A few months ago, I began rereading Roland Barthes. Probably the greatest French critic of the last century, Barthes is associated, in the heads of most undergraduates and dilettantes, with two things. The first is semiotics, or the study of signs; at the end of his life, he even held the impressive-sounding Chair in Literary Semiology (a title of his own choosing, apparently) at the Collège de France. The second is his essay, “The Death of the Author”, in which he described the author’s passing, adding, provocatively, “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.” Make no mistake: Barthes was not composing an elegy to the author in this essay — he was announcing, with all the peremptory energy of a young capitalist who’s taken over a very old franchise, that the author had been sacked.

Let none of this intimidate you. For Barthes was, primarily, a wonderful writer — as great and gifted a writer (sometimes greater) as some of the most well-known poets and novelists of the 20th century. Trite though this might sound, Barthes is genuinely someone in whom categories such as poet, fiction-writer, essayist, and critic break down. For all his polemical championing of the reader, Barthes’s work is a striking assertion of the fact that what matters, and what is at issue, is writing itself; that generic definitions — novel, short story, essay, poem — are helpful but ultimately constraining.

And, in fact, Barthes is at his most brilliant when attacking genre and its window-dressing. In his first book, the brief Writing Degree Zero (1957), he took on, among other things, the realist novel and its pervasive conventions, which permeate, particularly, history-writing. By the ‘realist novel’, I hasten to add, Barthes wouldn’t have meant a genre that’s the opposite of, say, the ‘fantasy novel’ as we understand it now — the latter ranging from Marquez to Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. Barthes would have found in the ‘fantasy’ genre many of the same tiresome conventions that made, for him, the realist novel such a chore. In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes quotes Paul Valéry’s shrewd observation that novels always seem to begin with a sentence like “The Marchioness went out at five o’ clock.” The simple past tense (of which that sentence is an example), inaugurates, Barthes says, an “unreal time” — the time of “novels, cosmogonies, and histories”. It’s a kind of time that suppresses the “uncertainty of existence” — Gabriel Josipovici, more faithful to the French original, translates the phrase as the “trembling of existence”. For one who’s identified with bringing the word ‘text’ into currency (along with Jacques Derrida), it’s worth recalling that what Barthes desired was liberation, joy, and sensation; and that he found these in the ‘trembling’ and ‘uncertainty’ of life. And the mode of writing that approaches this ‘trembling’, this disruption, most closely, is poetry — not, for Barthes, simply a series of words in rhyme and metre, but an ethos of language.

Does this (in case you’ve persisted in reading until this point) make Barthes sound difficult? I hope not. For, even if he isn’t exactly straightforward, he is revelatory — and he gives considerable pleasure. Once you’re acquainted with him, you’ll find he’s less difficult to read than many well-known novels filled either with stories or present-day pieties and preoccupations. You’ll find he’s more comprehensible than most newspaper reports and book reviews. And you’ll see he’s easier to understand than almost all the film summaries offered by Tata Sky to its viewers (which I, frankly, find indecipherable).

You could start with the book Mythologies, where, in short essays originally written for a magazine (one can only marvel at what was once possible in the realm of print media), Barthes proves he’s the wittiest observer of popular culture since George Orwell. As you read, you might find that data that had lain beneath the surface of your mind is being excavated by the details Barthes notices. For instance, in “The Romans in Films”, he reminds us that in “Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, all the characters are wearing fringes. Some have them curly, some straggly, some tufted, some oily, all have them well combed, and the bald are not admitted, although there are plenty to be found in Roman history.” Having established this peculiarity, Barthes wants to know, “What then is associated with these insistent fringes?” He answers immediately: “Quite simply the label of Roman-ness.... The frontal lock overwhelms one with evidence, no one can doubt he is in Ancient Rome.”

Is the frontal lock or its representation an important historical event — say, in comparison to global warming or the Holocaust? Clearly not. This is where Barthes is an artist: in his ability to translate the banal, even the ridiculous, into the fleetingly seminal. And this is how art differs from sociology: in its absorption with the commonplace, the unpromising, for no extraneous reason. Unlike cultural studies and its ideologues, Barthes is not actually telling us that popular culture is important. It’s the frisson between the lack of grandeur, the tackiness, of his subject, and the majesty of Barthes’s elaborations on it that make for the tone and texture of his art. Susan Sontag points out that it’s when his object of study is monumentally meaningless, like the Eiffel Tower, that Barthes’s readings are most fecund. Here is his opening gambit in his eponymous essay: “Maupassant often lunched at the restaurant in the tower, though he didn’t care much for the food: It’s the only place in Paris, he used to say, where I don’t have to see it.” Like Walter Benjamin — but largely devoid of Benjamin’s melancholy — Barthes is an epicure of the inversion; meaningless things are important to him, important things (the realist novel; the author; the subject) meaningless.

It would be a mistake to continue to view Barthes through the prism of semiotics. Despite his professional chair and his academic legacy, Barthes is no more a jobbing semiotician than Christ was a devout Christian. Semiotics is a necessary scaffolding for Barthes, and a creative point of entry into material otherwise banal or resistant: just as Greek mythology is for the modernist novelists and poets, for Joyce, Rilke, Pound, and Lawrence. Like semiotics, mythology is a carefully coded system with correspondences to other, unlikely systems; it allows Joyce, for instance, to write about the tiniest detail of contemporary Dublin. I would reiterate that, despite his Chair, Barthes is no more an authority on semiotics than Joyce a scholar of Greek myth; semiotics is not a separate domain of professional knowledge for Barthes, but a component integral to affirming the primacy, and alchemy, of writing.

And what of the ubiquitous “The Death of the Author”? Don’t we sense that its proclamations are at least partly tongue in cheek, because irony is often the most effective means of making, and deflecting, a point? One also has to keep in mind Barthes’s innate playfulness. It’s best to place this essay in the company of mock-essays, like Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, where, outrageously, the narrator suggests that the translation of a text might well be more authentic than the original. Barthes perpetrates comparably outrageous inversions: Proust didn’t write autobiographical fiction, he claims, but “made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model”. Similarly, Count Robert de Montesquiou, on whom Proust based the character the Baron de Charlus, is “apparently no more than a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus”. The humour of these inversions moves Barthes beyond Benjamin towards Borges and, even earlier, Oscar Wilde, with his constant rebuttal of sincerity. Here, in a similar vein in “The Decay of Lying”, is Wilde: “Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps...?” It’s in that over-the-top, teasing, grandiloquent Wildean gesture that we need to place Barthes’s most outrageous pronouncement, concerning the author’s demise.

One should also bear in mind that the idea of the author’s death must have been in circulation for a while before Barthes wrote his piece; Foucault would present his own variation on the theme a few years later in “What is an Author?” So it’s perhaps best not to look at Barthes (or Foucault, for that matter) as the originator of the idea, a thinker, but as a performer who’s in play with a notion, a bricoleur; like Borges in his little essay on the fictional Pierre Menard, Barthes is adopting a tone, a style, a form, that makes play possible. Ideas, as Borges shows us, and as Barthes knows, already exist; it’s writing that comes periodically to life.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably already read Barthes. Yet I’d urge you to read him again, as a writer.