Writing Degree Zero

*Writing Degree Zero* is one of those 100-page books you need a 500-page book to really understand. You know you're in trouble when, like me, you find yourself having a problem fully comprehending even the `explanatory' preface. In which, by the way, Susan Sontag warns of the difficulty of the text and states that *Writing Degree Zero* serves as a kind of précis of Barthes' early views that presupposes the reader's familiarity with the literary argument of the time, specifically as it was presented in Sartre's book on the subject *What is Literature?* That all said, there was still much that I found of interest in this slim volume. The main thrust of the argument seems to be the `impossible' dilemma inherent in the act of writing. And, by `writing,' we mean here the act at its highest level of intent. How, for instance, can the writer compose an authentic text when the very tools he's forced to use--the conventions of language and Literature--are those that belong to a tradition he had no part in choosing, let alone creating? How can he write a text socially and historically engaged in the present when this tradition is handed to him from the past? How can he avoid slipping into cliché, commercialism, and sloganistic propaganda, all pitfalls of the present, and yet still make himself understood and relevant to his time? Barthes makes much of the distinction between speaking and writing, the former more genuine than the latter in his view, inasmuch as speech is less bound by `Order,' which is, by its very nature, always closed and authoritarian. Yet all attempts to convert the idiosyncratic, free-form rhythms and authenticity of speech into text ((as in the works of Celine)) remains, in the final analysis, when written, artifice. What's a writer to do? Barthes advances the notion of `modes of writing,' a conscious attempt on the part of the writer to approach the act of writing by first choosing from among various strategies of presentation. He also speaks of a `neutral' manner of writing, `degree zero,' but he's quick to point out that this can also degenerate into a mere mannerism and, in its turn, become just another literary convention to escape. It seems to me that Barthes is saying that a writer is trapped, like a rat in a box, condemned to chasing its own tail. Perhaps the only possible escape is for a writer to constantly switch `modes of writing,' to invent new ones for every utterance? Well, that's my own solution, but if Barthes thought it were as simple as that, you'd think he would have said so, right? Besides, what do I know? I think I was practically making up my own theories as I went along in trying to understand what I was reading. Abbreviated, dense, and elusive as it might be, as intellectually handicapped as I might be, *Writing Degree Zero* is so full of intriguing insights and lines of thought that even understanding maybe one-third of it, I felt it was time well spent. It has certainly inspired me to read further into