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Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Tr. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. viii-312 pp, $22.95.
Even though Roland Barthes died eight years ago, collections and translations of his works continue to appear regularly. And, for scholars interested in semiology, this is a fortunate legacy, because Barthes offers a lyrical, highly readable semiology in action-not necessarily applied semiology, but rather, an investigation of the connotations of semiology. In other words, a semiology investigating its own procedures, inclinations, and-most intensely in Barthes's work-its desires.
The twenty-three essays included in The Responsibility of Forms represent a wide-ranging body of works spanning the 1960s and 1970s, published collectively in French in 1982 as L'obvie et l'obtus. The English title demonstrates once again the unfortunate reluctance of American/English publishers to maintain even a semblance of the quirky, abstract titles of French works (in this case, The Obvious and the Obtuse) and instead substitute them with blandly palatable English titles. Moreover, this "other" title pinpoints the current of thought underlying Barthes's semiology-the urge to probe the signs of the obscure, or that which is obscured in our constant exposure to it. After all, professional wrestling, striptease, Einstein's brain, toys and margarine were among the subjects he explored in an early book, Mythologies, published in 1957 (1972 in English). Yet, Barthes probably would have appreciated the uncontrollable polysemy connected with these titles, a growth of play which almost ceaselessly broadens the reader's access to the text, since it was this same element which so frequently energizes his most penetrating writings.
Five of the essays in this collection appeared with others selected and translated by Stephen Heath as Image-Music-Text (1977), but are translated here by Richard Howard, who also has translated many of Barthes's other books. The Responsibility of Forms is divided into two sections: Writing the Visible and Music's Body, indicating the spirited eclecticism of these essays, prefaces and reviews which vary from only a few pages in length to up to thirty pages. Some ("The Spirit of the Letter," "Wilhelm von Gloeden," "Is Painting a Language?") are light, fragmentary excursions of surprising depth. Others ("Réquichot and His Body," "The Greek Theater") are dense investigations approaching the realm of academic treatises. Barthes's...