Eugene Goodheart
THE MYTHS OF ROLAND
The attempt of English and American critics to come to
terms with contemporary French criticism suffers, it seems to me, from
two opposite disadvantages. Either the Anglo-American critic is so ill–
disposed
to
the work that he makes no adjustment in his language or
categories which would permit him to take in what is original,
provocative, and instructive in the work, or he is so favorably disposed
that, as in the extreme case of a recent book on Roland Barthes by
Stephen Heath, he adopts without resistance the categories, language,
and ideas of the material he is studying. In either case, a dialectical
relationship to the material is impossible. In studying Barthes, and
particularly his role as a demystifier, I have attempted to enter into a
dialectical relation to his work. My account of Barthes's thought is
sufficiently immanent, so that it is recognizable in its own terms;
however, I approach him on a terrain not entirely his own, so that he is
forced to answer questions which he has not posed to himself.
Much of the advanced criticism written today openly and even
pleasurably declares its lack of authority. It shares with the works that
provide it with occasions the condition of
ecriture:
the liberating
experience of writing without an author. When Roland Barthes
deauthorizes Balzac's
Sarrasine,
he grants it a freedom it never dreamed
of. Not that Barthes is unaware that this
ne~
freedom is achieved at a
cost. The awareness is already palpable in the mixture of playfulness
and anxiety that animates his earlier work,
Mythologies.
In the preface to that book Barthes warns us that demystification is
"a word which is beginning to show signs of wear." We hardly need to
be reminded that for Marx, as it had been for the Enlightenment,
demystification was the very essence of criticism. All criticism, Marx
had written in an early essay, was the criticism of religion: the clearing
of the religious mists that surround the sun of truth. Much later in his
career when he writes the celebrated chapter on commodity fetishism in
