Roland Barthes: A Biography

A biography eager to deplete its already diminished source materials; a biography that declares the homosexuality of its subject, but couples such declaration with a loyalty oath to the closet, pledging to imitate Barthes, his lovers, and (no doubt) his heirs in upholding the closet's high valuation on discretion; or that in classic fashion channels the author's own unease with homosexuality ("like everyone else" indeed) into bullying readers who had better be satisfied with the interest they aren't finding - such a biography inspires scant faith in either its intelligence or its integrity.

For make no mistake, it is not simply the names of Barthes' lovers being withheld here. The love affairs themselves have vanished from the account, along with any affective texture they may have displayed. The names that apparently do contribute to the book's interest include that of a straight man who turned Barthes down and those of a Swiss girl on whom Barthes once "made quite an impression" and of the sanatorium director's wife with whom Barthes, while a patient there, "was rumored to be having an affair." Even when Barthes' gay sex life is conducted anonymously, Calvet keeps it as misty as a hammam and more elusive than a hustler's heart. Unwilling to devote a sentence to embodying Barthes' sexual preferences, Calvet spends half a page retailing an episode in which some dopey hanger-on asks Barthes whether he would ever consider making an exception to them - say, if Julia Kristeva were willing. And it's down the rabbit hole. (In Sarah Wykes, Calvet has been matched with a translator whose ineptitude surpasses his unconscious dreams. Kristeva's reply when told of the above incident - "I don't know if things could have gone that far [si loin]" - Wykes renders, "I don't know if things could have gone further," tempting us to think that things had progressed to a couple of necking sessions at least.)

Calvet pays a heavy price for his respect for the closet, and pays it in the very coin of his book's "interest." For starters, though Barthes was an important figure on the postwar French intellectual scene (and arguably the best literary critic on the planet in the late 20th century), his importance emerges from his writing, not from a life that, once he bids farewell to tuberculosis and sanatorium, appears to follow the banal course of a successful academic career. Perhaps the only person who could have made this life rich in incident was the one who did, in his own biography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. After Calvet has acquiesced in the heirs' censorship and accomplished his own, how much truly new material remains to tell a story, or draw a portrait, that we don't already know from Barthes' representation of himself? Apparently not a great deal: for the most part Calvet only retraces the schemes provided in Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Incidents, the late essays.

To generate book length under such conditions, the author resorts to an art of amplification that would be the envy of all students who have ever had to sit an exam they are not entirely prepared for. Is Barthes from Bayonne? Bring on Ernest Hemingway's description of the town from The Sun Also Rises. Did Barthes stay at the sanatorium of Saint Hilaire? Let follow a breathless description of the view from the terraces, complete with the information that the setting is ideal for hang gliding. Every event of Barthes' life is wrapped in fluffy tissue of historical background (type: "Europe was on the brink of war," "May '68 was fast approaching") or framed with heavy feuilletonesque ironies (type: he-did-not-know-at-the-time). And the compost is under constant irrigation by a flow of utterly inconsequential speculation. In a dazzlingly irrelevant conclusion, Calvet, noting the recent collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe, ruminates on what Barthes "might have had to say" about these events - as though such political commentary had been Barthes' stock in trade and not what he tried hard to avoid.

Lost too in this awkward shuffling is any developed sense of the only things that might make a reader pick up this volume: Barthes' own texts. Though Calvet pumps in summaries of every major work as soon as he reaches its publication date, their quality, of a glibness that recalls jacket copy, suggests they are only another means of padding. His insistent but unevolved thesis - that Barthes used the leading ideas of his time merely to express his own literary sensibility - reveals only the thoroughness with which he has benumbed Barthes' nervous, even nervy self-understanding into a thought-resistant idee recue. Unsurprisingly, Calvet finds "no link between Barthes' own sexuality and the content of his texts," but one cannot suppose that someone who invites us to wonder why Barthes ever studied women's fashion, "since he was not really interested in women," is looking very hard.