the essay by Pavel and Bremond clearly announces that the goal is to attack what is probably the most representative of Barthes's texts; the one, in any case, where his activity as a reader and theoretician operates most distinctively. After Michelet in 1954 and On Racine in 1963, before Sade, Fourrier, Loyola in 1971 and Sollers Writer in 1979, S/Z may be considered exemplary of a method. On Racine gave rise to the polemic everyone is familiar with, the rejoinder from Raymond Picard (New Criticism or New Fraud?), and then the response...