ALBUM
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European Perspectives
A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Lawrence D. Kritzman, Editor
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For a complete list of books in the series, see pages 359–360.
ALBUM
Unpublished Correspondence and Texts
ROLAND BARTHES
Established and presented by Éric Marty
With the assistance of Claude Coste for “On Seven Sentences in Bouvard et Pécuchet”
Translated by Jody Gladding
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Album: Inédits, correspondances et varia copyright © 2015 Éditions du Seuil
English translation copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54588-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Barthes, Roland. | Marty, Éric, 1955– editor. | Gladding, Jody, 1955– translator. | Coste, Claude author.
Title: Album: unpublished correspondence and texts / Roland Barthes; established and presented by Éric Marty; with the assistance of Claude Coste for On Seven Sentences in Bouvard et Pâecuchet; translated by Jody Gladding.
Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. | Series: European perspectives | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039160 | ISBN 9780231179867 (cloth: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Barthes, Roland—Correspondence. | Critics—France—Correspondence.
Classification: LCC P85.B33 A4 2018 | DDC 801/.95092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039160
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[email protected] Cover design: Evan Gaffney
Cover images: photo of Roland Barthes by Arthur Woods Wang, Photographs of Authors and Ranchers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; draft of letter from Roland Barthes to Jean-Paul Sartre: Roland Barthes Collection, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF); Divertissement in F Major, dedicated to Philippe Rebeyrol: Philippe Rebeyrol Archives, l’Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC); note to Roland Barthes from Jean Cocteau: “Thanks to the Comité, Jean Cocteau”; letter to Roland Barthes from Georges Perec: Roland Barthes Collection, BNF.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Éric Marty
Death of the Father
Encounter in the English Channel on the Night of October 26–27, 1916, Between German Destroyers and the Trawler Le Montaigne
Acknowledgments
Note
Chronology
1. From Adolescence to the Romance of the Sanatorium: 1932–46
1. Roland Barthes to Philippe Rebeyrol (IMEC)
2. Roland Barthes to Jacques Veil
3. Roland Barthes to Georges Canetti
4. Roland Barthes to Robert David
Sketch of a Sanatorium Society
2. The First Barthes
1. Return to the World of Institutions
2. Author of Le Degré zéro de l’écriture
3. The Period of Michelet and Mythologies
4. Two Letters to Charles Panzéra
5. Author of the Theater
The Future of Rhetoric
Two Romanian Texts by Roland Barthes
3. The Great Ties
1. Roland Barthes to Maurice Nadeau
2. Roland Barthes to Jean Cayrol
3. Roland Barthes to Alain Robbe-Grillet
4. With Michel Butor
5. Roland Barthes to Jean Piel
6. With Claude Lévi-Strauss
7. With Maurice Blanchot
Valéry and Rhetoric
4. A Few Letters Regarding a Few Books
Regarding Sur Racine
Regarding Critique et vérité
Regarding S/Z
Regarding L’Empire des signes
Regarding Sade, Fourier, Loyola
Regarding Nouveaux Essais critiques
Regarding Plaisir du texte
Regarding Alors, la Chine?
Regarding Fragments d’un discours amoureux
Regarding La Chambre claire
Other Letters
The Postage Stamp
On Seven Sentences in Bouvard et Pécuchet
5. Exchanges
1. Roland Barthes to René Char
2. Roland Barthes to Georges Perros
3. With Jean Starobinski
4. With Georges Perec
5. Claude Simon to Roland Barthes
6. With Julia Kristeva
7. With Pierre Guyotat
8. With Jacques Derrida
9. With Maurice Pinguet
10. Roland Barthes to Renaud Camus
11. Roland Barthes to Antoine Compagnon
12. With Hervé Guibert
“Vita Nova”
Translated by Kate Briggs
Notes
Index
FOREWORD
Éric Marty
Reading in R. B. what he does not say but suggests, I imagine that for Werther passionate love is only a detour to death. After reading Werther, there were no more lovers, but more suicides. And Goethe passed off to Werther the temptation of death, but not his passion, writing not to keep himself from dying but through the movement of a death that no longer belonged to him. “That can only end badly.”
—Maurice Blanchot
Posthumous time is as complex and subtle as life time. It is woven of events, surprises, waiting, mourning (survivors die as well), encounters (new readers), betrayals, neglect, alliances, sorrows, disappointments, and of course joys. In that posthumous time, there is also a place for what Proust called temps retrouvé, that time when forgotten feelings, scents, words, truths, and faces are revived thanks to the effects of recollection. In putting together this album celebrating Roland Barthes’s centenary, I continually had that feeling of accessing a temps retrouvé, immediately prompting a concern for helping readers gain access to it as well. From the letters from the sanatorium, where Barthes is very often immersed in the darkness of disease and its surrounding silence, to the last letters that revive Barthes’s exchange with another writer now deceased, Hervé Guibert, strange and often scintillating bits of the past emerge. It is a past that may well have constituted for Barthes himself, in his lifetime, an invisible part of his life, a virtual part. We remember so little of the letters we have written and even when we do remember them, what can be gathered from them—what is gathered here from so many exchanges with so many correspondents—constitutes an expected tableau, a tapestry woven of so many threads that even its author could not have imagined it.
This album comprises five large sections—preceded by a prelude devoted to the death of Barthes’s father—in which the letters exchanged, written, and received by Barthes constitute the main part of the text, with inclusions of unpublished material (from Barthes’s text from 1947 on the sanatorium to his notes on “Vita Nova”). Chronology—since it is an entire life we find here—was our guide, as well as our desire to let that life unfold through what correspondence expresses be
st: friendship. Thus we have in some way inflected the chronology through a form of cartography whereby chapter titles are also something like stages in a writing career, in a writer’s life. It is worth noting, moreover, that Barthes may be among the last of our authors for whom producing a posthumous collection of letters is possible, given the evolution of the act of writing itself, since his death, and the gradual disappearance of letters that makes the epistolary act revolutionary. That fact as well confers upon this collection a flavor or scent of a time regained. It is also the time regained of a certain idea of what writing means.
Nevertheless we know that a “correspondence” is an artifact, and it is an illusion to think we might rediscover Barthes’s actual life there. Thus this collection is not in any way an exact reflection of things or a life, except as an erotic of the everyday, even if we may think that some of the letters in this body of complex and moving materials may have something seemingly decisive about them. Just as others are seemingly insignificant, simply a brief note or polite response. Nevertheless we have included them because, for those who love letters, in the very brevity of a polite phrase there lies an entire message full of meaning. Sometimes it is simply the writer’s name itself that matters because it allows us to complete the cartography of friendship that we are attempting to draw.
Letters are lost, burned, and torn up, and this collection does not pretend to be exhaustive. Thus the reader will not find here Roland Barthes’s letters to some of those closest to him: François Wahl, his friend and editor; Severo Sarduy, Wahl’s companion; Jean-Louis Bouttes, whom Barthes refers to as “the Friend” in his final work, Vita Nova. They did not keep his letters. Not long ago I myself, for example, destroyed the letters that Roland Barthes had sent to me. The decision to include only unpublished letters led us to omit those Barthes wrote to Frédéric Berthet,1 Leyla Perrone-Moisés,2 and Michel Archambaud,3 among others. There are so many gaps, perhaps sometimes linked to oversights or negligence on our part, but most often due to the physical contingency of those fragile things that letters are. We deeply regret not having found a single letter from or to François Braunschweig, who was so close to Barthes and to whom Barthes dedicated his Essais critiques in 1964. We were also refused rights in a few cases, we ran into all sorts of complications that denied us access to certain correspondences, and we were met with silence on the part of some of Barthes’s friends whom we solicited. Phillipe Sollers wanted to publish a certain number of Barthes’s letters separately.4 Michel Foucault, who was Barthes’s closest friend in the 1960s, with whom he went out almost every evening, often to wrestling halls or, for example, to see a B movie like Maciste in a movie theater in Belleville, as on a January evening in 1963, is only represented by a very small sampling. There is only one letter from Barthes to Pierre Klossowski and none from Klossowski to Barthes, although they were very good friends. Other names are missing or poorly represented. There are no letters from or to Marguerite Duras, whom Barthes visited often in the 1960s, or from Henri Lefebvre, for example, with whom Barthes was very close. These absences are compensated for by presences that are unexpected (Maurice Blanchot), moving (Jean Genet), or surprising and therefore all the more delightful (Georges Perros).
DEATH OF THE FATHER
A very popular author of historical accounts of World War I, Paul Chack (1876–1945), devoted an entire chapter in one of his books, which appeared in 1927, to the naval action in which Louis Barthes, the father of Roland Barthes, died on the night of October 26–27, 1916.1
Roland Barthes must have known of this hagiography, as he must have known of the letters his mother received following his father’s death from the military, letters he kept with the account of the naval battle. We are reproducing them here as a kind of prelude to the album, as part of the archives of the fatherless writer who nevertheless had letters establishing his father’s legend in death. Like Claude Simon and Albert Camus, Barthes belongs to that generation of intellectuals and writers orphaned by the Great War. More precisely, all his work erases the father, neutralizes patriotic and even familial and patriarchal mythology. In Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, published in 1975, this is his comment on two photos of his father in uniform: “The father, dead very early (in the war), was lodged in no memorial or sacrificial discourse. By maternal intermediary, his memory—never an oppressive one—merely touched the surface of childhood with an almost silent bounty.” In the same book, mentioning one of his teachers who began the school year by listing on the blackboard the names of students’ relatives who had “fallen on the field of honor,” Barthes notes both how he was the exception in being the only one “who could claim a father” and how, at the moment when the blackboard was erased, “nothing was left of this proclaimed mourning.” A father without a tomb since his body went down with the wreck of the ship that he commanded, Le Montaigne.
This play of mark and erasure is characteristic of the modern palimpsest thanks to which Barthes constructs a new art of autobiography. It seemed to us that as a prelude to this book we could offer exactly what it was that, in order to write, Barthes never stopped erasing and thereby inscribing, since basically that is the very principle of this album.
* * *
Calais, October 27, 1916
Madame [Louis Barthes],
It is with the keenest regret that I am confirming the news of the horrible misfortune that has so suddenly stricken you and your deepest affections.
The name of your dear husband will remain in my memory as one of a brave, loyal, and courageous officer, prepared to make any sacrifice to fulfill his duty to the very end. That task, so often thankless and riddled with dangers, he accomplished with the highest, most elevated feeling, setting an example for all through his energy and his zeal. Of him, Madame, I have only words of praise to offer you; I considered him to be by far the best officer under my command, and all those who witnessed him at work in all circumstances are unanimous in deploring his loss.
Death struck him down at his battle post.
Although wounded in the head, he continued to give orders as precisely as ever; but a second shell hit him directly in the chest. Unfortunately his body could not be recovered and disappeared with the vessel when it sank. The ship was then located four kilometers north of Cape Gris-Nez.
I know from experience the dreadful pain that you must feel and that grips your heart as a beloved and cherished wife; but nevertheless, Madame, overcome your grief, think of your dear little son who brought you both joy, and tell yourself that your dear husband died in fulfilling his duty toward and for France.
He bears with him the sincere regrets of those who knew him and he will remain an example for those who have survived him.
Please accept, Madame, the assurance of my respectful and most sincere condolences.
Signed: Le Bihan
Commander of the Second Patrol Squadron
Calais
* * *
Chief of the Flotilla Division of the North Sea
Dunkirk, November 7, 1916
Madame,
So that you receive testimony that is—insofar as human things can be—worthy of your husband’s valor and your sacrifice, I have asked that he be given the Military Cross and Citation by an authority higher than my own. But I can wait no longer to express to you my respectful compassion and the deep regrets that M. Barthes leaves behind. I saw little of him because my flotillas are widely dispersed, but I knew him well enough for him to inspire in me a lively sympathy and absolute confidence in his value and character.
The last time I saw him, as I was telling him how I regretted that certain regulations did not yet permit me to compensate him as he deserved and as I would like, he answered me in such a way—with such dignity and simplicity and so loyal and fine a look—that his noble heart was clearly revealed to me and my eyes brimmed with tears of emotion; these visions matter in life and are not forgotten.
Thus I know, Madame, whom you have lost and the grief before which I bow.
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Commander Le Bihan has written to you. You know what took place that night of October 26–27: your husband sensing something serious in Pas-de-Calais and placing himself and his two small ships resolutely between the trade routes that he was supposed to guard and the enemy’s likely position. Then the sudden arrival of five warships. He could have extinguished his lights and hidden in the darkness. No! Duty called him to recognize those ships and demand if they were enemies or allies. Such knowledge was essential at any cost in order to sound the alarm if necessary and to inform our forces. Barthes ordered the reconnaissance signal to be given. Terrible fire, at point-blank range, hit Le Montaigne. Seriously injured, the Commander fell, but he commanded still; clearly, carefully he gave the order that had to be given. A second volley of enemy torpedoes carried his soul to where those souls go who put duty before life, before all else. Duty, whatever it is, is a form of the Divine Order—we know this—and swift is the infinite reward for those who sacrifice themselves to that order.
Le Montaigne sank a short time later. With difficulty, places were found in the small crafts for the able-bodied and the wounded. Impossible to bring the dead. But before leaving the ship, Second-in-Command Courant and Quartermaster Clermont assured themselves again that their Commander was no longer alive. I interrogated them on their observations; there is no possible doubt.
Hence the tomb of the Commander of the Montaigne is the bridge of his ship; it is the battle post that he did not desert. I well understand, alas, that you would wish for a different one where you could pray or where later you could bring your dear child to pray. But your gaze and your prayers ascend higher than the tomb.
Be so good as to accept, Madame, my humble respects and my affliction, shared by all those who knew, esteemed, and loved the one for whom you grieve.
Captain Exelmans2
ENCOUNTER IN THE ENGLISH CHANNEL ON THE NIGHT OF OCTOBER 26–27, 1916, BETWEEN GERMAN DESTROYERS AND THE TRAWLER LE MONTAIGNE
Account rendered by the survivors of Le Montaigne to Lieutenant Guénée, Commander of the trawler L’Élisabeth.