The tomato and the habanera. Roland Barthes’ Rhétorique de l’image: what tools for what analysis? The example of La Soirée dans Grenade

Abstract

The lectures given by Roland Barthes at the École Pratique des Hautes Études certified the death
of rhetorics (“L’ancienne rhétorique”, 1964-1965); but he wrote in the same time an important
paper (“Rhétorique de l’image”, 1964) that hypothesizes its survival in non-linguistic “texts”,
more specifically in advertising pictures. Why not in musical works? Barthes studied a Panzani
advertisement; we consider Debussy’s Soirée dans Grenade. We first paraphrase Barthes’
analysis (a semiotic analysis using rhetorical concepts, leading to a reception analysis), leading
to an understanding of the links between La Soirée and the poetic texts that Alfred Cortot and
Federico Garcia-Lorca wrote about this work. We question Barthes’s definitions of the terms
“rhetoric”, “sign” and “reception”, to realize that our reception analysis is neither a rhetorical
analysis of La Soirée dans Grenade nor a non-rhetorical one, but a rhetorical analysis of Cortot’s
and Garcia-Lorca’s texts.