Writing itself

Barthe’s writing, with its prodigious variety of subjects, has finally one great subject: writing itself.

Barthes was endeavor was the quintessentially literary one: the writer organizing, under a series of doctrinal auspices, the theory of his own mind.

Barthes was an inspired, ingenious practitioner of the essay and the anti-essay — he had a resistance to long forms. Typically, his sentences are complex, comma-ridden and colon-prone, packed with densely worded entailments of ideas deployed as if these were the materials of a supple prose. It is a style of exposition, recognizably French, whose parent tradition is to be found in the tense, idiosyncratic essays published between the two world wars in the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise — a perfected version of the NRFs house style which can deliver more ideas per page while retaining the brio of that style, its acuteness of timbre. His vocabulary is large, fastidious, fearlessly mandarin. Even Barthes's less fleet, more jargon-haunted writings — most of them from the 1960s — are full of flavor; he manages to make an exuberant use of neologisms. While exuding straight-ahead energy, his prose constantly reaches for the summative formulation; it is irrepressibly aphoristic. (Indeed, one could go through Barthes's work extracting superb bits — epigrams, maxims — to make a small book, as has been done with Wilde and Proust.) Barthes's strengths as an aphorist suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the perception of structure. A method of condensed assertion by means of symmetrically counterposed terms, the aphorism displays the symmetries and complementarities of situations or ideas — their design, their shape. Like a markedly greater feeling for drawings than for paintings, a talent for aphorism is one of the signs of what could be called the formalist temperament.