4.03.2006
Writing Degree Zero (Narrative)
Title
Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.
Field
Narrative
Summary
In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes links up literature, form, and history to think about the rise of the bourgeois novel and an ethics of writing. In the classical period (this is in France, like mid 15th C, I believe, not the Greeks or anything), language was literature, transparent. Towards the end of the 18th C, "Literature is no longer felt as a socially privileged mode of transaction, but as a language having a body and hidden depths, existing both as dream and menace." (3) "What we can do here is to sketch this connection; to affirm the existence of a formal reality independent of language and style; to try to show that this third dimension of Form equally, and not without an additional tragic implication, binds the writer to his society; finally to convey the fact that there is no Literature without an Ethic of language." (6) Barthes begins by linking style and history - style is given, inescapable, to the writer by history - what has come before and constitued it. It is vertical, not horizontal like speech, not the product of language - "style is never anything but metaphor, that is, equivalence of the author's literary intention and carnal structure."(12) Writers hav a choice of tone when writing, it seems, but writing is the (historically bounded) choice, style and language are givens. "A language and a style are blind forces; a mode of writing is an act of historically solidarity."(14) As such, "Writing is precisely this compromise between freedom and remembrance." (16) Barthes talks a bit about political writing and moves into a discussion of the novel as masking and unmasking of the real. "This has to be related to a certain mythology of the unversal typifying the bourgeois society of which the Novel is a characteristic product; it involved giving to the imaginary the formal guarantee of the real, but while preserving in the sign the ambiguity of the double object, at once believable and false."(33) "This is what writing does in the novel. Its task is to put the mask in place and at the same time point it out."(34) He discusses the way the preterite and the third person mask and unmask. Barthes asks if there is any Poetic Writing? (No.) Or at least there was, when poetry was mored to prose in an additive sense. In modern poetry, language has become unmoored: "The Word, here, is encyclopaedic, it contains simultaneously all the acceptations from which a relational discourse might have required it to choose. It therefore achieves a state which is possible only in the dictionary or poetry - places where the noun can live without its article - and is reduced to a sort of zero degree, pregnant with all past and future specifications."(48) Barthes then looks at bourgeois writing in the second part of this book - noting that the Revolution did not change the form or style of this type of writing. By 1850, literature is judged in terms of its labor - "Labor replaces genius as a value, so to speak; thre is a kind of ostentation in claiming to labour so long and lovingly over the form of one's work." (63) Writers take on a naturalist aesthetic, which paradoxically, is completely unnatural in the amount of labour it must perform to seem natural. Revolutionary writing is condemned to continually write in non revolutionary ways because it will always recapitulate to codification - this is the tragedy of history. Further, it can only dissolve itself, tend towards annihilation "In a perpetual flight forward from a disorderly syntax, the disintegration of language can only lead to the silence of writing."(75) This is where Barthes advocates a Writing Degree Zero: "to create a colourless writing, freed from all bondage to a pre-ordained state of language...the new neutral writing takes its place in the midst of all those ejaculations and judgements, without becoming involved in any of them; it consists precisely in their absence. But this absence is complete, it implies no refuge, no secret; one cannot therefore say tha tit is an impassive mode of writing, rather, that it is innocent." (77) However, this writing can never be. "Unfortunately, nothing is more fickle than colourless writing; mechanical habits are developed in the very place where freedom existed, a network of set forms hem in more and more the pristine freshness of discourse, a mode of writing appears afresh in lieu of an indefinite language."(78) Finally in terms of ethics (of course the above was about ethics), Barthes speaks of the possibility for a new humanism: "the general suspicion which has gradually overtaken language throughout modern literature gives way to a reconciliation between the logos of the writer and that of men. Only then can the writer declare himself entirely committed, when his poetic freedom takes its place within a verbal condition whose limits are those of society and not those of a convention or a public." (83) "Like all modern art in its entirety, literary writin caries at the same time the alienation of History and the dream of History; as a Necessity, it testifies to the division of languages which is inseperable from the division of classes, as Freedom, it is the consciousness of this division and the very effort which seeks to surmount it...The proliferation of modes of writing brings a new Literature into being in so far as the latter invents its language only in order to be a project: Literature becomes the Utopia of language."(88)
Keywords
Literature, Form, Writing, History,Style, Secret
Other Thoughts
"In those neutral modes of writing, called here 'the zero degree of writing,' we can easily discern a negative momentum, and an inability to maintain it within time's flow, as if Literature, having tended for a hundred years now to transmute its surface into a form with no antecedents, could no longer find purity anywhere but in the absence of all sings, finally proposing a realization of this Orphean dream: a writer without Literature."(5)
"Writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in something beyond language, it develops like a seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the threat of a secret, it is an anti-communication, it is intimidating."(20)
"Since writing is the spectacular commitment of language, it contains at one and the same time, thanks to a valuable ambiguity, the reality and the appearnace of power, what it is, and what it would like to be thought to be: a history of political modes of writing would therefore be the best of social phenomenologies."(25)
"The Novel is a Death; it transforms life into destiny, a memory into a useful act, duration into an orientated and meaningful time. But this transformation can be accomplished only in full view of society. It is society which imposes the Novel, that is, a complex of signs, as a transcendence and as the History of a duration."(39)
Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.
Field
Narrative
Summary
In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes links up literature, form, and history to think about the rise of the bourgeois novel and an ethics of writing. In the classical period (this is in France, like mid 15th C, I believe, not the Greeks or anything), language was literature, transparent. Towards the end of the 18th C, "Literature is no longer felt as a socially privileged mode of transaction, but as a language having a body and hidden depths, existing both as dream and menace." (3) "What we can do here is to sketch this connection; to affirm the existence of a formal reality independent of language and style; to try to show that this third dimension of Form equally, and not without an additional tragic implication, binds the writer to his society; finally to convey the fact that there is no Literature without an Ethic of language." (6) Barthes begins by linking style and history - style is given, inescapable, to the writer by history - what has come before and constitued it. It is vertical, not horizontal like speech, not the product of language - "style is never anything but metaphor, that is, equivalence of the author's literary intention and carnal structure."(12) Writers hav a choice of tone when writing, it seems, but writing is the (historically bounded) choice, style and language are givens. "A language and a style are blind forces; a mode of writing is an act of historically solidarity."(14) As such, "Writing is precisely this compromise between freedom and remembrance." (16) Barthes talks a bit about political writing and moves into a discussion of the novel as masking and unmasking of the real. "This has to be related to a certain mythology of the unversal typifying the bourgeois society of which the Novel is a characteristic product; it involved giving to the imaginary the formal guarantee of the real, but while preserving in the sign the ambiguity of the double object, at once believable and false."(33) "This is what writing does in the novel. Its task is to put the mask in place and at the same time point it out."(34) He discusses the way the preterite and the third person mask and unmask. Barthes asks if there is any Poetic Writing? (No.) Or at least there was, when poetry was mored to prose in an additive sense. In modern poetry, language has become unmoored: "The Word, here, is encyclopaedic, it contains simultaneously all the acceptations from which a relational discourse might have required it to choose. It therefore achieves a state which is possible only in the dictionary or poetry - places where the noun can live without its article - and is reduced to a sort of zero degree, pregnant with all past and future specifications."(48) Barthes then looks at bourgeois writing in the second part of this book - noting that the Revolution did not change the form or style of this type of writing. By 1850, literature is judged in terms of its labor - "Labor replaces genius as a value, so to speak; thre is a kind of ostentation in claiming to labour so long and lovingly over the form of one's work." (63) Writers take on a naturalist aesthetic, which paradoxically, is completely unnatural in the amount of labour it must perform to seem natural. Revolutionary writing is condemned to continually write in non revolutionary ways because it will always recapitulate to codification - this is the tragedy of history. Further, it can only dissolve itself, tend towards annihilation "In a perpetual flight forward from a disorderly syntax, the disintegration of language can only lead to the silence of writing."(75) This is where Barthes advocates a Writing Degree Zero: "to create a colourless writing, freed from all bondage to a pre-ordained state of language...the new neutral writing takes its place in the midst of all those ejaculations and judgements, without becoming involved in any of them; it consists precisely in their absence. But this absence is complete, it implies no refuge, no secret; one cannot therefore say tha tit is an impassive mode of writing, rather, that it is innocent." (77) However, this writing can never be. "Unfortunately, nothing is more fickle than colourless writing; mechanical habits are developed in the very place where freedom existed, a network of set forms hem in more and more the pristine freshness of discourse, a mode of writing appears afresh in lieu of an indefinite language."(78) Finally in terms of ethics (of course the above was about ethics), Barthes speaks of the possibility for a new humanism: "the general suspicion which has gradually overtaken language throughout modern literature gives way to a reconciliation between the logos of the writer and that of men. Only then can the writer declare himself entirely committed, when his poetic freedom takes its place within a verbal condition whose limits are those of society and not those of a convention or a public." (83) "Like all modern art in its entirety, literary writin caries at the same time the alienation of History and the dream of History; as a Necessity, it testifies to the division of languages which is inseperable from the division of classes, as Freedom, it is the consciousness of this division and the very effort which seeks to surmount it...The proliferation of modes of writing brings a new Literature into being in so far as the latter invents its language only in order to be a project: Literature becomes the Utopia of language."(88)
Keywords
Literature, Form, Writing, History,Style, Secret
Other Thoughts
"In those neutral modes of writing, called here 'the zero degree of writing,' we can easily discern a negative momentum, and an inability to maintain it within time's flow, as if Literature, having tended for a hundred years now to transmute its surface into a form with no antecedents, could no longer find purity anywhere but in the absence of all sings, finally proposing a realization of this Orphean dream: a writer without Literature."(5)
"Writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in something beyond language, it develops like a seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the threat of a secret, it is an anti-communication, it is intimidating."(20)
"Since writing is the spectacular commitment of language, it contains at one and the same time, thanks to a valuable ambiguity, the reality and the appearnace of power, what it is, and what it would like to be thought to be: a history of political modes of writing would therefore be the best of social phenomenologies."(25)
"The Novel is a Death; it transforms life into destiny, a memory into a useful act, duration into an orientated and meaningful time. But this transformation can be accomplished only in full view of society. It is society which imposes the Novel, that is, a complex of signs, as a transcendence and as the History of a duration."(39)
# posted by SMRT : 1:44 PM
