Aditya Gandhi

Usually, the word "revolution" refers to a rebellion against a single person, or a small group of people—in other words, someone who hears the word will think that a king or an aristocracy is abusing its power. This is actually what happened in France during the French Revolution, which was aimed at erasing the inequality imposed by the existence of a nobility. Similarly, when we talk about "tradition" we often think of a section of the nobles drinking tea in a very polite and old-fashioned way. But when we talk about twentieth-century France, we have to remember that the bourgeoisie had most of the power—a consequence, in fact, of the French Revolution. This bourgeoisie was not distinguished by birth and it constituted a large number of people. There were nevertheless ideological revolts against this new tradition instituted by the bourgeoisie, a very capitalist tradition that depended on the activity of the workers. In the twentieth century, therefore, many people protested the status quo of this bourgeois culture. They questioned not only the values ​​of such a society, but also its literature, which they consciously or unconsciously thought about.

In the twentieth century, the French could not really protest against any economic misfortune, for France was then enjoying a wave of prosperity.[1] Other aspects of French society deserved the people's condemnation, however. Perhaps the most serious problem was imperialism, because of which France was at that time involved in many wars.[2] And, as Lenin's famous quote indicates, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Since the bourgeoisie had ruled France since the French Revolution in the eighteenth century—and since the nineteenth century was a golden age for the bourgeoisie—the twentieth century was the product of the bourgeois.[3] The bourgeoisie itself associated itself with the established Church, an essential phenomenon of an authority figure throughout history.[4] The tradition against which a malcontent would protest, then, was that of the bourgeoisie rather than that of the "old nobility of the sword."[5] In addition to the wars that France was waging at this time, and despite its economic boom, the workers were suffering. According to Anwar Youssef, while many people who made up the bourgeoisie "dominated the social edifice...the mass of workers and the people lived in the blackest misery."[6] The proletariat therefore desired an upheaval of the status quo. We see some of their rebellions in the twentieth century, such as those of the socialist organ "Worker of the Oise" and even the rise to power of the French Communist Party.[7] The twentieth century was in a sense a century of revolt, a reaction against the nineteenth century.

This era of reaction also concerned literature. Roland Barthes wrote extensively on this subject. It is important to note that he himself was an anti-bourgeois and Marxist figure, hoping for an upheaval of the nineteenth-century order.[8] In his own words, he lamented the state of a "proletariat excluded from all culture."[9] He describes the dominant literature, the traditional novel, of the nineteenth century in his essay, "The Writing of the Novel." Such a novel is distinguished by its use of the past simple and the third person, two symbols indicating that one has entered the world of the novel. But these characteristics of literature are also for him symbols of a bourgeois order. After all, we understand thanks to Barthes that the novel of this era is not separate from society, because "it is society that imposes the Novel, that is to say, a complex of signs. »[10] These signs—the simple past, the third person, and the narrative—allow the reader to recognize a familiar world, the one in which he lives. Barthes writes that "the narrative past is therefore part of a security system of Belles-Lettres…an image of an order…one of these many formal pacts established between the writer and society."[11] Moreover, in his book Mythologies , Barthes writes in a similar way that bourgeois and imperialist rhetoric sinks unconsciously into language.[12] In "The Writing of the Novel" Barthes writes that "The Novel is a product characterized…[by] a certain mythology of the universal, specific to bourgeois society"; the nineteenth-century novel thus becomes intrinsically bourgeois, a product of the society of the time, and in reading it the bourgeois system seems to be natural, inseparable from reality.[13] In short, according to Barthes, the bourgeoisie uses literature to universalize its values.[14] Given Barthes' political convictions, we know that he ultimately wanted to fight against such a naturalization of the bourgeois order.

What does Barthes propose to do, then? His solution can be found in his idea that we should despise the traditional novel in general. In an essay entitled "Triumph and Rupture of Bourgeois Writing," Barthes explains that writers must become "writers without literature," they must question the existence of literature.[15] The novel is too infected that one cannot depend on it. The use of radicalized writing is necessary in a literary world dominated by the bourgeoisie, in the same way that some Marxists declare that one can only respond to a politically bourgeois world through revolution. Moreover, if one has a radical message to express, according to Barthes, the form of the traditional novel can only confine and sabotage a writer.[16] As he argued in "The Death of the Author," his ideal, his goal, is to separate the novel from the author so that none of the bourgeois values ​​can enter into the writing.[17] Barthes wanted writers to distance themselves from the traditional novel as much as possible.

Barthes refers, for example, to Albert Camus throughout Writing Degree Zero as a model for the writing he describes when he talks about the death of the author and the distrust of bourgeois tradition. According to Rosette Lamont, Camus, who was not in fact overly Marxist, had anti-bourgeois sentiments, because he hated the false comfort and "received ideas" of the "average sensual man": "He denounces a way of thinking which blunts consciousness, robbing one of terror but of lucidity as well."[18] These beliefs echo Barthes's idea that the traditional novel perpetuates a bourgeois way of life, against which one must defend oneself, by reading as well as by writing. Otherwise, one might fall into the trap of believing that the world of the traditional novel is natural, and not a creation—in the same way that the novel is a creation—of a capitalist society.

What Barthes admires so much about Camus is what Barthes calls his "zero degree" style of writing. In this style, it is mostly an absence. According to Barthes, the main characteristics of the zero degree of writing include: "transparent speech," "a neutral state," "instrumentality," "a blank writing."[19] In short, the zero degree of writing is a kind of purest "journalism," entirely objective, an enumeration of events and facts that are not attached to symbolism.[20] While in the nineteenth-century novel the author played the role of a demiurge deliberately choosing what would be part of his novel to give it meaning, in the zero degree of writing the author erases himself from the text.[21] This literature of absence can therefore contain neither the simple past nor the third person. While the traditional novel hides behind a mask of nineteenth-century ideals, white writing aims for an objective truth as much as possible. Barthes writes: "White writing, that of Camus...is the last episode of a Passion for Writing, which follows step by step the tearing apart of the bourgeois conscience."[22] In Camus we find the same novel, in fact, that Barthes spoke of when he described how one should react to the traditional novel.

Barthes specifically refers to The Stranger , published in 1942, when he discusses Camus, but some features of white writing can also be found in The Fall , which was published in 1956—three years after the publication of Writing Degree Zero . The first page of The Stranger is distinguished by its use of the first person and the passé composé , and the first word—“Today”—recalls the present tense that Camus uses in The Fall .[23] Similar to The Stranger , The Fall also contains the first person and the passé composé when the narrator speaks. Already, Camus’s writing does not accord with the principles of the bourgeois novel; rather, it resembles a journalistic work that the reader cannot separate from reality. Through the use of the first person, the narrators—who are also the main characters of their respective novels—appear real people at the same time as the author disappears. Barthes would admire these anti-novels that show the reality of France and refuse to hide its faults and social constructions behind a mask. However, it is important to note the differences between the two texts, the most important of which is the existence of a discourse between the narrator and the reader in La Chute . According to Gérard Genette, the discourse is subjective, so that the story can be objective; thus, these two novels by Camus are distinguished, La Chute belonging to subjectivity and L'Étranger to objectivity.[24] We see thus that La Chute is not absolutely a model of the zero degree of writing, an idea accentuated by the fact that the narrator of La Chute uses the passé simple from time to time; for example, he says once while telling a story, "I went into the bathroom to drink a glass of water. My image smiled in the mirror, but it seemed to me that my smile was double." »[25] The zero degree of writing does not run through all of Camus' writing, then. Although Camus's political views agree with those of Barthes for the most part, it is possible that Camus did not have Barthes in mind when writing. (It is interesting that he wrote The Stranger before the publication of The Zero Degree of Writing.), and it is in this first where Camus is closest to Barthes). Nevertheless, Camus's aims of change can explain how his writing somewhat accidentally represented Barthes' ideal.

The advent of the idea of ​​the Nouveau Roman brought writing even closer to absolute objectivity, as Barthes desired. Alain Robbe-Grillet created this literary movement, and while Barthes could not speak of him in Le Degré zéro de l'écriture —Robbe-Grillet did not publish his famous work, Pour un nouveau roman , until 1963—he wrote several essays about the Nouveau Roman and Robbe-Grillet's novels, even an article aptly titled "Objective Literature."[26] Of course, Robbe-Grillet and his literary circle criticized the bourgeois novel as well as the bourgeoisie, and his writing thus had almost the same aim as Barthes'.[27] In the incipit of his essay "Une voie pour le roman futur" Robbe-Grillet writes that "the only novelistic conception current today is, in fact, that of Balzac. »[28] Balzac's novel is in fact the bourgeois novel, and Robbe-Grillet's subsequent argument for a new kind of novel indicates that he wants progress away from this novel. Robbe-Grillet proposes that writers should be less concerned with narrative and thoughts, concentrating instead on objects to eliminate the false meanings of the Balzacian novel.[29] After all, for Robbe-Grillet, "the world is neither meaningful nor absurd. It simply is."[30] In order to convey such a world as accurately as possible, he supported a form of writing without a clear plot or even adjectives, which could introduce artificial meanings to his text: a blank writing that would erase the bourgeois ideals that he himself perhaps had because he belonged to society.[31] A more radical experiment than those of Camus, the Nouveau Roman radically overturns the definition of a novel by getting rid of many of the traits of a conventional novel, and not only those of the traditional novel but those of today's novels.

Nathalie Sarraute was one of the writers in Robbe-Grillet's literary circle, and she was herself a proponent of the Nouveau Roman. Her novel Les Fruits d'or , published in 1963, gives voice to all of her theories. Of course, she uses the present tense and the first person. And although the third person is often used in her novel, the other experimental qualities of her style are emphasized. The novel gives the reader no solid meaning, no context except a critique of the bourgeoisie. It is as if we were seeing the objects of real life; the narrator simply presents them to us, in little pieces that we must put together, if we can. This Nouveau Roman seems to accomplish the goal of objectivity, to the point that we do not really know, at the end of the reading, what Sarraute herself thinks.

But Sarraute also shows an essential contradiction in the idea of ​​the Nouveau Roman. She was too interested in an idea she called 'tropisms,' and she even wrote a book with that word as its title. She defines 'tropisms' thus: "They are indefinable movements, which slip very quickly to the limits of our consciousness; they are at the origin of our gestures, of our words."[32] Indeed, what she is saying is that objectivity does not exist, too shocking an idea if one is a writer of the Nouveau Roman. But Les Fruits d'or reflects this paradox. Instead of objects, such as chairs, which Robbe-Grillet claimed were the focus of the Nouveau Roman, the only concrete object of importance in Les Fruits d'or is the work "Les Fruits d'or" that the characters are talking about. Otherwise, the objects of the novel are interactions between characters, and we receive the thoughts of these characters instead of some description of a material object. The objects she shows us are in fact the tropisms of each character, and therefore, those of everyone. Leah Hewitt explains this idea, saying that the novel is only a "pretext for the delineation of Sarraute's tropisms, that is, the movements of attraction and repulsion between characters" and then that "we undergo the movement of the tropism which doubles that of the characters."[33] The Golden Fruits shows , finally, the impossibility of a true New Novel.

Barthes himself admits the impossibility of such a novel as he desires. More than once in Writing Degree Zero , after speaking of the ideal novel, he makes a remark such as "nothing is more unfaithful than a blank writing" or "modernity begins with the search for an impossible Literature."[34] As Ronald Blogue explains—and as Sarraute has already shown us with her tropisms—objectivity does not exist in language and, consequently, in writing: "The naturalization of cultural paradigms…proves to be a universal, rather than a bourgeois, phenomenon, and thus an escape from it can no longer be the goal of a revolutionary writing."[35] But at the same time as Barthes continues to enumerate the inaccessible quality of his goal, he continues to speak of it, suggesting that one cannot recreate the true goal of writing, and that one should try nonetheless. The other option is to write an entirely bourgeois novel.

We thus see a hierarchy of literary radicalism and reaction against the nineteenth-century tradition: the Balzacian novel is at the bottom of this ladder, then novels of the same rank as The Stranger , then the Nouveau Roman, and finally, at the top, the ideal of Barthes. Barthes' ideal contains several contradictions that prevent a writer from reaching it. The most serious problem is that objectivity does not exist in something created by man. Furthermore, the fact that these writers inhabited a bourgeois society suggests that the subjectivity that would have entered into their writing would have been at least partially bourgeois. Moreover, we find a problem in the accessibility of such writing to workers, which should benefit some movement against the bourgeoisie. Here, as writing becomes more radical and less bourgeois, it becomes more esoteric; The novel most accessible to workers was perhaps the bourgeois novel, and one cannot imagine that many twentieth-century workers read The Golden Fruits . Finally, Barthes' ideology—a literary Marxism—is full of paradoxes and a malevolence that do not accord with his good intentions.

_{[1] Richard Brody, “The Uses of Mythologies,” The New Yorker .
[2] Ibid.
[3] Anwar Youssef, French Bourgeois Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries as Seen by Contemporary Writers (University of Strasbourg, 2011), 127-128.
[4] Ibid., 340.
[5] Ibid., 124.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., 340.
[8] Brody, “The Uses.”
[9] Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, followed by New Critical Essays (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 54.
[10] Ibid., 33.
[11] Ibid., 28-29.
[12] Brody, “The Uses. »
[13] Barthes, Degree Zero , 29.
[14] Ibid., 30.
[15] Ibid., 48-49.
[16] Ronald Bogue, “Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the Paradise of the Writerly Text,” Criticism 22 no. 2 (1980): 158.
[17] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Manteia 2, no. 5 (1968).
[18] Rosette Lamont, “The Anti-Bourgeois,” The French Review 34, no. 5 (1961): 445.
[19] Barthes, Degree Zero , 59-60.
[20] Ibid., 59.
[21] Ibid., 28.
[22] Ibid., 11.
[23] Albert Camus, The Stranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), 9.
[24] Genette, Figures II , 63.
[25] Albert Camus, The Fall (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 37-38.
[26] Bogue, “Roland Barthes,” 156.
[27] “Robbe-Grillet, Alain,” Encyclopedia.com .
[28] Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 17.
[29] Ibid., 23.
[30] Ibid., 21.
[31] Bogue, “Roland Barthes,” 161-162.
[32] Nathalie Sarraute, Complete Works (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 1553.
[33] Leah Hewitt, “Nathalie Sarraute's Les Fruits d'or : Literary Apples of Critical Discord,” Modern Language Studies 13, no. 3 (1983): 104.
[34] Barthes, Le Degré zéro , 61, 32.
[35] Bogue, “Roland Barthes,” 169.}

Barthes, Roland. The Zero Degree of Writing followed by New Critical Essays . Paris: Seuil, 1972.

Barthes, Roland. “The death of the author. » Manteia 2, no. 5 (1968): 61-67.

Bug, Ronald. “Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the Paradise of the Writerly Text. » Criticism 22, no. 2 (1980): 156-171.

Brody, Richard. “The Uses of Mythologies . » The New Yorker .

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Camus, Albert. The Stranger . Paris: Gallimard, 1942.

Genette, Gérard. Figures II . Paris: Seuil, 1969.

Hewitt, Leah. “Nathalie Sarraute’s Les Fruits d’or : Literary Apples of Critical Discord. » Modern Language Studies 13, no. 3 (1983): 104-111.

Lamont, Rosette. “The Anti-Bourgeois. » The French Review 34, no. 5 (1961): 445-453.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a new novel . Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

“Robbe-Grillet, Alain. » Encyclopedia.com. Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature.

Sarraute, Nathalie. Complete Works . Paris: Gallimard, 2011.

Youssef, Anwar. French Bourgeois Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries as Seen by Contemporary Writers . University of Strasbourg, 2011.