294
RICHARD KLEIN
IMAGES OF THE
SELF:
NEW YORK AND PARIS
MYTHOLOGIES. By Roland Barthes. Selected and translated from the
French by Annette Lavers. Hill and Wang. $5.95.
CRITICAL ESSAYS. By Roland Barthes. Translated from the French by
Richard Howard. Northwestern University Press. $10.00.
BALZAC TO BECKETT. By Leo Bersani. Oxford University Press. $8.50.
Racine c'est Racine: securite admirable du neant. -
Mytho–
logies, 1957.
The "proof" of a criticism is not of an "alethic" order (it does
!I1ot proceed from truth), for critical discourse - 1ike logical
discourse, moreover - is never anything but tautological: it
consists in saying ultimately, though placing its whole being
within that delay, what thereby is not insignificant: Racine
is Racine, Proust is Proust....
- Les Essais Critiques, 1964.
The first quotation comes at the end of a brief article that
uncovers a persistent feature of "bourgeois" myth-making, the tendency
to reduce the complexity and richness of cultural phenomena to the
self-evidence of a tautological truth.
1
The tautology postulates an inef–
fable essence of Racine;
it
aJbstraats the work's hlstorioal reality, and
violently refuses any critical/philosophical interpretation in the name of
an aggressively mobilized common sense. It asserts its secure, formal truth
at the price of all content or differentiation: in the dark all cats are
gray. The whole aim of
Mythologies
is to demystify the reductive formal–
ism which transforms complex historically determined facts into self–
justifying essences, which substitutes a false nature, whose principle is
tautological, for historical reality whose logic is dialectical. Hence,
Barthes's critique of "bourgeois" ideology, from within a broadly Marxist
The article, "Racine est Racine," is not one of those chosen by the trans–
lator for inclusion in the English version. She has cut Barthes's book roughly
in half. In general, she seems to have operated on -the principle that English
readers would not be interested in pieces dealing with the French literary
scene, with French politics, or specifically French phenomena (Le Tour de
France, Les Music-Halls). Since those are frequently the object of Barthes's
most impassioned, penetrating insights, the effect is to leave one with the
impression of a man somewhat preciously cuItivating his connoisseUJrship of
mass media and consumer culture. That effect is aggravated by her awkward,
literal translation that makes Barthes's elaborate, but elegant style seem, by
its increased difficulty, grossly out of proportion to the fragility of its sub·
jects. By contrast, Richard Howard has translated all the critical essays
with the grace and sureness we have learned to expect of him.
