Notes (on the Index Card)

Abstract

OCTOBER 112, Spring 2005, pp. 35–44. © 2005 Denis Hollier. 1. Leiris and Barthes belong to very distinct intellectual universes, two literary generations: Leiris, that of Surrealism and existentialism; Barthes, that of structuralism and poststructuralism. One could easily draw up one of those two-column tables of binary opposites that Barthes, being a structuralist, liked so much: opera, for example, a very high plus in Leiris’s column, would be a very low minus in Barthes’s (expressive repertory); the same with teaching—or any kind of public speaking— which Leiris hated and dreaded, while for Barthes his seminar was a source of pleasure and inspiration. Nothing seems more distant from the “Objective literature” Barthes advocated in his manifesto-like article on Robbe-Grillet than Leiris’s systematic use of the autobiographical first person. Certainly Leiris became an admirer of Barthes when Barthes unexpectedly shifted toward the first-person singular (Leiris dedicated one of his last essays to Barthes), while Barthes’s autobiographical turn of the late 1960s (The Pleasure of the Text) led him to take positions and perform gestures, to affirm values that, with the years, were to bring him surprisingly close to those associated with Leiris, the most striking of which might be the increasing recourse to the autobiographical mode of utterance as a means of escaping what he came to call the arrogance of theory. Leiris often associated his autobiographical inspiration with the deep uneasiness he felt in assuming the authority of the one who speaks for others. (Hence, in fact, the intensely uncanny absence of others in La Regle du jeu [The Rules of the Game].) As for Barthes, he used the first person more and more as a linguistic tool to dampen the “fascistic” dimension of language: “An egotistic writing cannot be arrogant,” as he says in his seminar on The Neutral. But they share another common feature, one that may be more anecdotal, more contingent: both left an impressive volume of index cards or slips. There are 399 cards filed in Leiris’s box for La Regle du jeu1 and, according to Nathalie Leger, one of the curators of the Barthes exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in 2002, there are 12,250 slips in Roland Barthes’s bequest at Institut Memoires de l’edition contemporaine (IMEC).2