In the opening pages of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, a photograph
shows the author as a young man, masked and playing in a Greek tragedy
in the court of the Sorbonne. The caption reads:
Darius, a part that had always given me terrible
stage fright, had two long declamations in which I was likely to forget
my lines: I was fascinated by the temptation of thinking about something
else. Through the tiny holes of the mask, I could see only very high
up, and very far away; while I delivered the dead king's prophecies, my
eyes came to rest on inert--free--objects and books, a window, a cornice,
a piece of the sky: they at least weren't afraid. I excoriated myself for
getting caught in this uncomfortable trap--while my voice continued its
smooth delivery, resisting the expressions I should have given it.1
Neither the emotionally engaged performer of method acting nor the knowing
subject of Brechtian theatre, the distracted performer under the mask of
Darius suffers from a wandering mind that can barely resist the transgressive
desire to disrupt the faithful rendering of the ancient text. His apparent
ability to maintain the façade (hollow as it may be) of the character
Darius, of mimesis, and more generally of the "great" Western cultural
tradition, while indulging in thoughts and desires that subvert the tragedy
in a manner that generates anxiety on his part and, if this instability
were palpable to the audience, for the spectator as well, constitutes a
cultural intervention that would be the envy of contemporary performance
art. It is not hard to imagine why Barthes includes this image, for it
evokes many recurring motifs in his writing: the mask as an arbitrary and
exterior sign of identity, desire that both generates and subverts signification,
the lack of a coherent subject or agent that exercises authority over a
text, the mixture of pleasure and fear in the vertiginous breakdown of
meaning, representation, and "literature." The photograph and its caption
invite speculation on the implications of Barthes's thought for theatre
practice and theory. Barthes, however, offers little further encouragement
in this direction. When he wrote this passage he [End Page 161]
had for nearly fifteen years all but disavowed the theatre, and the most
striking aspect of the photograph and its caption could be that in his
later career he is addressing a specific theatre performance at all.
Barthes was a fickle critic, and the object of his adulation one day
might find itself castigated the next. The case of Albert Camus is typical
in this respect; the author of L'Etranger was hailed as the founder
of a new mode of writing, or écriture, only rather suddenly
to find himself publicly responding to an acrimonious Barthes who exhibited
all the wounded tone of a spurned lover. Alain Robbe-Grillet encountered
a similar fate. Theatre seems to have also met with an abrupt if less harsh
repudiation. In 1965, Roland Barthes wrote: "I've always liked the theatre
and yet I hardly go there anymore."2
In itself, this statement does not shock for Barthes is hardly alone among
theorists and critics when he directs his attention away from an art form
that has become associated with the tastes of a bourgeois or intellectual
elite, and whose relative importance is today greatly diminished among
media and other systems of representation. At the time he made this remark
Barthes himself had already broken new ground in the study of mass culture.
His Mythologies (1957) arguably constitutes one of the founding
texts of a field--cultural studies--that no longer privileges literature,
dramatic or otherwise, as the nec plus ultra of cultural production,
and in which the umbrella buzzword "performance" often relegates more conventional
theatre to a marginal, conservative, and frequently ignored corner of the
discussion.3
When situated in the chronology of Barthes's œuvre, however, this repudiation
of theatre is more noteworthy and marks a change in the trajectory of his
career. Barthes's university studies were on ancient Greek theatre--hence
his participation in the production at the Sorbonne--and through his prolific
theatre criticism of the 1950s he gained notoriety by using the journal
Théâtre
populaire, of which he was both a frequent contributor and co-editor,
as a pulpit to issue an impassioned defense of Brecht in the face of skeptical
French criticism. Barthes saw the stage as a necessary and powerful force
in French society, one that bourgeois taste and money had tamed to a flaccid,
ideologically insidious ritual of classist self-congratulation. A select
few of his articles on this subject appear in his Critical Essays
(1964). A review of his early writings in their entirety reveals the extent
to which theatre dominated his critical output in the 1950s, especially
in the years immediately following the publication of Writing Degree
Zero (1953). His polemic reviews and commentaries on theatre outnumber,
for example, the short texts that would eventually constitute the more
well-known Mythologies.4
Barthes divided his career into existential/Marxist, structuralist/semiological,
poststructuralist/deconstruction, and "nihilist" moments.5
Although somewhat arbitrary, these divisions prove meaningful for a discussion
of his tenure as a theatre critic, [End Page 162] which coincides
neatly with the duration of the earliest period. Critical evaluations of
the successive "phases" (Barthes's term) and their relative importance
have historically fallen into two opposed camps. Some critics view his
structuralism as his most important contribution to literary and cultural
studies, while more recent ones generally hail his enigmatic later writings
as seminal texts in poststructuralist theory and, sharing Barthes's own
view that his earlier interest in a literary science of signs and signification
was a "delirium" from which he fortunately recovered, take a greater interest
in Roland Barthes,
Camera Lucida (1980) or the posthumous
Incidents
(1987) than in On Racine (1963) and Elements of Semiology
(1964).6
Whichever position they profess, scholars in both camps generally grant
little more than a cursory account of the interest in theatre so evident
in his early texts. Ironically perhaps, Barthes himself fueled the trend
to overlook these writings. At the time of the structuralist quarrel that
propelled him to international intellectual stardom, Barthes had already
ceased to write about theatrical performance. The fact that he himself
never drew out the implications of his later, more widely disseminated
structuralist and poststructuralist thought for theatre practice could
explain why his work on theatre remains little more than a fait divers
in the monographs and biographies on his life and writings.7
Even given the episodic nature of his career, Barthes's repudiation
of theatre remains something of a mystery. Why did he abruptly turn his
critical attentions elsewhere after advocating for so many years a responsible
theatre that could shake the yoke of bourgeois values and then finding
such a theatre in Brecht's Berliner Ensemble during its visits to Paris
between 1954 and 1956? The recent publication of his complete works has
facilitated an exhaustive review of his writings on theatre, and a few
critics have ventured explanations for his disavowal. Andy Stafford traces
Barthes's association with
Théâtre populaire, his shifting
opinions of Jean Vilar's Théâtre national populaire
(T.N.P.), the discovery of Brecht, and finally his disillusionment not
only with French efforts to forge a truly popular theatre for the masses
but with militant activism of any sort. Stafford argues that the tension
between a "Trotskyian cynicism towards popular culture" and a "typically
Communist Party cultural populism" confounded Barthes's impatient call
for a viable popular theatre, the very possibility of which he soon began
to question. He concludes that Barthes's exasperation [End Page 163]
with mass culture, so evident in the Mythologies, drove him to the
more esoteric structuralist enterprise of the early 1960s.8
Philipe Roger similarly suggests that Barthes championed an idiosyncratic
vision of a truly popular theatre that he would subsequently deem impossible.9
Where Stafford contends that André Malraux's theatre reform of 1959
played into the hands of bourgeois culture and further alienated Barthes,
Roger suggests that through the establishment of theatres and Maisons
de la culture throughout France, Malraux--minister of culture under
DeGaulle--actually realized a truly popular theatre, a disturbing success
that impelled Barthes's silence lest he find himself praising the initiatives
of a regime he reviled. Despite their differences, both critics agree that
after 1960 Barthes's interest in theatre disappears along with his conflicted
Marxist leanings, and consider his repudiation of the stage a function
of this shift in his thought.
It would be hard to dispute that Barthes had a love/hate relationship
with mass culture--the Mythologies betray a curious mix of fascination
and distaste--and his cantankerous theatre commentaries leave little doubt
that he was thoroughly fed up with the state of French theatre as early
as 1955. It is nonetheless unclear why, alone among systems of representation,
theatre is inextricably linked to Barthes's failed reconciliation of his
developing theories with a Sartrean Marxism, and that the disillusionment
with one entails the rejection of the other. Barthes frequently expressed
a dislike of cinema, photography, and literature on grounds similar to
those that kindled his invectives against French theatre, a fact that did
not prevent him from exploring these media from different theoretical perspectives
throughout his long career. Far from precluding an analysis of theatre,
the shift from an existentialist/Marxist analysis to a purportedly scientific
semiology would more logically have opened new critical perspectives on
theatre as a signifying system. Theatre's "density of signs," to use a
phrase Barthes coined in 1954, had already provided a rich field of inquiry
for the theorists of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Barthes's predecessors
in the study of signs and signification. Furthermore, these arguments cannot
explain the sustained absence of live performance in Barthes's later career,
most remarkably in his failure to relate "the body," le corps, a
key theoretical trope of his later phases, to the study of French theatre
productions. Why, when he examined the poststructuralist body's inflection
in literary texts, painting, photography, music and other media, did he
use the word "theatrical" either as an epithet, a synonym for the "hysterical"
representations he loathed, or else in a more general sense, as so many
contemporary critics do, as a metaphor for theatre that denies live performance
any specificity? The fact that the body, both as a figure and literally
qua
body, reappeared with force and preoccupied Barthes while theatre, when
not scorned, lingered in the margins of his work, makes the question of
his sudden dislike all the more perplexing.
In pondering Barthes's fraught relationship to theatre, it is illuminating
to broaden the inquiry from a narrow focus on his flirtation with Marxism
and to consider his early writings in terms of the perennially thorny question
of the body and its unsettling "presence." The body on stage clearly both
fascinates and vexes Barthes, and generates a profound ambivalence that
pervades his early articles and essays on [End Page 164] theatre
and other topics. Two distinct bodies compete in Barthes's early writings:
a clearly intelligible body-as-sign and a decidedly less articulate one
that both intrigues and torments him. While Barthes elsewhere cultivates
ambivalence to enhance his theoretical terms--the deliberately unclear
distinction between plaisir and jouissance, for example--the
studied ambivalence of this instability is notably lacking in his comments
on theatre which seem to betray genuine misgivings. Could Barthes's conflicted
appraisal of the performing body be construed as a provocatively unstable
term? What caveats attend this potential? What comment can be gleaned from
the performing bodies that weave in and out of his writings?
The body as écriture
Unease with the body haunts Barthes from his earliest published writings,
including the essays collected in Writing Degree Zero in which he
critiques the ideal for committed literature Sartre had put forth in
What
is Literature? Where Sartre located engagement in a clarity
of expression through prose, Barthes sees the responsibility of the writer
in the choice of writing, écriture, a gesture that in itself
signifies more heavily than the denotative content of a given text. Barthes
anticipates the canon debate of the 1980s when he maintains that the discourse
of "literature" also indicates an historical situation that an alibi of
eternal or essential value obscures. Less convinced than Sartre of the
individual's autonomy, Barthes carefully observes the limits on this freedom
of choice by distinguishing between language, style, and writing. Language
serves as a horizon within which the author must navigate, a "reflex response,"
a limit which a single author is free neither to set nor to choose. Style
likewise offers no choice to a writer, but differs from language in that
the writer's individual experience determines it, rather than an externally
imposed and shared cultural situation. It is a "personal and secret mythology,"
a "form without destination," the "closeted memory" that, as does language,
situates the author within a fixed set of coordinates from which to write
and demands no responsibility on the part of the writing subject.10
Powerless against these two invariable axes, only in writing can the author
exercise a narrow freedom and écriture marks the writer's
sole possibility for commitment. Still following Sartre in his idiosyncratic
way by advocating choice and responsibility, albeit limited, Barthes sets
language and style aside to address the possibilities and pitfalls of écriture.
The brief and often overlooked comments on style, however, sketch a
startling portrait of the body's role in the generation of meaning. Style
fascinates Barthes for reasons other than the measured arguments that characterize
his discussion of écriture. Style springs from the "hidden,
secret flesh" of the writer's body, forming a second horizon of possibilities
"whose frame of reference is biological, not historical" (10-11). Using
vocabulary worthy of an alchemist, Barthes continues:
Style is always a secret; but the occult aspect
of its implications does not arise from the mobile and ever-provisional
nature of language; its secret is recollection locked within the body of
the writer . . . what stands firmly and deeply beneath style . . . are
fragments of a reality entirely alien to language. The miracle of this
transmutation makes style a kind of supra-literary operation which carries
man to the threshold of power and magic . . . . It is [End Page 165]
the Authority of style, that is, the entirely free relationship between
language and its fleshly double, which places the writing above History
as the freshness of Innocence.
[12-13]
Though Barthes does not elaborate these thoughts on style at any length,
they are surprising in the context of his greater argument and far more
than a casual propadeutic aside. Style exceeds the apparent totality of
history, language, ideology, and the social--and those familiar with his
later work will perhaps be surprised to find in Writing Degree Zero
a passage that would seem more at home in The Pleasure of the Text,
"The Grain of the Voice," and other later essays.
The corporeally manifested "zero degree" of meaning does not sit well
with the Marxist and existentialist leanings Barthes still held at this
period and that motivate the greater discussion of Writing Degree Zero.
If it presages the poststructuralist dissemination of the subject, in the
intellectual climate of 1953 the body of style evokes more the romantic
notion of an autonomous Cartesian selfhood. Barthes's fascination with
the "secret flesh" of style generates a palpable ambivalence:
But when the poetic language radically questions
nature by virtue of its very structure, without any resort to the content
of the discourse and without falling back on some ideology, there is no
mode of writing left, there are only styles, thanks to which man turns
his back on society and confronts the world of objects without going through
any of the forms of History or of social life.
[51-52]
Stripped of the insidious myth of literature, the "degree zero" paradoxically
constitutes both writing's disappearance and its ideal. If Barthes longs
for "innocence," "neutrality," and "transparency," in the next breath he
discounts such writing as comprised of "only styles," exempt from meaning,
extracted from history, and situated outside of the social arena of politics
and ethics. Barthes also suspects that the zero degree might be an unattainable
goal, that even the purest "white writing" will all too soon acquire an
ideological shadow as a new myth of writing or a new literary mannerism.
He notes that at the very moment of its appearance Camus's L'Etranger
already runs this risk, and herein lies Barthes's most pointed answer to
Sartre's faith in the clarity of prose unencumbered with literary or poetic
ornament. Pursuing his attempt to reconcile Sartrean commitment with a
Marxist critique of bourgeois ideology, Barthes brackets off the "occult,"
"magical," "miraculous" corporeality that drew his rhapsodic and nearly
religious praise to explore the problems that écriture poses
for a committed writer.
The desire to engage an historical situation leads Barthes to invoke
a second and very different body, one that holds no secrets and performs
no magic. Three articles published the same year as Writing Degree Zero
all vindicate a tidily semiotized body specifically in the context of live
performance. In "Pouvoirs de la tragédie antique" ("Powers of Ancient
Tragedy"), his first contribution to Théâtre populaire,
Barthes appreciates in particular how the ancient Greeks' use of masks
exteriorizes identity, establishing the character's words and deeds as
a function of a position in a specific historical moment. Under the intelligible
mask, there is no secret excess analagous to a writer's style, "no abyss
in which an ineffable part of being could take refuge."11[End
Page 166] Contemporary theatre, Barthes laments, has abdicated the
"liberated collective unrest" that such exteriority incites, and that in
the middle of the twentieth century only sporting events continue to achieve.
In an early expression of his interest in Saussure, Barthes writes that
the issue at hand is a distinctly semiological one:
Take professional wrestling: what do you read?
Signs
of emotion, more than emotion itself. The combatants exhibit the state
of their souls (pain, joy, rage, vengeance, normality), all their expressions
are chosen to present to the masses an immediate and exhaustive reading
of their motives. Here there is not the ambiguity of life.
[219, my emphasis]
Advocating a performance free of "life," Barthes challenges the importance
and very existence of a performer's "liveness" or "presence" when he maintains
that even an unmasked performer (the wrestler) can be an écriture,
unencumbered by an occult or otherwise troubling excess.
In "The World of Wrestling" and "Folies-Bergère," the first two
of the many short articles on popular culture he began publishing in 1953,
Barthes further asserts that the performing body can achieve a pure intelligibility.
With a marked absence of the disdain that characterizes many of the later
mythologies, Barthes relishes the "professional" wrestling matches, "the
most intelligible of spectacles."12
The body, he recognizes, constitutes the key to the spectacle's success,
and he admires the wrestler's ability to incarnate an outrageous, over-the-top
and, most importantly, immediately readable persona at the expense
of interior motivation and psychology. The body's transformation, furthermore,
is complete: "Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic
meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification,
rounded like a nature."13
In a similar vein, a "complete intention of exteriority" characterizes
the stylized signs of femininity inscribed on the Folies-Bergère
showgirls.14
In the unclothed human body, the Judeo-Christian state of pure "naturalness,"
Barthes sees neither nature nor truth, but a system at work. The sight
of the showgirls is nothing less than epiphanic: "I have cleared up the
most tenacious mystery of existence, that of the other's body. This face
which normally is nothing more than present, is here at last manifested
to me as a product" (199, my emphasis). The showgirls circulate both as
a commodity in an economy of exchange (the seats at the Folies-Bergère
are expensive and the spectators demand a product in return for their money)
and as clearly intelligible signs in a system of gendered codes. Both wrestling
and the Folies-Bergère cleanse the body of any parasitic remainder
that would attest to something, or more significantly to someone, behind
the "mask" of a purely readable body.
In many of the following mythologies Barthes further ascertains a semiotically
pure corporeality unencumbered by "mystic" or "secret" remainders. The
men of ancient Rome portrayed in Hollywood films, for example, are riddled
with internal conflict. How does the spectator know this? Not by apprehending
the character's interior psychology but by viewing a simple exterior sign:
the beads of sweat on their [End Page 167] foreheads. In another
example, l'Abbé Pierre's face seems to exude a goodness that wells
from within, testifying even to the manifestation of a divine presence
on earth in this tireless crusader against homelessness but which is nothing
more than a montage of signs borrowed from a cultural code of saintliness.
The myth "Striptease" further develops the arguments of "Folies-Bergère":
as the stripper progressively peels off her clothes the conventions of
the dance and the signs of eroticism reclothe her body under a code of
nudity so opaque in its familiarity that it effectively obscures any real
nakedness. Under the layers of cultural codes exists no "reality foreign
to language," no "hidden, secret flesh." Barthes derides the tendencies
of his much reviled petit-bourgeois public to mistake this code
as true or real, to misrecognize these ideologically determined masks of
identity as immutable nature. The harsh tone of many of these commentaries
is absent in "The World of Wrestling" and muted in "Folies-Bergère,"
spectacles that unabashedly sacrifice truth to intelligibility and that
do not purport to pass artifice and convention as true or real.
French theatre constituted a consummate and particularly galling myth,
and Barthes's first theatre reviews and criticism echo the urgent call
for demystification. In post-war France, Barthes laments, one goes to the
theatre not to experience collectively "man mired in the tyranny of a barbaric
religion or inhuman civic law,"15
but to watch complacently in luxurious surroundings of velvet and gilt
the tribulations of adulterers and broken families, all clothed in the
latest fashions and circulating in elegantly appointed salons. The bourgeois
spectator finds a "soothing mythology, just right for reassuring one's
fears or to kill off one's remorse,"16
and leaves the theatre unflustered, confident that the price of the ticket
was worth both the measure of high culture received and, perhaps more importantly,
the spectacle of lavish costumes, sumptuous décor, and arduous over-acting,
all in the name of realism. In place of this theatre of money, Barthes
envisions one that breaks out of ideological servitude to bourgeois taste
to foster the collective encounter with a dynamic historical situation
that he so admired in Greek tragedy.
Larvatus prodeo: "I move forward, masked." Barthes co-opted this
Cartesian motto as his ideal for representation, often translating it as
"I come forward indicating my mask with a finger."17
This acknowledgment of the mask, the refusal to pass as unmediated "nature,"
distinguishes the Greek tragedians, wrestlers, and showgirls from the other
bodies that populate the Mythologies. This same distinction also
grounds Barthes's critical evaluation of acting styles in the many reviews
he began publishing in 1954. He is particularly impressed with the performance
of Maria Casarès in a production of Julien Green's L'Ennemi.
Casarès "inundates with clarity" her performance, thereby engaging
the spectators who can no longer complacently witness the fulfillment of
entrenched expectations. Barthes admires her face in particular: "When
her face transforms, it deforms, it joins without reserve the folds of
the ancestral mask through which pain, panic, or joy are signified."18
As with the ancient tragedian to whom Barthes compares her, Casarès
exhibits pure and extreme emotions that oblige the spectators, as active
readers, to observe the production of the play's meaning. Casarès
[End
Page 168] does not express an interior state, she signifies it; she
does not serve a text, she reveals it to the spectator: "she throws
onto the stage an excess and a distance that can only weary
those who are lazy and disconcert the amateurs of easy salvation."19
A performer like Maria Casarès harmonizes with the residual existentialism
of Barthes's first phase when, like the heroes of Sartre's own plays who
realize that existence means accepting and assuming a situation in the
world, getting one's "hands dirty" as it were, she rejects the familiar,
anesthetizing myths of theatre and literature to take up a mask in a meaningful
gesture, a profound if limited act of commitment.
Barthes idealizes performers who assume their roles totally, sans
réserve. Their bodies bear no trace of a reality outside of
language, the "secret and decorative flesh" that exceeds history and language
as the "freshness of innocence." The only excess to the body as writing
that Barthes seems to acknowledge is the fetishized "presence" or "nature"
that the reviled petit-bourgeois reader or spectator (itself a myth
begging interrogation) misrecognizes as universal, natural, or true. Barthes
wonders who among these complacent bourgeois theatregoers will want to
see a performer like Casarès, whom he dubs the tragédienne
sans public.20
The thought that there might be no spectators for his ideal theatre even
when it exists betrays Barthes's incipient doubt that there can be a popular
culture at all and presages his eventual disappointed realization that
working class culture is ultimately dictated by petit-bourgeois
sensibilities. If his disenchantment with Marxism and his misgivings about
theatre are indeed related, it is in this respect: given the apparent hegemony
of the petite-bourgeoisie, the only viable theatre is one that perpetuates
the myth of autonomous subjects and truths rooted beyond the contingencies
of representation.21
An unhealthy sign
Despite the preponderance of neatly semiotized bodies in Barthes's early
discussions of theatre and performance, his 1954 preface to an edition
of Baudelaire's complete works, reprinted in Critical Essays as
"Baudelaire's Theatre," reveals that writing's "fleshly double" was not
an anomalous musing of Writing Degree Zero. In a frequently cited
passage Barthes consider all aspects of theatrical representation, including
bodily specific elements such as gesture, an artificial "density of signs,"
an "exterior language" that evokes both the choice of écriture
he describes in Writing Degree Zero and the literal or figurative
masks that convey an emotional state.22
Barthes argues Baudelaire was first and foremost a poet, not a playwright,
and that his dramaturgy suffered from a weak and too abstract sense of
the multivalent registers that constitute this theatricality. A notable
exception draws Barthes's comment: "[Baudelaire's] authentic theatricality
is the sentiment, indeed one might say the torment, of the actor's disturbing
[troublant] corporeality" (27). The recognition of this [End
Page 169] troubling body abruptly sends Barthes's argument straying
from the path of clarity and intelligibility:
Baudelaire had an acute sense of the most secret
and also the most disturbing theatricality, the kind that puts the actor
at the center of the theatrical prodigy and constitutes the theatre as
the site of an ultraincarnation, in which the body is double, at once a
living body deriving from a trivial nature, and an emphatic, formal body,
frozen by its function as an artificial object.
[28]
The double body establishes the opposition between writing and style specifically
in terms of live performance, and in conceding a "natural" body Barthes
opens a Pandora's box of questions that "Powers of Ancient Tragedy" and
the Mythologies kept tightly closed. The performing body stands
apart from the rest of theatre's "density of signs" as a troubling object
of fascination, leading one to conclude that in his ideal performances
described elsewhere--Greek tragedians, wrestlers, Casarès--Barthes
less resolves than represses the question of a performing body's disturbing
corporeality. The contradictions spawned by this mystic "ultraincarnation"
unsettle the arguments of the Baudelaire preface itself. The performer's
"tormenting" corporeality, the redeeming attribute and sole manifestation
of theatricality in Baudelaire's dramaturgy, fascinates precisely where
it exceeds the "artificial" signs that comprise the theatricality ("density
of signs") it supposedly epitomizes.
A distinctly Artaudian sense of dramaturgy informs Barthes's theorization
of the "tormenting" body under the mask and outside of writing, and though
there is no evidence it was his intention the Baudelaire preface could
be construed as a site where discordant Brechtian and Artaud-inspired dramaturgies
meet, and its troubled logic a consequence of their irreconcilable goals.
Unlike his well-known interest in Brecht, Barthes's references to Artaud
are few and far between, usually no more than a name on a list of writers
who envisioned the limits of language (Lautrémont, Mallarmé,
and Sollers are often his companions). However, the language of the Baudelaire
preface and even his initial description of style in Writing Degree
Zero--"magical" and "double" bodies, a tormenting "ultraincarnation"--summon
the intertext of Artaud's The Theatre and its Double. The "secret
and disturbing theatricality" resonates with echoes of the Theatre of Cruelty,
which also shatters the surface of language, reason, and intelligibility.
Barthes's appreciation of the "density of signs" could be considered a
rearticulation of Artaud's call for a new dramatic language that frees
the entire theatrical apparatus from the tyranny of the written text.23
Barthes's unflagging suspicion of metaphysics of any sort would, of course,
forbid too close a rapprochement with Artaud; he would certainly not identify
theatre's "double" with the archetypal recesses of the human soul. Nonetheless,
the two share a revulsion of psychological theatre and both promote a vision
of the performer's body as a palpable but inarticulate "speech before words."24
These "fragments of reality alien to language" and "above History" inevitably
collide with the proclivities that led Barthes to Brecht. Soon after the
Baudelaire [End Page 170] preface, the discovery of Brecht and a
concurrent rise in his interest in Saussurian linguistics radically reset
the parameters of his thought. Barthes first discovered Brecht during the
Berliner Ensemble's 1954 visit to Paris, and later writes that he was
incendié,
"set afire," by the production of Mother Courage he saw. His initial
review in Théâtre populaire is no less emphatic: "The
performance proved to us that this profound criticism has created that
theatre . . . which we had dreamed of and which has been discovered before
our eyes, in its adult and already perfected form."25
Brecht's "epic" theatre furnished a fully formulated answer to the bourgeois
theatre of money Barthes despised. After 1954 Brecht would figure as an
ubiquitous point of reference in his work, from the first reviews of Mother
Courage through Camera Lucida. No such coup de foudre
characterized Barthes's discovery of Saussure but the same year saw a marked
increase in the Swiss linguist's influence which would soon surpass even
that of Brecht. The principles of structural analysis were already evident
in Barthes's idealization of the mask, figurative or literal, which brings
out the subject's function in a given system of relationships at the expense
of any inherent or essential identity. Despite obvious differences between
Brecht's profound sense of history and Saussure's synchronic analysis of
structures, the two do not clash in Barthes's work. For Barthes, the Saussurian
principle that a sign has no value in and of itself and makes no sense
outside of the whole system from which it differentially derives its meaning,
or even its very existence, is analogous to the Brechtian gestus
that reveals how the characters' identity and worldview are shaped by the
social, economic, and political situation in which they find themselves,
and to which they are often blind. The task of a Brechtian/Saussurian critic
is to find the means to alienate the apparent autonomy of an individual
entity, be it a character in a play or a sign, to reveal its situation
in the system in which it circulates and that grants it meaning.26
Barthes's zealous espousal of Brecht and Saussure predictably lowers
his threshold of tolerance for transhistorical metaphysics and occult excesses
to the sign. After the Brecht epiphany, the performer's "natural" body
haunts his writings on theatre more as a problem than a "secret" or "magical"
presence worthy of celebration, a shift clearly apparent in the 1954 essay
"The Diseases of Costume." Barthes executes further his conjugation of
Brecht and Saussure when he proposes gestic properties as the touchstone
of a production's semiological "health": "Every dramatic work can and must
reduce itself to what Brecht calls the social gestus, the external,
material expression of the social conflicts to which it bears witness."27
The ideal costume, like all aspects of a production, serves this gestic
function: "The costume is nothing more than the second term in a relation
which must constantly link the work's meaning to its 'exteriority.' Hence
everything in the costume that blurs the clarity of this relation, that
contradicts, obscures, or falsifies the social gestus of the spectacle,
is bad . . ." (42). Barthes deplores the typical costume's attempt to impress
an audience through values, esthetic appeal and historical accuracy (for
example), that do not contribute directly to the argument of the play or
reveal the attitudes adopted by the characters towards [End Page 171]
each other. He praises the costumes of the Berliner Ensemble's production
of Die Mutter that signify rather than reproduce or painstakingly
imitate the poverty of the characters, and in which the spectator can see
the deliberate choices made by the costume designers and the work that
went into constructing them: "the good sign must always be the fruit of
a choice and of an accentuation" (48). They are "healthy" because they
are readable signs, the clear result of meaningful decision on the part
of designers, directors, and performers. This favorable prognosis allows
Barthes to continue his deft juggling of Marx via Brecht's
Verfremdungseffekt,
Sartre's committed choice, and Saussure's sign.
In the midst of this discussion of a theatre where clear, artificial,
and at least somewhat arbitrary signs circulate, the tormenting corporeality
of the "mystic" body makes an unexpected interruption: "Another positive
function of the costume: it must create a humanity, it must favor
the actor's human stature, must make his bodily nature perceptible, distinct,
and if possible affecting [déchirante: more closely translated
as "tearing" or "rending"] (48-49). The choice of the term déchirante
is noteworthy and--again more evocative of Artaud than Brecht--suggests
a body that wreaks destruction on the theatre of intelligible signifiers
Barthes advocates elsewhere.28
What is this inherent "human quality" that distinguishes the body and conscripts
the other, apparently subordinate elements of theatre (set, costume) to
its service? Barthes does not define this excess beyond a curious and vague
humanism. He also exhibits less an Artaudian inclination to celebrate this
body than a Brechtian worry over this excess, and charges the ideal costume
with another important function. If the healthy costume "respects" the
troubling corporeality of theatre, it does so not merely by being a readable
sign itself but by actively shaping the body into one as well, "sculpting"
the body, carving out its "silhouette" for the spectator, and reinscribing
it as écriture. This transformation is particularly important
for the performer's face: "The costume must be able to absorb the
face; we must feel that a single historical epithelium, invisible but necessary,
covers them both" (49).29
The costume's function is less to reveal the troubling corporeality of
the performing body than to mitigate it, to enclose it, to reconcile its
"humanity" with the systems of language and history Barthes brings together
in his conjugation of Brecht and Saussure. By his own standard the body
is a decidedly "ill" sign, and the task of a good costume is to nurse it
back to health. The ideal costume effectively neutralizes the "liveness"
of theatre, and if the performing body's unique and "miraculous" properties
persist, they demand the concerned vigilance of designers and directors.
A disembodied ideal
With the exception of a few French productions (Vinaver, Planchon, Sartre's
Nekrassov),
after 1955 Barthes increasingly considers the contemporary stage a problematic,
semiologically muddled mode of representation. Even the enlightened example
of Brecht cannot redeem French theatre; the state funding necessary to
maintain [End Page 172] such a theatre, the audience who can understand
it, and the theatre company who can execute it are all sorely lacking.30
The volume of Barthes's theatre criticism falls sharply, and the few reviews
he continues to produce lack his earlier energy as outrage over the state
of French theatre devolves into a repetitive lament of its misguided efforts.31
In the late 1950s, Barthes turns his critical attention away from the theatre
and devotes more and more energy to semiology and structural analysis.
A comparison of "The Diseases of Costume" with a 1957 article in the
journal Annales, "Histoire et sociologie du vêtement" ("History
and Sociology of Clothing"), reveals how the abstraction of the live performing
body permits a more precise semiological study. The arguments of the earlier
article become quickly mired in the question of the body, whose "human"
quality the clothing brought into focus. In stark contrast the body is
virtually absent in "History and Sociology of Clothing" where Barthes is
more interested in the mutations of costume within an impersonal sociology,
and any idiosyncratic deviations draw his interest only as inflections
of a greater system. Barthes evokes Saussure by name and profusely deploys
a vocabulary borrowed from linguistics--signifié, signifiant,
indices,
structures--that
signals a departure from earlier criticism in which he had not embraced
the terms of structural analysis so systematically.32
Barthes no longer needs to charge the clothes with the task of serving
the body's "humanity," precisely because in his general study of clothing
as it might appear in drawings, documents, painting, photographs, or simply
(as in this article) on an abstract level the body is missing, replaced
by a study of generic categories and populations that, untroubled by "tormenting"
excesses, clearly benefits from its absence.
Structural analysis might avoid the "sick" sign of the performer's body
but it cannot cure it, and when the discussion turns to questions of theatre
the "magical" body continues assiduously to haunt Barthes's writing. In
one of his last and longest articles on Brecht's theatre, a 1960 preface
for an edition of Mother Courage, Barthes offers a final mise-à-point
of his dual conception of the performing body.33
After praising the intelligible artificiality that in Barthes's eyes is
Brecht's hallmark, he once again issues a now familiar disclaimer in a
passage that merits quoting at length:
But perhaps it is necessary to go further: behind
this meaning there is still a cipher. Even more than in the range of materials
[in the costumes] . . . this cipher can be discovered in some fresh, fragile
substances . . . in the half-open collar of a shirt, the skin of a face,
a bare foot, the childlike gesture of a hand, a topcoat that is too short
or only half-buttoned. This cipher, which is the true Brechtian cipher,
is the vulnerability of the human body. And like this vulnerability, Brecht
never says it aloud but confides its evidence in the spectacle, and just
as man's corporeal tenderness is the cipher beyond which there is nothing
more to decipher, the most clearly offered meaning is the most hidden:
man is lovable [aimable].34[End
Page 173]
This commentary is remarkable for several reasons. Barthes embarks on a
lyrical foray into language and ideas--tendresse,
aimable--that
contrast sharply with the dry scientific discourse of his structuralist
phase which, by 1960, was nearing full swing; these notions anticipate
his later thought and indicate a clear connection between his theatre criticism
and the "lovable" bodies that populate his later works (in particular A
Lover's Discourse: Fragments and Camera Lucida). Barthes concedes
that the body somehow exceeds the costume and the rest of theatre's "density
of signs"; the gap in clothing is no longer foreclosed with a nudity that
is just another sign (as with the strippers and showgirls) but is left
open, exempt from meaning. In this gap he locates the "human" quality that
the healthy costume sculpted into a readable sign, and if Barthes no longer
situtates it absolutely "outside of history," it nonetheless lingers at
the threshold of intelligibility, on the brink of the unthinkable au-delà,
the "beyond." Instead of worrying over or pathologizing this excess, he
marvels at it as the horizon of semiosis and the raison d'être
of theatre itself. Barthes's vocabulary once again invokes Artaud, and
the curious usage of the distinctly Artaudian term "cipher" (chiffre)
to describe the performing body of Brecht's theatre is particularly striking.
The vision of an ideal theatre is, in effect, where Brecht and Artaud meet;
where history, ideology, and writing reach their outer limit beyond which
there is nothing more to alienate, nothing more to say; where one can only
affirm--body
degree zero.
One could say that Barthes thus closes his career as a theatre critic
by indulging in a final celebration of the performing body's attributes
that his semiological analyses could not tolerate. After 1960, references
to French theatre, directors, performers, or any specific moment of theatre
practice all but vanish, along with the lyrical praise of the performer's
fascinating, "vulnerable" corporeality. Compare the review of Mother
Courage to the following passage from the 1963 "Literature and Signification":
"Brecht divined the variety and relativity of semantic systems: the theatrical
sign does not appear as a matter of course; what we call the naturalness
of the actor or the truth of a performance is merely one language
among others."35
Brecht persists as a theoretical figure in Barthes's writing, but one displaced
from questions of theatre practice to a more general discussion of signification.
Barthes's silence on the dynamics of theatre performance is at times deafening.
On
Racine, for example, offers a textual analysis of Racine's plays that
elides questions of performance in all but his discussion in the short
second section of the alexandrine's delivery. Even then Barthes idealizes
a falsely pure alexandrine, removed from the body that pronounces it and
thereby cleansed of any potential "parasitic" extra-linguistic remainder
that might adulterate the text's semiological purity. An even more egregious
example is the systematic and lengthy structuralist analysis of The
Fashion System in which Barthes establishes the rhetoric and syntax
of fashion not by studying the clothing itself, nor even fashion photographs,
but tellingly by examining instead the captions and the accompanying articles.
In the brief mention of the body in this work, he amplifies his earlier
remarks on the costume: the body interests him only when it enters the
language of fashion ("small, fine traits are in style this year") or when
the clothes, or more accurately the description of the clothing, shape
the "sensitive" body into a complex of clearly intelligible signs. Nudity
enters his analysis not as a body that exceeds the clothing system, but
as a mere word, a signifier that, in his system, is a function of clothing:
the [End Page 174] bare arm between the shoulder and the glove is
part of the whole "look."36
He has regained the semiological purity of the body-as-sign of Mythologies,
but only by subsuming his semiological analysis into an exclusive study
of language.37
In the same 1965 article in which he announces he no longer goes to
the theatre, Barthes himself wonders why: "What happened? When did it happen?
Was it I who changed? Or was it the theatre? Do I no longer like it, or
do I like it too much?"38
Could he have so quickly forgotten the body that haunted his writings on
theatre as both cause for celebration and an unwelcome excess? Is he genuinely
oblivious to the incompatibility of his early theorization of corporeality
with a structural analysis and a Saussurian-inspired semiology? Diana Knight
has remarked the "desire to conceive utopias either within or beyond language"
that characterizes Barthes's work throughout its many phases.39
In the case of the body of theatre, Barthes attempts to conceive of both
at once, hence the profound ambivalence and attendant anxiety that pervade
his remarks on the live body of theatre and make it a uniquely fraught
area of inquiry--as a rigorous semiologist who considers all the world
a text to be decoded, he no longer likes it; as one who still dreams of
a zero degree exempt from meaning, he likes it too much.
"Writerly" theatres
In the years following his self-reflective questions on theatre, the parameters
of Barthes's thought undergo another seismic reordering. Between 1967 and
1970, the publication of Jacques Derrida's
On Grammatology and Writing
and Difference, Julia Kristeva's Semiotica: Research for a Semanalysis,
and the work of other writers associated with the Tel Quel review,
as well as the growing interest in the work of Jacques Lacan, all contribute
to the rise of a current of thought recognized as poststructuralist. The
name is appropriate insofar as it suggests the extent to which this new
way of thinking implicates Barthes's earlier work. In a 1970 letter to
Les
Lettres Françaises, Barthes acknowledges this influence: "Derrida
was among those who helped me to understand the stakes (philosophical,
ideological) of my own work: he unhinged the structure, he opened the sign."40
While Saussure and Brecht continue to figure as frequent points of reference,
after 1969 Derrida, Kristeva and Lacan become Barthes's preferred interlocutors,
and the language of deconstruction and psychoanalysis supplants the pseudo-scientific
discourse of his structuralist phase.
If Barthes was already exhibiting little tolerance for the body's mystic
"humanity," the intellectual climate of early deconstruction further troubled
such notions. The dream of theatre's immediate, heart-rending corporeal
presence in particular draws the critical eye of Derrida, who dedicates
two essays in Writing and Difference to a [End Page 175]
deconstructive reading of Artaud's The Theatre and its Double. Derrida
hones in on the passage where Artaud himself concedes that the most brute,
primitive, archetypal theatre exists as the "image of something subtler
than Creation itself," and that the purported theatre of the here and now
is therefore always already a repetition. Artaud's theatre is cruel not
by its searing presence, but because it manifests "the gratuitous and baseless
necessity" of representation; there is no body outside history, exempt
from language or under the sign.41
Barthes hails Derrida's reading of Artaud as a watershed: "His literary
interventions (on Artaud, on Mallarmé, on Bataille) have been decisive,
by that I mean: irreversible."42
He is also quick to revise his earlier thoughts on theatre. The fragments
on Japanese bunraku theatre in The Empire of Signs, his last
discussion of any length of a specific theatrical performance, purge the
stage of a mystic Artaud-inspired immediacy and issue a scathing indictment
of Western theatre practice.
Japan--or rather the semiological paradise that Barthes calls "Japan"--represents
the antithesis of the myth-ridden
petit-bourgeois culture dissected
in Mythologies. Where the French masses misrecognize the sign as
nature or immutable reality, Barthes's Japanese delight self-consciously
in their semiotized society. In this "atheist" economy of signs, there
is no outside to signification, and not really any signification at all--only
floating signifiers. Like many other aspects of Japanese culture, bunraku
emblematizes the ultimate lack of interiority or inherent value Barthes
idealized since the article on Greek tragedy. Bunraku successfully
shifts the spectator's focus away from the body as product, structure,
or a signified, to the gesture of meaning's production, its "structuration,"
and the play of its signifiers. There is no stable performer, no psychology
or interiority under or within the body, but in their place the weave or
text
of a plurality of signifying gestures, the construction site of an imaginary
subjectivity.
Western performers, to Barthes's dismay, simultaneously execute all
three of the gestures--the character's movement, the production of this
movement, and the delivery of the lines--that bunraku so elegantly
disperses. This coincidence in time and space blurs distinction between
these gestures and, thus unified, leads to a perception of the Western
performing body not as the realm of productive possibilities or as performance,
but as the mark of a producer, a unified subject, a performer who
exists outside of and before the performance itself:
We conceive lyric art as the simultaneity of
several expressions (acted, sung, mimed), whose origin is unique, indivisible.
This origin is the body . . . Western spectacle is anthropomorphic; in
it, gesture and speech (not to mention song) form a single tissue, conglomerated
and lubrified like a single muscle which makes expression function but
never divides it up: the unity of movement and voice produces the one
who acts; in other words, it is in this unity that the "person" of the
character is constituted, i.e. the actor.43
To borrow the terms of S/Z, published the same year as The Empire
of Signs, Western theatre is chronically readable, a theatre
not of production but of consumption, not of [End Page 176] plural
strands woven together but of a flat seamless surface, a "single tissue"
that "congeals" into apparently fixed meanings and expressions. Bunraku
so delights Barthes because it keeps the play of signifiers open, and any
interiority or subjectivity accorded to the "actor" (the puppet) is not
a presupposed origin but clearly results from multiple gestures of production.
This writerly theatre, however, comes at a heavy price, no less
than the abstraction of the live performing body itself: "Bunraku
. . . does not sign the actor, it gets rid of him for us" (58). Barthes's
exemplary theatre is a disembodied ideal.
The bunraku passages could be considered Barthes's own response
to The Theatre and its Double, in particular the "On Balinese Theatre"
and "Oriental and Occidental Theatre" essays, in which he issues a corrective,
informed by Derrida, to his earlier thoughts on the body and theatre. Artaud
applauds the "systematic depersonalization" of the Asian performer that
reveals a deeper, truer state of life. Barthes likewise recognizes an excess
to the corporeal sign, but strips it of the "magic," "torment," and "tenderness"
so evocative of Artaud. No longer cause for celebration or the hint of
the au-delà, the body is a lamentable dysfunction of the
sign and its "presence" an illusion, the hysterical symptom of a stale
but exigent epistemology of the subject. Hence the "trap" of Western theatre
that he felt so anxiously in the court of the Sorbonne: even under the
mask of Darius and an expressionless voice, his was not only a body that
generated signification but one doomed to represent a somebody.44
The bunraku discussion effectively marks the end of Barthes's career
as theatre critic.
It is a great irony of Barthes's career that at the very moment he issues
his sweeping condemnation of live theatre and Western theatre practice,
both theatre and the body reemerge as fruitful, even privileged, metaphors
for the very textuality denied to the Western stage. S/Z finds La
Zambinella, the castrato of Balzac's novella "Sarrasine," "staged" on several
occasions, literally in a woman's operatic role on a Roman stage and figuratively
in the "theatre" of a small antechamber in which a portrait of the castrato
posing as an effeminate but fully endowed Endymion draws the admiration
of the narrator's companion. La Zambinella's body is the perfect metaphor
for textuality. Voyeurs, listeners, readers, and spectators must each create
this body anew and throughout the novella the castrato is repeatedly painted,
sculpted, and narrated as both male and female, but always laced with ambiguity,
always demanding further rewriting. There is no "truth" about the castrato's
gender, no language in which to express it--it is the "neutered" body that
has no place, no meaning, it is that which must be rewritten. The
body proliferates into infinity as a copy with no authoritative origin,
no "ulterior predicate of a primal body."45
Like Balzac's text itself, the castrato possesses a writerly value that
"makes the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text."46
Similarly, in Sade Fourier Loyola, Barthes dubs a room in Sade's
Château [End Page 177] of Silling the "theatre of debauchery"
where the libertines congregate daily to hear stories that they then act
out in their loge-like niches:
Thus the Sadian theatre (and precisely because
it is a theatre) is not an ordinary place where we prosaically pass from
speech to fact . . . but the stage of the primal text, that of the Storyteller
(herself the product of how many anterior codes), which traverses a transformational
space and engenders a second text, whose primary auditors become its secondary
auditors: an unending movement (are we not in turn readers of both texts?)
which is the attribute of writing.47
In discussions of Sade, Balzac, Saint Ignatius, and other texts, the theatre
and the performing body enjoy a renaissance as theoretical figures. Barthes
deploys allegories of a productive theatre, a writerly theatre, where the
bodies of both performer and spectator are written, rewritten, and lose
their credible claim to identity or truth outside this infinite chain of
inscription.
These theatrical stagings of textuality taper and become more abstract
as Barthes nears the end of his career, but the body's role as the
text
and the site of its rewriting persists as a key theoretical trope. In Roland
Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes explicitly names le corps
the figure of excess, the "joker" in the deck, his "mana" word. This descendant
of the idealized "degree zero" continues to proliferate in the "such" (tel)
of the absent loved one in A Lover's Discourse: Fragments and perhaps
most strikingly in the ontology of photography, the "it was there" of his
final work, Camera Lucida. These textual, writerly, lovable bodies
remain figures, however, and even when presented through theatrical imagery,
none joins the "tormenting" bodies of his early theatre criticism on a
contemporary French stage. Barthes's thought never comes quite full-circle
or, if it does, like Vico's spiral (to invoke one of his favorite images)
it returns on a different plane; though they come very close, both the
"such" and the "it was there" are still figures of absence, shielded by
deferral in time from the unsettling "it is there" of live performance.
Despite the many aphorisms on theatre in his later writings, Barthes never
rescinds the damning critique lodged in The Empire of Signs. One
might even conclude that only by being relieved of the live body's uniquely
troubling properties can both le corps and theatre become such rich
figures in his later work. At the time of his untimely death, Barthes was
editing a volume of his collected writings on theatre and suggested that
he might add a few new articles--whether he would have reopened the case
of French theatre can only be a matter for speculation.48
Coda: a queer Barthes?
In the 1973 essay "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein," Barthes reiterates his
suspicion that no matter how fragmented the art, no matter what talent
for "epic" theatre or montage, an artist cannot avoid the same fetishist
charge remarked by Diderot that transforms the separate facial features
sketched on an artist's pad into a human face. Even when Brecht "indicates
the mask with a finger," this is not a gesture of pure deixis; the index,
this phallic finger, is an excess to the mask, the fetish of a knowing
self or a position of truth subjected by the "Law": "In the theatre,
in the cinema, in traditional literature, things are always seen from
somewhere . . . . This point of meaning is always the Law: [End
Page 178] law of society, law of struggle, law of meaning. Thus all
militant art cannot but be representational, legal."49
Barthes concedes theatre's need for such subjugation if it is to be at
all political in the traditional sense, but ends the essay with a plaintive
question: "in a society that has not yet found repose, how can art stop
being metaphysical, that is to say: meaningful, readable, representative?
Fetishist? When will there be music, text?"50
What, one might wonder, will this new theatre and new "non traditional"
politics look like? What does Barthes leave contemporary theatre practice
and criticism beyond a profoundly dissatisfied ambivalence?
There is a second theatre scene in Sade Fourier Loyola in which
Barthes makes a uniquely personal reference in his later career to his
experience as a spectator. After remarking that Sade can only articulate
the body's beauty through banal clusters of clichés--"Venus-like
beauty," "perfection," and so on--Barthes finds a way of giving this tedious
myth a textual existence:
This way is the theatre (as the author of these
lines understood when he attended one evening a drag performance in a Parisian
nightclub). . . . [I]t is this abstract body's theatricality which is rendered
in dull expressions (perfect body, ravishing body,
fit
for a painting, etc.), as though the description of the body had been
exhausted by its (implicit) staging: perhaps this is the function of this
touch of hysteria which underlies all theatre (all lighting) to combat
the touch of fetishism contained in the very "cutting" of the written sentence.
However that may be I had only to experience a vivid emotion [une vive
commotion] in the presence of the lit bodies in the Parisian nightclub
for the (apparently very tame) allusions Sade makes to the beauty of his
subjects cease to bore me and to glitter in their turn with all the illumination
and intelligence of desire.51
Unlike the Folies-Bergère showgirls or the strippers in the
Mythologies,
the drag performer is not only readable, but opens a gap in the
code in which the spectator/reader (Barthes) can project his desire. Barthes
has assumed the place of the sculptor Sarrasine watching La Zambinella
at the opera or the libertine who listens to and re-enacts the narration
in Sade's "theatre." He does not consume the body as a product, but must
produce it himself or, even more perversely, leave it unwritten. Of the
body framed and brilliantly illuminated on stage, one can only repeat stereotypes
of beauty ("perfect," "ravishing") so inane in themselves that they betray
beauty as another sort of zero degree that cannot be described or predicated,
only affirmed. The drag performer's body is a text in which Barthes
takes pleasure, and he briefly offers a glimpse of a theatre, literal and
live, that harmonizes with his poststructuralist thought.
This performing body exempt from meaning that must always be rearticulated
differently,
viewed through the lens of Barthes's (barely) tacit homosexual desire,
might lead a contemporary reader to wonder: is Barthes theorizing a "queer"
performance avant la lettre? Much has been made of Barthes's discretion
on the subject of his homosexuality.52
Barthes deliberately keeps his sexuality a blind spot, the empty center
[End
Page 179] of peripheral hints and references--his presence at the drag
show, for example. One might situate him in the tradition of Wilde and
Gide, for whom homosexuality was often less a secret than a glaring unnamed
truth. Barthes, however, refuses to let his pleasures be pinned down, to
"congeal" (prend) into a fixed position of sexual identity from
which he might write, even if it is a secret one. Instead of a truthful
etiology that explains his many symptoms, Barthes leaves his sexuality
open as a generative realm of possibility, a text that his readers,
like himself in the cabaret, cannot passively consume but must rewrite
themselves or, again more perversely, refuse to rewrite and appreciate
as
such. What is queer if not the "joker" in the deck of a heteronormative
epistemology, the term of excess that must be rewritten anew with each
utterance as either epithet or reappropriation, and whose meaning will
never be definitive, never congeal?
Barthes's "joker," however, is a profoundly ambivalent term and if its
exemption from fixed meanings and stable categories represents a provocative
excess, it cannot both retain its instability and speak its name, even
if it dared. In Roland Barthes, Barthes imagines Brecht's reproach
to his refusal of traditional politics and briefly envisions a non-traditional
political subject:
He is quite willing to be a political subject
but not a political
speaker (the speaker: someone who delivers
his discourse, recounts it, and at the same time notifies it, signs it).
And it is because he fails to separate political reality from its general
repeated
discourse that politics is barred to him. Yet out of this preclusion he
can at least make the political meaning of what he writes: it is
as if he were the historical witness of a contradiction: that of a sensitive,
avid,
and silent political subject.53
Barthes's political subject joins his sexual one as a partner in silence,
"sensitive, avid and silent," who unlike Balzac's castrato does not induce
a perpetual play of articulation and rearticulation but instead abstains
from the fray. It is not what must be rewritten, but what
cannot
be rewritten. Unable to kill the political "father," unwilling to join
the din of political babble to speak against him, thus bound and gagged
Barthes can only silently turn and, as he puts it, "show him his derrière."54
What, one might wonder, compels the father figure to pay this irreverent
gesture any heed, or to refrain from filling the silent "gap" Barthes so
perversely offers with an arrogant, phallogocentric discourse?
Barthes's tacit politico-sexual subject would seem to make a poor model
for a resistant rearticulation of the injurious terms of patriarchy. Barthes
was never sanguine enough about the transformative power of his politics
or his sexuality to warrant an easy reconciliation of his thought with
the optimism that underlies many invocations of queerness. To reclaim his
experience at the drag show as queer would inflect this term with the disabling
ambivalence that elsewhere pervades his thoughts on both politics and theatre,
a threat that has not been lost on queer's critics. Moreover, by all evidence,
Barthes would have chafed under the appellation "queer." Once spoken--perhaps
as soon as it is spoken--even the slipperiest term risks becoming a myth
of its own, repeatable and readable. Camus's zero degree of literature
in [End Page 180]L'Etranger, one might recall, quickly spawned
imitations that made it just another literary manner. When read alongside
Barthes's more general misgivings towards theatre and live performance,
his passing remarks on drag in Sade Fourier Loyola do not offer
a bold vision for a new theatre practice, writerly, queer or otherwise.
For Barthes, the ideal theatre, like the political climate in which he
can at last speak without becoming mired in the repetition of the doxa,
remains a tantalizing vision--"tormenting" even, to give new resonance
to the term he used earlier for the body on stage--whose realization lies
on the far side of a still unforeseeable epistemological rift.
Timothy
Scheie has published numerous articles on French and American theatre
in Theatre Journal, College Literature, Text and Performance, and
other journals. He is an Assistant Professor of French at the University
of Rochester's Eastman School of Music, where he teaches in the humanities
department.
Notes
1.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 33. Note: published English translations
exist for much of Barthes's work and I have used them wherever possible.
For Barthes's early articles and reviews that have not been republished
in English, I have consulted his Oeuvres complètes volumes
I and II, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 1993-95). Translations from these
are my own.
2.
Barthes, "Témoignage sur le théâtre" (1965),
Œuvres
complètes I, 1530.
3.
Jill Dolan laments that the discourse of cultural studies deploys a theatrical
vocabulary to examine seemingly everything but theatre, and calls for discussions
of "performativity" and "performance" that do not exclude or subsume the
specificity of conventional theatre practice. See "Geographies of Learning:
Theatre Studies, Performance, and the 'Performative,'" Theatre Journal
39.2 (1993): 417-42.
4.
Andy Stafford makes this observation in "Constructing a Radical Popular
Theatre: Roland Barthes, Brecht and Théâtre Populaire,"
French
Cultural Studies 7 (1996): 33-48. It should also be noted that some
of the Mythologies address the theatre as well.
5.
Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 145.
6.
Leslie Hill notes how both Annette Lavers in Roland Barthes: Structuralism
and After (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) and Jonathan
Culler in Roland Barthes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)
view Barthes's scientific structuralism as the zenith of his career, and
what follows as decadent and self-indulgent. See "Barthes's Body," Paragraph
11 (1988): 107-25. Most recent critics, including Hill, consider the works
of his later "phases" the more provocative part of his œuvre.
7.
Along with Lavers and Culler, Barthes scholars have given little more than
a passing nod to his work in theatre. These include Philip Thody,
Roland
Barthes: A Conservative Estimate (London: Macmillan, 1977); Steven
Ungar, Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1983); Philipe Roger, Roland Barthes, roman (Paris:
Bernard Grasset, 1986); Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1991); Rick Rylance,
Roland Barthes (Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994); and Diana Knight, Barthes and
Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). The
omission is particularly egregious in Moriarty's study and in Louis-Jean
Calvet's otherwise thorough biography,
Roland Barthes: A Biography
(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994). Both contain chapters
ostensibly dedicated to Barthes's theatre years and offer discussions of
his discovery of Brecht and its implications, but very little discussion
of contemporary French theatre (with the exception of Sartre's Nekrassov,
Vilar's
Théâtre national populaire and a few other
topics addressed in Barthes's theatre criticism). Moriarty has recently
moved to fill this lacuna with "Barthes's Theatrical Aesthetic," Nottingham
French Studies 36.1 (Spring 1997): 3-13.
9.
Philipe Roger, "Barthes with Marx," in Writing the Image after Roland
Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 174-86.
10.
Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (1953), trans. Annette Lavers and Colin
Smith (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), 10-11. Subsequent references will
be included parenthetically in the text.
11.
Barthes, "Pouvoirs de la tragédie antique" (1953), Œuvres complètes
I, 219.
14.
Barthes, "Folies-Bergère" (1953), Œuvres complètes
I, 197. Subsequent references will be included parenthetically in the text.
This essay was not included in the mythologies collected for publication.
15.
Barthes, "Pouvoirs de la tragédie antique," 217.
20.
Barthes would later have harsh words for Casarès's performance (and
Jean Vilar's direction) in Phèdre at the T.N.P. Casarès
infused the role and Racine's stylized alexandrines, which he saw as profoundly
alienating in the Brechtian sense of the word, with a psychology and naturalness
that transformed the tragedy into a moralizing realist drama about that
most bourgeois of topics, adultery. See On Racine, chapter 2.
22.
Barthes, "Baudelaire's Theatre," Critical Essays (1964), trans.
Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 26. Subsequent
references will be included parenthetically in the text.
26.
For a more complete discussion of Barthes's conjugation of Brecht and Saussure,
see Ellis Shookman, "Barthes's Semiological Myth of Brecht's Epic Theater,"
Monatshefte
81.4 (1989): 459-75.
27.
Barthes, "The Diseases of Costume," in Critical Essays (1964), trans.
Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 41. Subsequent
references will be included parenthetically in the text.
28.
One could imagine this "tearing" as a distant forerunner of the punctum,
or "point," he would theorize twenty-five years later in Camera Lucida.
29.
The "epithelium" is "a membranous cellular tissue that covers a free surface
or lines a tube or cavity of an animal body and serves especially to enclose
and protect the other parts of the body" Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary
(Springfield, MA: G&C Merriam Company, 1980), 382.
30.
Barthes enumerates the failures of French and Belgian productions to "translate"
or even to understand Brecht's dramaturgy. The individual director or performer,
however, is not to blame; it is the entire institutuion of theatre in France
that is at fault. See Barthes, "Brecht Traduit" (1957), Œuvres complètes
I, 730-34.
31.
Stafford remarks his "rather indolent drama critic's cynicism" (44).
32.
"Histoire et sociologie du vêtement" (1957), Œuvres complètes
I, 741-52.
33.
Barthes, "Préface à Brecht, «Mère Courage et
ses enfants»" (1960), Œuvres complètes I, 889-905.
35.
"Literature and Signification" (1963), Critical Essays, 263.
36.
Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1983).
37.
A few years earlier in Elements of Semiology, Barthes reversed Saussure's
contention that linguistics is a sub-field of semiology: "Linguistics is
not a part of the general science of signs, even a privileged part, it
is semiology which is a part of linguistics." Elements of Semiology
(1964), trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill & Wang),
11.
38.
Barthes, "Témoignage sur le théâtre," Œuvres complètes
I, 834.
40.
Barthes, "Lettre à Jean Ristat" (1972), Œuvres complètes
II, 1417.
41.
Jacques Derrida, "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,"
trans. Alan Bass, in Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: the Politics of Theatricality
in Contemporary French Thought, ed. Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1997), 57-58.
43.
Barthes, The Empire of Signs (1970), trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 59. Subsequent references will be included
parenthetically in the text.
44.
Barthes maintains that even the marionette in the Western tradition does
not escape such fetishization, for the strings leading to a hidden manipulator
attest to a motivating subject, a god-like figure, operating and animating
(bestowing a soul upon) the puppet from a transcendent position: "as a
doll, reminiscence of the bit of rag, of the genital bandage, it is indeed
the phallic 'little thing' ('das Kleine') fallen from the body to
become fetish." Barthes,
The Empire of Signs, 59.
45.
Barthes, S/Z (1970), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1974), 60. Note again how Barthes distances himself from an Artaudian
notion.
52.
Here I am bracketing off Incidents, his most "out" work, which was
published posthumously. It is not entirely clear if Barthes intended to
publish all the passages in this book. See Calvet, 260.
53.
Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 53.
54.
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973), trans. Richard Miller
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1975), 53.
