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In 1963, Roland Barthes published Sur Racine, a volume that included a book and essay on Racine he had first published three years earlier. Barthes's version of the Racinian hero—a narrative function of binary linguistic structures and unconscious desires—was a rude defamiliarization of canonical French literature. At the time, Barthes was not even an agrègé; his thesis had been refused, he still had something of an outsider's status, and he was assuredly no expert on Racine. Raymond Picard, a leading Racine specialist, editor, and biographer at the Sorbonne, responded to Barthes in punishing fashion in 1965 with Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture. Barthes replied in turn to Picard the following year with Critique et vérité, which frankly cast his own work as an insurrection against a literary police state in which Picard was a too-zealous officer. To Picard's reproach that Barthes' analysis was both unschooled and pseudo-scientific, Barthes answered that traditional literary history's obsession with the author and his intentions ignored the primary literary object. A true “science of literature” would focus, via linguistic models but also by making the critic an active and creative reader of texts, on the language that was the precondition of author and intentions alike. The tragic Racinian stage was itself being reproduced in the form of critical polemic, though Barthes's publishers (Seuil) risked turning the entire drama into farce in their zeal to capitalize on what François Dosse describes as the “Homeric combat” (1: 223) being played out vigorously in the Parisian press. Barthes's Criticism and Truth appeared in bookstores wrapped by a promotional band asking, “Should Barthes Be Burned?” By trumpeting the contest as a question of heresy, Seuil cleverly exploited the fact that a rather arcane intellectual development had become a cause célèbre among the general public. It also demonstrated how deeply and uniquely French the whole affair really was.
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