Back to Barthes! Since my first reading of his work with “Mythologies” back at the end of 2019, I’ve been on a bit of a journey with his writings. I’ve also read “Mourning Diary” and Roland Barthes; and was transfixed by Prof Richard Clay’s marvellous documentary updating Barthes’ ideas, 21st Century Mythologies. There are any number of Barthes books lurking on the TBR, but for some reason felt very drawn recently to one which is his first published work – “Writing Degree Zero” (here published by Hill and Wang, and translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith).

As the foreword by Adam Thirlwell makes clear, “Writing Degree Zero” was produced during a very interesting period for French writing (it first appeared in 1953); the French intellectuals of the time were heavily involved in a whole range of debates exploring the possibility of a left-wing literature, its form, whether it needed to reach a mass audience and indeed, whether a piece of writing which *did* reach the masses was automatically left wing (I’d argue strongly against the latter, but that’s just me). The debate ranged over the pages of Camus’ newspaper ‘Combat’ and the journal ‘L’Observateur’; and in the midst of this Barthes published his first book which explored these topics and much, much more.

The book is in two parts, each featuring a number of short pieces with titles such as “What is Writing?”, “Political Modes of Writing”, “Writing and Revolution”, “The Utopia of Language” and so on. In these essays, Barthes explores the history of French literature, how political it is, whether it’s accessible to all and what future it has. The first part is particularly interesting because it detaches the concept of ‘writing’ from that of ‘style’ or ‘language’; and Barthes goes on to look back at French classical literature which was designed with a purpose, to educate and inform. He explores the ‘preterite’, a tense which doesn’t exist in English, and discusses its relationship to the structures and conventions of novels. And he declares that Literature is the product of a modern, Capitalist society, and therefore of course not necessarily part of the normal use of language in the everyday.

Roaming through the different phases of French literature, he notes the changes in style and fashion – for example, after the French Revolution – and he believes that after the 1850s the writer was “without Literature” which rather leaves him or her out in the cold. The art of writing becomes a craft, and Barthes ends his exploration of the history of writing by struggling to find a way forward for French literature, some kind of pure, Utopian form, a colourless, almost neutral type of writing which allows a journalistic style to take over – he cites Camus’ prose as a good example.

Well – that’s kind of what I get out of “Writing Degree Zero”, though it’s possible I’m way off – I do find Barthes a Bit Hard at times! But despite this, I found the book absolutely engrossing, particularly the discussions of political writing. Those of us who read regularly perhaps forget that there are many who don’t or can’t, and they may be in the parts of society where political writing should reach. So how do you get those ideas to the people that need them, and in what form? It’s a puzzle, and the discussions here are fascinating though I still don’t know what the answers are. Barthes traces many issues to the roots of bourgeous writing, reminding the reader how elitist it was (and probably still is):

This classical writing is, needless to say, a class writing. Born in the seventeenth century in the group which was closest to the people in power, shaped by force of dogmatic decisions, promptly ridding itself of all grammatical terms of speech forged by the spontaneous subjectivity of ordinary people, and drilled, on the contrary, for a task of definition, bourgeois writing was first presented, with the cynicism customary in the first flush of political victory, as the language of a privileged minority.

As with everything else I’ve read by Barthes, “Writing…” was fascinating; he of course regards language as a form of signs, and those signs are by necessity allied with power. He’s also very aware of the tricks which words can play on us, using (unexpectedly!) the example of Agatha Christie to show just how easy it is for a writer who is clever with language to totally bamboozle any reader. Certainly, if you take a look at any kind of political rhetoric you will see how right he is on that point.

So I didn’t always find “Writing Degree Zero” the easiest of reads, and this post is probably a very simplistic reading which only scratches at the surface; but the rewards reading the book brings are immense. If nothing else, I feel it demonstrates that literature and language are just a couple of the many modern mythologies which Barthes set out to unpick, a process which deserves to be taken up by all and sundry so that we can fight against the constant barrage of lying words we seem to be faced with nowadays..