Roland Barthes in China; or how to plumb the depths of professorial vacuity...

By Dilip - Thursday, June 23, 2022

ROLAND BARTHES IN CHINA

(Simon Leys; re-published in his book of essays: The Hall of Uselessness, 2014)

Sed perseverare... (To err is human, (but) to persist is diabolical)

IN APRIL and May of 1974, Roland Barthes made a trip to China with a small group of his friends from the review Tel Quel. This visit coincided with a colossal, bloody purge launched nation-wide by the Maoist regime. This was the famous and sinister “campaign of denunciation of Lin Biao and Confucius” (pi Lin pi Kong). Upon his return, Barthes published an article in Le Monde which offered a strangely jolly view of this totalitarian violence: “Its very name - Pilin-Pikong in Chinese - has the joyful tinkle of a sleigh-bell, and the campaign comprises made-up games: a caricature, a poem, a children’s sketch during which, suddenly, a little girl in make-up assails the ghost of Lin Biao between two ballet dances: the political Text (and it alone) gives rise to these little ‘happenings.’”

At the time, reading this immediately put me in mind of a passage from Lu Xun, the most inspired Chinese pamphleteer of the twentieth century: “Our Chinese civilisation, so highly vaunted, is nothing but a feast of human flesh prepared for the rich and powerful, and what we call China is merely the kitchen where this stew is concocted. Those who praise us are to be excused only inasmuch as they do not know what they are talking about, like those foreigners whose high positions and pampered lives have rendered them completely blind and obtuse.”

Two years later, Barthes’s article was republished as a luxurious slim volume intended for collectors. The author had added a postface, which prompted me to make the following remarks:

Mr. Barthes explains what made his report so original (an originality that vulgar fanatics so badly misapprehended at the time): his objective, he tells us, was to attempt a new kind of commentary, a “commentary in the register of ‘no comment’” which would be a way of “suspending an utterance without thereby nullifying it.” Mr. Barthes, who already has many claims on the esteem of scholars, now seems to have acquired another one, which should earn him immortality, by inventing the unheard-of category of a “discourse neither affirmative, nor negative, nor yet neutral” - “the desire for silence as a special form of discourse.”

By virtue of this discovery, all of whose implications are not immediately discernible, he has contrived – amazingly - to bestow an entirely new dignity upon the age-old activity, so long unjustly disparaged, of saying nothing at great length. It surely behooves us, in the name of all those old biddies who chatter away every afternoon between five and six in their tea shoppes, to offer Mr. Barthes a resounding thank you. Finally, in the same postface - and there must be many people for whom this is the strongest reason of all to be grateful to Mr. Barthes - he defines the intellectual’s proper role in the world of today, his true function, his honour and his dignity, as the valiant maintenance - in face of and in opposition to “the never-ending parading of the Phallus” by the politically committed and other unpleasant proponents of “brute meaning” - of an exquisite trickle of lukewarm water from a tiny spigot.

And now the same publisher has offered us the text of notes that Barthes made daily about various events and experiences on that famous trip. I wondered whether reading this journal might perhaps alter my opinion.

In his notebooks, Barthes scrupulously records, one after the other, the endless servings of propaganda dished up during visits to agricultural communes, factories, schools, zoos, hospitals, and so forth. For example: “Vegetables: last year, 230 million pounds + apples, pears, grapes, rice, maize, wheat; 22,000 pigs + ducks…. irrigation works: 550 electric pumps; mechanisation: tractors + 140 monoculturalists… Transport: 110 trucks, 770 teams of draught animals; 11,000 families = 47,000 people ... = 21 production brigades, 146 production teams….” And precious information of this kind is supplied over some two hundred pages, punctuated by brief, very elliptical personal notes, e.g.: “Lunch: look, it’s French fries!”; “Forgot to wash my ears”; “Pissotières”; “What I’m deprived of: no coffee, no salad, no flirting”; “Migraines”; “Nausea.” Only the rarest rays of sunshine interrupt the fatigue, greyness, and ever-worsening boredom - as for instance a long and tender squeeze of the hand from a “charming worker.”

Could the spectacle of an immense country terrorised and stupefied by the rhinoceritis of Maoism have entirely anaesthetised Barthes’s capacity for outrage? The only trace of indignation seems to have been reserved by him for the atrocious food served on the flight home: “The Air France lunch is so vile (pear-shaped rolls, exhausted chicken in a greasy sauce, dyed salad, floury cabbage tasting of chocolate - and no more champagne!) that I’m on the verge of writing a letter of complaint.” [My emphasis.]

But let us not be unfair: anyone may write down a mass of nonsense for private use; we can reasonably be judged only on our public pronouncements. Whatever one might think of Barthes, no one can deny that he had intelligence and good taste. No wonder, therefore, that he carefully refrained from publishing these jottings. But then who in God’s name decided to proceed with this dismaying exhumation? If this strange initiative originated with his friends, we should probably recall Vigny’s warning that “A friend is no more malicious than the next man.”

In the January 2009 issue of Magazine Littéraire, Philippe Sollers claimed that these notebooks exemplify the virtue of “common decency,” as lauded by George Orwell. It seems to me, to the contrary, that by virtue of what he fails to say Barthes manifests an uncommon indecency. In any case Sollers’s comparison is incongruous: Orwell’s “common decency” is grounded in simplicity, honesty and courage; Barthes certainly had qualities, but not those particular ones. The only words of George Orwell that spring readily to mind apropos of the “Chinese” writings of Barthes (and of his friends at Tel Quel) are these: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

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