Barthes’s Menippean Moment: Creative Criticism 1966–70

Abstract

Using an unpublished seminar that Roland Barthes delivered in 1966–7, this chapter considers the challenge to rewrite, re-use, and ‘re-cover’ other writers’ texts. It shows, first in Critique et vérité, then across the seminar ‘La linguistique du discours’, and finally in the 1970 essay S/Z, that Barthes was developing a creative, literary-critical, practice rather than promoting ‘la nouvelle critique’. In this spirit of creative criticism, using Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Menippus, Barthes designed his radical approach to Balzac in S/Z. An egregious reading of Barthes’s approach notwithstanding (Bremond and Pavel, 1998), three elements are identified in his essayistic rewriting of Balzac’s Sarrasine that point to creative criticism: digression, drama, and historiality. These techniques allow Barthes’s essay both to distance and bring nearer the ‘tutor-text’ Sarrasine which, written in 1830, raised important questions about the cusp of modernity, and how to write criticism as literature.