BACHELARD TO BARTHES
217
cultural oligarchies, differences of opinion are only sporadically toler–
ated. (The philosopher Paul Ricoeur is a notable exception to the
structuralist chorus; two men long established in America, Serge
Doubrovsky and Paul de Man, have provided almost the only other
dissenting voices.)
1
Poulet and Starobinski teach, respectively,
in
Zurich and in Geneva, and it's difficult to believe that they sym–
pathize with the most recent trends in French criticism. But the
brutal fact of French cultural life is that if you attack what the cen–
tralizing, devouring and manifesto-mad in-group from Paris has
decided to promote, you are liable to find that your only intellectual
allies are a few Sorbonne scholars and the reviewers from
Le Monde
and
Le Figaro Litteraire.
What is generally taken for the French critical spirit is a highly
developed taste for attacking intellectual dwarfs.
If
the gods and
temples of
La vie Lilteraire
change, the enemy
is
an immovable, per–
manently recognizable target. In structuralist terms (I'll spare you the
diagrams that usually accompany structuralist analyses), it could be
said that Parisian literary life is a diachronically feeble system: the
opposition to what fashion excludes (the Sorbonne, the newspapers,
bourgeois society)
is
hardly affected by the temporal changes in
fashion (Richard
~
Barthes
~
Foucault) . Now constant polemics
against the most narrow-minded academicism is scant proof of a
critical spirit. It is in fact largely gratuitous and incomprehensible
except as a ritualistic act of self-congratulation. You would think
from the hysterical sarcasm directed by some of the second-line new
critics against the government and the press that they were being
effectively persecuted, or at the very least that Frenchmen were
being prevented from reading Roland Barthes and coerced into find–
ing Pierre-Henri Simon of
Le
M
onde
a more exciting critic of
literature. Certainly the journalistic reaction to Barthes's
On Racine
was a particularly unpleasant and even violent display of philistinism,
and, as we know, official hostility toward intellectual life does not
have to become real persecution in order to be felt as oppressive. But
the distinction between the two, which the French prefer to ignore,
is
a useful one to make, if only as an aid in determining proper
I.
After devoting a sympathetic issue to structuralism, Sartre's
Les Temps
Modernes
has just published two negative reviews of the anti-Sartrean
Les Mots
II
les chases.
Until now there has been little resistance from the source which
might have made resistance interesting.
