Barthes by Tiphaine Samoyault

Author:Tiphaine Samoyault
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

The house

By 1960, the villa in Hendaye, though pleasant enough, had turned out to be much too close to the bustle of tourists in the summer to be a real retreat; the family now started to look for an alternative near Bayonne. It was not that Barthes had been unable to work in the previous dwelling – he had written ‘Myth Today’ there, as well as almost all of The Language of Fashion – but Etchetoa was located between the beach and the road to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and it was noisy in the summer. Apparently, his mother was not entirely comfortable there either, as is shown by the last note in the Mourning Diary: ‘Hendaye / Not very happy / it was an inheritance.’81 Though Barthes enjoyed going to the beach from time to time, in Biarritz or Hossegor, to listen to the sea and watch people, he could not take time off to do this every day. At best, the beach was a place for meditation when there was nobody about, early in the morning, or a place for observation when it was crowded. It was also a space in the process of transformation, one that created a difference between previous times and the present. For example, one of the pages in Barthes’s diary refers to this passage of time, with its existential and sociological resonances: ‘Yesterday, on the beach at Hossegor, the weather was gorgeous, a lot of people (it was Sunday, too). Uneasy feelings, as far as I was concerned: this adolescent place that I have known deserted, uninhabited, aristocratic – it used to be called “the wild sea”, these days little hotels, krapfen, balloons, doughnuts, the densely crowded beach thronged with people, cars, etc.; an image that sums up France: neither aristocratic, nor even middle class, nor even “working class”, just full of people. What I am most struck by is the way the French now have clean feet, whereas in my past, ordinary people had dirty feet; even when they were washed, they were caked with filth, horribly soiled.’82 Rather than the instructive but aggressive and distracting seaside, Barthes preferred the countryside, which provided a counterpart to the city. The choice of the Barthes family fell on Urt, a village of some 2,000 residents on the banks of the Adour, in the borderland between the Basque Country and the Landes. Here, they settled on a house called Carboué, which they bought in March 1961. The villa Etchetoa was finally sold in September 1963. In 1960, Barthes was already spending a great part of his summer in what was still a rented property, charmed by the peace and quiet of the place, which reminded him closely of his childhood. The house, a massive white cube built on a bend of the village road, looked out on all four sides: on one, there was a modest garden that had the advantage of being largely out of sight of passers-by. The road that led to and past it was,

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