Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola and Mythologies

I am enjoying Barthes' books more as I go down the list, and these were the last two...I have now read all of his writings. Mythologies is enjoyable -- he discusses the relationship between meaning and form for all sorts of things: the beard of the saintly Saint Pierre, laundry detergent, Racine! This is also the book which has given many scholars lots to think about -- all the way to Thunder Bay's Persians (a pastry, not the people), as far as I can tell. Much more interesting to me, of course, were the comments on literature and writing. These precious comments, in the introductory section on the essay on Saint Ignatius, are what I was reading Barthes to find. He discusses how the Jesuits have given France (and therefore, me, as a French Canadian formed by my French Canadian education) its concept of literature, a concept that is Jansenist: good literature is clear literature, form serving only sense. That is far more utilitarian than I had hitherto recognized, but essentially correct, I would think. I'm surprised at his open-mindedness about the Jesuits and Ignatius, since Barthes is so clearly a Marxist. He also talks about the reader-writer relationship, which he proposes is always indefinite since once can never know who is the reader. Fabulous.