Sent to the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, an elite school adjacent to the Sorbonne, he seemed destined for the prestigious cole Normale Superieure.Įven advertisers began to take the new discipline seriously. A precocious child, while still a teenager he tried his hand at a satirical Platonic dialogue and a novel, and was a founding member of a small anti-fascist group, the Defense Republicaine Antifasciste. He was brought up, first in Bayonne and then in Paris, in an almost exclusively feminine world like so many intel- lectuals, including his mentor Sartre, he was cosseted, indulged, lonely and, yes, bored. Barthes' father died in the First World War, when Barthes was still a baby: "No father to kill, no family to hate, no milieu to reject: great Oedipal frustration", as he put it. It is ironic that he should be the subject of a biography.
Barthes was the theorist who famously proclaimed "the death of the author" and set himself against biographical interpretation. Unfortunately, any reviewer of this Life is almost compelled to open with a point itself tediously obvious. ROLAND BARTHES had a morbid, near- hysterical fear of beinand to discover what the author "really meant", refused the opportunity for stimulation "texts" and "discourses" could offer.
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