Revolution according to Roland Barthes, Part 1
A walk through Barthes' The Preparation of the Novel
What follows is an amended version of a lecture I wrote for a Narrative Medicine workshop in April of 2023. It was a pleasure to put it together — reading The Preparation of the Novel was a near religious experience for me — and I have wanted to share it with more people. Barthes explores so much that is fundamental to things I think about, so it strikes me as a good beginning to this newsletter. It is long, though (the lecture took almost an hour and a half), so I will split it into two parts. Thank you in advance for engaging with it and do let me know in the comments what (if anything) resonates with you!
In December of 2022 I finally tested positive for the first time for Covid. It was holiday time, so NYC was quiet, and I spent a couple of weeks lying on my couch with my dog, and reading. Just prior to this time, I had read a book called THIS LITTLE ART, by Kate Briggs, who is a literary translator. The book is about the art of translation, and she writes frequently in that book about the work of translating Roland Barthes, the French literary theorist. In particular, Briggs served as translator for two of the lecture courses that Barthes gave at The College de France between the years 1977-1980, the year he died. The last course he gave, spread out over two years and so in two parts, translated in one volume, is called THE PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL, or La Préparation Du Roman.
For those who may not know the work of Roland Barthes, he was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician who established his reputation in the late 50s and early 60s. Of his work, 32 books have been translated to English. (I love Barthes - he may well make appearances in future newsletters.) He produced many enduring works – some you may have heard of might be Mythologies, A Lover’s Discourse, or Camera Lucida – and they all read a lot like literature. His writing is often impenetrable, but it is always beautiful, and bold, and often strange and wonderful. He never wrote a novel himself, though apparently, according to Briggs’ preface to the course, by the end of the 1970s it was “known that Barthes was writing a novel.” It was not until 1995, however, that the facsimiles of Barthes’ 8 page plan for his novel entered the public domain. 8 pages, containing 8 different versions of the same sketched outline of a novel. That’s it. There’s no way to know whether Barthes would have gone on to write the novel had he lived, instead of being hit by a truck in 1980. He called his novel Vita Nova, which means new life.
So there’s this interesting ghost, this possibility, this desire in the background of this lecture course – Briggs writes about the ambiguity in the title, The Preparation of the Novel – is it about the novel Barthes wanted to write? Or about novels in general? What does it mean to “prepare” not TO write a novel, but OF a novel? All of this is in the course. His own desire, his preparation, but also the deepest questions of what makes anyone want to write, what it means to be a reader, to make the transition from reader to writer.
The Preparation of the Novel, it’s important to say, is the translation of Barthes’ notes for his lectures, not the transcript of the lectures themselves. The text inserts footnotes for parts where he veered off slightly from his notes, additions that he added and parts of the notes that he deleted. I find something very moving in the reading of a man’s lecture notes, the work that he worked off of when he delivered the lecture itself. There is a deeper intimacy to it, like watching the rehearsals of a performance rather than the performance itself. [Please note that in the quotes I share, the arrows and indicators are Barthes’, not mine. This is not true (usually) for the ellipses.]
A good place to start, I think (especially as I first delivered this as a lecture), is with what Barthes has to say about the lecture as a form. In the first session of the course he says:
I think that part of a life’s activity should always be set aside from the Ephemeral: what happens only once and vanishes…to my mind, a lecture is a specific production: not entirely writing nor entirely oration... It’s something that must, wants to die—to leave no more substantial a memory than of speech …
I love this reminder of the importance of the ephemeral. In the many narrative medicine workshops I have facilitated over the years, participants have gathered and read and written together, and then shared their words with each other; the form of these encounters is one of experience, sharing work together that doesn’t move beyond the room it takes place in — it is, really, a practice of ephemerality. This is of course one reason why the work is very hard to capture and study in a scientific way – the experiences are often ephemeral, and so the effects often are too. But Barthes reminds me that this living and dying, this passing through, is in and of itself important, “part of a life’s activity” that needs to be honored.
In Barthes’ inaugural lecture at the College de France, which he gave a year earlier, he laid out some overarching views of literature that I think are important as they underlie The Preparation of the Novel, beginning with a discussion of language as power.
This object in which power is inscribed, for all human eternity, is language, or to be more precise, its necessary expression: the language we speak and write. … We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
This statement is perhaps obvious but still strikes as a revelation, and as important for any endeavor that deals in language to remember. Without going too deep into the idea, we can see truth in it – to classify is oppressive because labels are oppressive; power is inscribed in language because education is power, and access to education is not universally available. This is obviously deeply relevant to medical culture, where classifications are often the goal, and language is wielded as attached to knowledge which is attached to power.
From there, Barthes turns toward literature:
This salutary trickery, this evasion, this grand imposture which allows us to understand speech outside the bounds of power, in the splendor of a permanent revolution of language, I for one call literature.
I don’t want to evade, as Barthes arguably does, that of course there is also the wielding of power in literature in all kinds of ways … and certainly literature in the capitalistic world of publishing and media and popular culture is a different thing. But I want to use Barthes’ beautiful statement as an inspiration toward the potential that literature, that creative work has to be revolutionary, in the way that he says – to understand speech outside the bounds of power. I think of that as making a space for people to explore collectively what revolution in any context might look like, to explore their own experiences and challenge their assumptions and what they have been taught. Looking at Barthes’ lecture, we can come up with some hypotheses about the ways that literature might enact this potential, the ways that we might foment this revolution in creative work.
Literature does not say it knows something, but that it knows of something, or better, that it knows about something – that it knows about men.
This distinction is important – the separation of language that says it knows something and language that says it knows about something is, I venture, perhaps the main difference between creative and not creative work.
And then finally:
There is an age at which we teach what we know. Then comes another age at which we teach what we do not know; this is called research. Now perhaps comes the age of another experience: that of unlearning, of yielding to the unforeseeable change which forgetting imposes on the sedimentation of the knowledges, cultures, and beliefs we have traversed.
What if we thought of the work of creativity, our work, as a work of unlearning?
In the first lecture of the first course Barthes ventures a definition of writing (of Literature, he says) as opposed to Science: “An order of knowledge where the product is indistinguishable from the production, the practice from the drive (and, in that case, belongs to an erotics).” This focus on practice is important - the *something* that happens in this work, the mystery, the movement, lies in the practice of the writing, the making of something that wasn’t there before, something that might surprise you because once it is written, it then exists as a thing in the world. The product is indistinguishable from the production – in other words the practice IS the work, and, as in the second half of the sentence, the practice is also the DESIRE, the will, the WANT, hence the connection to the erotic, in the sense of a desire.
He goes on to speak about what makes the Novel, and I think his points apply to the practice of creative work in general:
In my view, the most important factor when it comes to recognizing a work (which is to say, quite simply and materially, to reading it): that it should emit a sense of necessity, that it should release us from skepticism: ‘Why? Why not?’ (“Necessity”? – Perhaps what makes meaning proliferate: so that after reading is different from before).
He returns to this idea of necessity later, in the second part of the course over a year later:
Why this story and not another? I feel this very keenly when I look at the majority of contemporary novels and films, even the good ones; a depressing feeling: it’s ‘good,’ but I don’t see why it was necessary to tell that story, to have chosen that as the object of a tremendous labor of fabrication > … For the story to be necessary in my eyes, it has to have an allegorical density: presence of a palimpsest, of another meaning, even if we’re not sure which one.
Barthes is saying here something I and other writing teachers often try to impart to our students: What is the engine behind this story, why must it be told? A story doesn’t need to be told just because it happened, and part of the challenge in writing is to find the why beneath the story; as he puts it, “the presence of a palimpsest.”
He goes on to speak of the novel as a mediating structure. We speak about this a lot in narrative medicine work – this is why we read and discuss literature as a practice, why we always engage with art before we make our own, as many people can gather around the same text and access it in different ways.
The Novel is a structure – or an operation of mediatization. Sentimentality is mediatized: induced, not declared, not proffered …
The novel needs to be situated in relation to the great logical categories of enunciation. I’m thinking of another Zen anecdote: Chou-chan (tenth century) brandished his staff before a group of disciples and said: ‘Call it not a shippé (chu-pi); if you do, you assert. Nor do you deny its being a shippé (chu-pi); if you do, you negate. Apart from affirmation and negation, speak, speak!’
Here we see again another writing truism: “show don’t tell.” I am always telling my students that the emotion in their pieces should be evoked, induced in their readers rather than declared directly. But Barthes goes further with this idea in this zen anecdote, showing that in this mediatization, literature occupies a space in between affirmation and negation. Again, we remember the idea of revolution against power, the possibility for literature to resist the way language can oppress – literature can occupy a space, instead, Barthes is suggesting, that could be neutral, could achieve neutrality. [Incidentally, Barthes gave a whole course called The Neutral just the year before he began the course on The Preparation of the Novel.]
Moving toward his discussion of the haiku, Barthes begins to speak about poetry and rhythm. “The sole justification,” he says, “of poetry, is truth…In poetry, form and only form is what enables us to touch the truth: the tactile power of form: to touch the word, the line, the tercet.” I love this idea of the tactile power of form – the idea that it is form that allows us to access the truth in a work. And this might be the first thing that can bring about that radical neutral space in literature – the use of form. Again this is an argument for creative work, and a reiteration of the earlier point that writing cannot be separated from its practice – it is only through the giving of form that a truth can be made to be expressed.
“What I mean is,” says Barthes, “the function of all rhythm is either to excite or to calm the body, which, on a certain level, at some, distant, profound, primitive point in the body, amounts to the same thing: to excite or to calm the body by means of the formula is to assimilate the body to a nature, to reconcile it, to put an end to its separation, to unsever it.” Here, if I understand him correctly, he speaks of the touching of truth through the form of a work as a way of coming back into our bodies, reconnecting to our own natures, and also a way of coming back into community. To unsever the body, to put an end to its separation, is to connect that body; form, here, rhythm of language, the touching of truth, is what connects us back to ourselves and to our nature, our community, our humanity.
We frequently speak in writing classes about the power of specific details – it is in the particularity of a certain character or situation that a reader will feel something – a reader will not feel something if a scene is general or vague, or if they are merely told what to feel. Flannery O’Connor writes about this in her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”:
The nature of fiction is in large measure determined by the nature of our perceptive apparatus. The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.
Barthes quotes Proust - “It is the apogee of the particular that begets the general.” This is a very beautiful and succinct way of summarizing, I think, the project of fiction writing – the way that we can get at universal truths through singular stories.
Barthes then introduces an idea that he calls the nuance – “The practice (general: mental, written, experienced) of individuation is the nuance,” he says, and therefore, “style could be defined as a written practice of the nuance.” A writer’s style, in other words, is what marks them as unique, what makes a reader able to identify one voice over another, and in this way it is an individuation. Barthes sees this individuation as a radical act – again, as one of the ways that literature can create a neutral space, can create that revolutionary neutral.
Poetry, Barthes says, and I would revise to any creative practice, is:
…the practice of subtlety in a barbaric world. Whence the need to fight for poetry today: poetry should be one of our “human rights”; it isn’t “decadent,” it’s subversive: subversive and vital.
This might be the most important pull quote from the whole book.
This is just as true now, in 2024, as it was in 1979 when he said it. Creative work is the practice of subtlety, and in so many spaces – nearly all spaces, certainly health care spaces – subtlety is not a thing that is embraced or appreciated, in fact is often a thing that is feared, avoided, discriminated against.
In finding the nuance, Barthes says, we also find a void – just as every positive thing has a corresponding negative. The idea of “the void” as Barthes uses it is actually, as we will come to see, almost a goal in itself, for it represents a place where language dries up, where nothing can be said, which for Barthes is the apex of what creative work can do. He quotes Stéphane Mallarmé, a French poet who Barthes returns to again and again in his work: “My work was only created by elimination, and every truth born only of the loss of an impression which, having sparkled, burnt itself out and allowed me, thanks to the timbres emitted, to go deeper...”
Here I understand there to be something of a similar formulation as Wordsworth’s famous statement that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility,” or, to give you the full quote – “poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” This is from Wordsworth’s 1801 introduction to a book of his poems called Lyrical Ballads, a quote all of us English majors (oh, dying breed!) will have learned. The idea here is that writing, creation, poetry, comes in processing of an event of an emotion, it does not come in the moment of experiencing that event of emotion. The act of creating is an act of processing – this is where, of course, it touches on the therapeutic. Barthes says of Mallarmé’s quote: “To create (poetically) is to empty, to exhaust, to deaden the shock (the sound) in favor of the Timbre.” I understand this again as a therapeutic movement – to empty ourselves of something, to deaden the shock of something in favor of the timbre, in other words to create music out of something that may have, before being written, only been loud.
I will conclude this first half here, but want to end with one last quote. Concluding his section on the Nuance Barthes writes:
This path of the Nuance: so what’s at the end? Well, life, the sensation of life, the feeling of being alive; and, as we know, if that feeling is to be pure, intense, glorious, perfect, a certain void has to form within the subject; even when the jubilation (of love), for example, is at its most intense it’s because there’s a language void within the subject: it’s when language is silent, when there’s no longer any commentary, interpretation, or meaning that existence is pure: a ‘full’ (‘overflowing’) heart = knowledge of a certain void (eminently mystical theme); the absolute wretchedness of someone who feels ‘distanced’ from the world, the ardent jubilation of someone who feels ‘alive’ to it > the Nuance – if not kept in check – is Life – and the destroyers of nuances (today’s culture, our popular press) = dead men who, from the depths of their death, take their revenge.
This quote has within it, for me, the whole reason to write and to read and to be engaged in the kind of work that we are. Is to experience life that we do this, in the midst our everyday lives, in the midst of death, in the midst of work that might be deadening and repetitious, it is to experience and be reminded of “the sensation of being alive, the feeling of being alive,” which, he rightly points out, becomes most intense at the moments when there is a “language void” in us, when something inexpressible comes through us, when there is something that we cannot say, something beneath and outside of language. Ironic, in a way, to experience this void through language! The Nuance, then, as Barthes says, is life, and this life is being destroyed, cannibalized, by today’s culture – for him this was the culture of 1979, for us this is the culture of 2024 – the statement arguably even more true. So this “nuance,” then, as Barthes uses the word, is the second way that the creative revolution can be brought about. To practice nuance, to practice subtlety, to practice getting at the absence of what can’t be said.
Thank you so much for reading and stay tuned for part 2, when we’ll get into haiku!
— Nellie
I am just catching up with reading this part 1 of Barthe's by Hermann. What a revelation. I want to learn more. What struck me was the idea of the ephemeral and how this is a facet of the phenomenology of the narrative medicine discipline. I think we grapple with trying to explain what happens in this practice and certainly we are challenged with applying matrix to the benefits by way of quantitative data. It is precisely because it is a momentary and transitory experience.
Perhaps for me, the most personal idea presented was the exploration of language and how it is the source of power to both enlighten and oppress. To take language away, to destroy it, is to destroy the person or community it speaks for. I think of the calculated destruction of the indigenous tribal communities of this country. A clear example of what language means to living or dying. The resurrection of a multitude of nearly lost tribal languages is a harbinger of Native ascendance.
One last thing, reading about nuance helps me so much in finding a reason to continue writing. To be able to motivate beyond the "why bother and who cares?"
Oh and Robin - thanks so much for the Wallace Stevens. - Anne
Thank you for this discussion, Nellie. It’s illuminating to hear Barthes’s voice through yours.
For some reason, what comes to mind is Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself,” in which the speaker awakens “at the earliest ending of winter” and hears “a scrawny cry from outside.” He thinks the sound is coming from his mind. But he knows that he hears it, and in the second stanza identifies it as a bird’s cry, a harbinger of spring. We feel (without the poet telling us outright) the poignancy of his realization that he has lived to see another spring. It is as if he were pinching himself to confirm that what he thinks he hears is real, that it is not a dream. Almost amusingly - because dreams are usually so prized in creative work - Stevens dismisses the stuff of dreams as “the vast ventriloquism/ Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .” This was not a dream, he thinks, inching closer and closer to certainty; the sun “was coming from outside,” the scrawny cry was that of a chorister (songbird) whose “C preceded the choir.”
The whole experience - his mind, the world outside, the spring to come - is part of the colossal sun. It is the experience and perception of what he sees, still far away, but ratified as a new knowledge of reality.
I can’t say exactly why this comes to mind in response to what you’ve expressed, Nellie. Hopefully it will resonate in some way. For me, the poem is so moving, going to the heart of what induces the writing of poetry. Here is Stevens:
NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.