Album: inédits, correspondances et varia by Roland Barthes (review)

This collection, consisting predominantly of Barthes’s letters to a large number of acquaintances, contains many individual points of interest. The title alludes to the Barthesian concept of the ‘Album’ (developed from Mallarmé) as a composite œuvre unified by ‘une structure fondée sur la nature des choses’ (La Préparation du roman (Paris: Seuil, 2003), p. 250). Accordingly, Éric Marty presents the collection as encompassing ‘toute une vie’, or ‘une part invisible’ of Barthes’s life, while aiming to evoke a sense of ‘temps retrouvé’ (p. 7). Unfortunately, the work as a whole suffers from these editorial ambitions. Despite the broadly chronological organization of the volume, its unity fails to transpire owing to the incomplete nature of the correspondence (as Marty acknowledges) and the tenuous relevance of some of the inédits. The more serious problem, at least for scholars, is that Marty often neglects to specify the context from which he has drawn his material, and the criteria for his selection in composing his ‘cartographie’ (p. 7). The most egregious example is the inclusion of ‘une vingtaine de fiches, choisies un peu au hasard’ (p. 372), all pertaining to Barthes’s late project for a novelistic Vita Nova: these notes are of great importance for our understanding of this part of Barthes’s work, and Marty comments on the new perspectives they offer, but any critical use of them is severely restricted by the lack of appropriate editorial apparatus. Notwithstanding these problems with the ensemble, most Barthesians will find something of value. The documents relating to the father’s death in a naval battle, and the letters leading up to Barthes’s emergence from the sanatorium, complement Tiphaine Samoyault’s account of his early life in her recent biography (Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 2015); reviewed in French Studies, 69.4 (2015), 554–55). Much of the correspondence is banal, with meatier topics frequently deferred for discussion in person (‘je vous raconterai tout cela’, p. 181), but it nonetheless offers a portrait of Barthes’s working life, always ‘chargé’ and caught between demands for articles and prefaces from all sides. An index allows readers to find discussion of particular works and writers, but the highlights in this regard are the letters to Philippe Rebeyrol on La Chambre claire, to Robert Voisin on theatre in the 1950s, and the correspondence (in both directions) with Maurice Pinguet on L’Empire des signes. A more sentimental vein of writing can be seen in the letters to Renaud Camus, Antoine Compagnon, and Hervé Guibert (these contribute to the ‘légende littéraire’ concerning Barthes and Guibert, p. 359). Some of the inédits are of principally biographical interest, such as the material from Barthes’s time in Romania, but three texts in particular warrant close critical attention (aside from the notes for the Vita Nova mentioned above): ‘L’Avenir de la rhétorique’ (from 1946), ‘Valéry et la rhétorique’ (1965–66), and ‘Sur sept phrases de Bouvard et Pécuchet’ (1975). While the volume is characterized overall by the enthusiastic rolandisme accompanying Barthes’s centenary year, it makes a useful contribution to the process of publishing Barthes’s remaining writings and teaching, and demonstrates that this editorial process is still far from complete.