When I woke up this morning I was thinking about Barthes’ relationship with Bachelard. Greatly influenced by Sartre in his jeunesse, I think the early Barthes has also gone through a Bachelardian period. In Barthes’ earlier masterpiece of literary criticism on Cayrol he writes:
“[T]his description spares nothing, it slides across the surface of everything, but its sliding lacks the euphoria of flight or swimming, it acquires no resonance from the noble substances of the poetic image-repertoire, the aerial or the liquid; it is terrestrial sliding…”
And then:
In Cayrol, where seascapes abound, from Dieppe to Biarritz, the wind is always sharp; it is faintly cutting, but, more certainly than deep cold, causes constant shivering, without, however, altering the progress of events, without astonishing …The world continues, familiar and close at hand, and yet one feels the cold.” (184)
It’s rather rare that Barthes writes with such simple sense of freedom and breeziness. No twisting, no irony. Only the straightforward touch of the elements. And this virtue belongs to Bachelard.
It’s curious but the fundamentals of interesting French criticism may boil down to three Bs: Bachelard, Blanchot, and Barthes. From there you can follow the axes of Bachelard-Richard, and Barthes-Genette. Main body of the critical vocabulary is all offered by them, collectively. And this is something I’ll have to write up one day, summing up not their history but their geography.
