The Writings of Roland Barthes 121even suggested (Greimas 2000: ‘arrivé’, xii) that Greimas got bored
with fashion and passed the job on to Barthes.^7
The final element of the conjuncture in which Barthes began to
work on clothing was the growth of the ‘new novel’ in France. The
rich beginning of Barthes’s 1961 essay ‘From Gemstones to Jewellery’
(see Chapter 5 here), which considers the hard, objectified nature of
the origins of gemstones and their mythical appeal, seems strongly
redolent of Barthes’s early championing of the nouveau roman in the
1950s, especially in relation to Jean Cayrol and alain robbe-Grillet. In
the nouveau roman Barthes championed in particular its ‘chosisme’
(thingism). objects or things in literature, suggested Barthes, could
be a reminder of humanity’s ‘station’ in a post-holocaust, post-
Einsteinian, mass communication world where consumerism tended
to invest in objects a widespread mythic status. Literary ‘chosisme’
was a counterbalance to an incipient anthropomorphism, because
it denied the pathetic fallacy or commodity fetishism with which we
tended to invest objects around us. ‘Chosisme’ also fitted with the
growing interest in structuralism of the mid-1950s where inanimate
objects were matt, meaningless, paradoxically transparent, in stark
contrast to human objects; but these inanimate objects were swiftly
contaminated by the meaning-making machine of human society of
communication and expression. In good structural terms, to posit a
world where objects just are was not only a view reminiscent of Sartre’s
description in Nausea of the experience of the facticity of ‘things’. To
invoke the simple ‘thereness’ of objects was also in opposition to
humanity’s inability in a social situation (that is, where there is more than
one person) to avoid meaning, whether created actively or passively.
This had an important bearing on clothing and human appearance in
general.
If, in Sartrian terms, we only exist for the ‘other’, then, by golly, the
individual will do it to the best of their ability by sending out, continuously,
self-confirming radar signals, bouncing them like bats off other animate
objects in order to find their way. In this ‘impersonalist’ view of human
identity, the other (others) are mere sounding boards, mirrors for
each of our attempts to affirm and confirm our characters which are
increasingly perceived as multivalent. The problem for an individualist
impersonalism is that everyone, that is all of those ‘others’ who are
‘confirming’ our individual existence, are all also doing exactly the