Narrating Death

The Limit of Literature

Daniel Jernigan, Walter Wadiak, Michelle Wang, Daniel K. Jernigan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138360365
• eBook ISBN: 9780429755675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Drawing on literary and visual texts spanning from the twelfth century to the present, this volume of essays explores what happens when narratives try to push the boundaries of what can be said about death.

Part I

The Uncrossable Border

1 Photography and First-Person Death

Derrida, Barthes, Poe¹

Kevin Riordan

(Photo: powerless to say what is obvious. The birth of literature.)

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

In response to his friend’s death in 1980, Jacques Derrida wrote an essay for Poétique called “The Deaths of Roland Barthes.” Derrida opens by addressing the plural in his title. He defers to Barthes’s own characterization of his deaths-to-come in the latter’s last published work, Camera Lucida. There, Barthes writes about photography’s many deathly qualities in relation to his mother’s recent passing, and from these reflections he anticipates his own death: “From now on I could do no more than await my total, undialectical death” (Camera Lucida 72). In naming this one—the total, undialectical death—Barthes implies that there were, and are, other deaths. Negotiating this plural, Derrida reads the late Barthes, and reads with the late Barthes, to mourn, celebrate, and remember his friend.

Camera Lucida, as Derrida sees it, has “kept watch over its author,” and for Barthes and Derrida, this work becomes a shared meditation on closure (Derrida, “Deaths” 36). While Barthes had addressed death before—most famously that of the author in 1968—Camera Lucida is unprecedentedly personal. Subtitled Reflections on Photography, the book discusses the practice, history, and “wound” of photography, but it is also framed as a work of mourning for his mother. Haunted by her absence, Barthes finds in the eclectic photographs before him—nuns and soldiers in Nicaragua, “Idiot Children in an Institution,” Nicéphore Niépce’s 1823 “The Dinner Table”—a single common element: “that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead” (Camera Lucida 9).

For Derrida, writing after Barthes’s own untimely death, Camera Lucida becomes its own kind of wound, an occasion for rereading and for mourning. Derrida considers Barthes’s many deaths, “his deaths, these and those of his relatives, those deaths which must have inhabited him,” to trace the more general relations between death, language, and thought (“Deaths” 52). Throughout the “Deaths” essay, he reminds himself of this purpose: “I must concern myself with this thought of a death that begins, like thought and like death, in the memory of language… a certain thought of death set everything in motion” (52). Late in the piece, however, Derrida interrupts himself, realizing that there is something amiss in his process. He describes his scene of writing, and he sets Camera Lucida aside to peruse photographs of Barthes in other books and newspapers. He writes: “I can no longer tear myself away from the photographs and the handwriting. I don’t know what I’m still looking for, but I’m looking for it in the direction of his body” (63). In this self-conscious interruption, in this dramatized moment of not knowing what to do, Derrida fortuitously receives a copy of an old Barthes essay in the mail. In the simulated presence of his own reader (herself reading Derrida after his death), Derrida unexpectedly reads the words of the recently deceased.

Barthes’s “Textual Analysis of Poe’s ‘Valdemar’” had been published eight years earlier, but this was the first time Derrida had seen it. In receiving this deferred package—deferrals and letters are, of course, touchstones for deconstruction—Derrida feels again the loss of his friend. He decides to look here—to this document, to its unexpected arrival—to reckon with the deaths of Roland Barthes. The 1973 “Valdemar” essay is a compact recapitulation of the kind of reading Barthes pioneered in the much longer S/Z, his book-length study of signifiance in Balzac’s “Sarassine.” Derrida finds in this seemingly minor work Barthes’s deliberate reading of the Poe story. Skimming through the analysis, Derrida is startled when he finds in Poe what Barthes himself had been startled to find, a statement that “says nothing but itself,” an utterance that is “radically impossible” (Barthes, “Textual Analysis” 153). Derrida encounters a chain of retellings and rereadings in which he himself is implicated. He reads Barthes reading—now beyond the grave—a character saying the impossible: “I am dead.”

Through their readerly and writerly engagements with Camera Lucida, Barthes and Derrida join many other thinkers in pursuing questions of life and death in relation to photography. Walter Benjamin famously wrote that the camera gives “the moment a posthumous shock, as it were” (“On Some Motifs” 175), and Susan Sontag claimed that every photograph is a “memento mori” (15). If, as André Bazin puts it, “death is the unique moment par excellence… the frontier between the duration of consciousness and the objective time of things” (30), then photography provides the mechanical means to transgress that frontier, to indexically transform the living or the conscious into things. In their works of mourning, Barthes and Derrida enter this broader conversation to theorize how one can think, see, and feel in relation to the photograph from a number of different positions (as its object, its producer, or its viewer). To locate a fundamental unit of analysis, they both zoom in on the “camera’s click” as a simulation of the instant of death. But this punctuating, puncturing click only disperses their ideas once again like so many waves and particles of light; the camera’s click propels both thinkers elsewhere, towards ambitious discussions of the subject, of language, and of the living’s relationship with the dead.

While photography is productive for understanding the timing and spacing of death, literature lends Barthes and Derrida a set of more flexible tactics with which to narrate, describe, and pluralize that understanding. Poe’s uniquely first-person “death sentence” in particular poses, for both thinkers, a provocative challenge to their photographically inflected vocabularies as well as to the broader conventions of linguistics and philosophy; “I am dead” seems to be neither descriptive, constative, nor performative. And yet its enunciation is perfectly plausible—though no less provocative—within literary fiction’s horizons of expectation. Literature, as Poe’s “Valdemar” is especially apt in revealing, is expansive and fundamentally transgressive to the language in which it participates; it is that discourse which can, according to Derrida, “say anything, accept anything, receive anything, suffer anything, and simulate everything” (“Demeure” 28).²

“Barthes’s” and Derrida’s syncopated readings of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” show how literature can indeed say anything and how, in doing so, it continues to surprise and to read us. The exceptional case of M. Valdemar—his continuing to speak, hypnotized after death—calls attention not just to what literature is but also to what it does and to what it asks of the reader. In this case, as a witness to the dying scene, the reader is herself called into the dynamic negotiation between the living and the dead. Literature in general and this Poe story in particular allow and even insist that the reader assume shifting discursive positions beyond herself, to be variably the “I,” the “you,” and the other. Poe’s story powerfully demonstrates the kind of “complex personhood” on which committed reading relies, while it also positions the reader as at once here-and-there, now-and-then, even living-and-dead. With the flexible temporalities that both narrative and reading produce, literature not only implies, simulates, and illuminates the instant of death—as photography does—it also can reinhabit and recross that pivotal moment, traveling in either direction, again and again. With these conventional means to move us and to mediate between the living and the dead, literature is uniquely positioned to make us read, think, and even speak the impossible.

Mourning Barthes: Two Sides of a Camera’s Click

In Camera Lucida, Barthes assesses the typical critical positions for reckoning with the photograph. Studies of photography, he observes, tend to be either semiological or sociological; one kind regards photographs at “a very close range,” the other “from a great distance” (6–8). Barthes prefers to move between, and ultimately to eschew, these positions. In an early declaration of purpose, he sets out to consider photography “not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think” (Camera Lucida 21). While his method in the book sometimes reads as personal to the point of idiosyncrasy, in this sentence, Barthes establishes the high conceptual stakes for his study, namely the development of a kind of photographic cogito. In listing the various actions of the “I” hinged across the “hence,” Barthes proposes a revision to, or more precisely a precondition for, Descartes’s. In the French, the phrase’s similarity to je pense donc je suis becomes the more pronounced, “je vois, je sense, donc je remarque, je regarde et je pense” (La chambre claire 42). Seeing and feeling, for Barthes, are the preconditions for thinking and being.

If being is contingent on seeing, then by corollary photography offers lessons on nonbeing and on death. From this premise, Barthes reads death—his mother’s, his own, others—photographically. In a rhetorical flash, in a caption, he most succinctly captures the unsettling relations he finds among life and death, the photographic image, and the language we use to make sense of them. Under a portrait of a handcuffed Lewis Payne (later executed for attempting to assassinate William H. Seward), Barthes writes: “He is dead and he is going to die…” (Camera Lucida 95). Barthes’s words are striking for their implication as well as for their form. First, the italics propose an emphasis that their consistency across all the book’s captions belies. According to other conventions, italics mark words as foreign, to the surrounding language, to the image, or to themselves. Or perhaps they signal a set of stage directions, a kind of death sentence. The caption’s concluding ellipsis (or “suspension points” in British usage), like Barthes’s death itself, is a strange plural singularity; it is at once several things and one thing. According to Jennifer DeVere Brody, this punctuation mark comes to “stand for what need not be said, for what may be redundant to say as well as for what cannot be said, for that which exceeds locution and is therefore impossible” (76–77). Arriving at the sentence’s end, the ellipsis is an uncertain prolonging, a deferral near death, a typographical symptom for impossible speech.

He is dead and he is going to die… In this reflection on an old photograph, Barthes rehearses, in the third person, something like Monsieur Valdemar’s first-person speech. In both cases, the author writes on both sides of death, the syntax stretching across an untraversable chasm. If literary conventions offer the reader identification and transference among narrators and characters—relations usually scored by the pronouns—photography provides a material means of negotiating similar (dis)associations in time and space. One sees oneself from an outside perspective, and one sees the bodies of the living and the dead joined in the same indexical form. Photography has long invited abstract associations with death and dying, but it also offers this more quotidian, mechanical means of self-estrangement, of seeing and thinking of oneself differently, of effectively shifting between the first, second, and third persons.

In “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” Derrida initially rereads the bookends of Barthes’s broad oeuvre—Writing Degree Zero (1953) and Camera Lucida (1980)—to frame the deceased’s wide-ranging ideas. But he zeroes in on Camera Lucida for some combination of its personal quality, its discussion of photography, and its more sustained meditations on death. Camera Lucida’s 1980 publication confers upon it the status of Barthes’s writerly last words, and it shares many qualities with his other, concurrently composed but posthumously published works. Prominent among these works, the Mourning Diary is composed of the short fragments Barthes wrote on pieces of “quartered typing paper” beginning the day after his mother’s death in 1977 (Howard 261). This personal (and now public) diary helps to clarify some of Barthes’s late sensibilities. Richard Howard, Barthes’s primary English translator, describes Mourning Diary as a set of “crucial and painful notations” that can be read as “the companion to the ultimate writings of Roland Barthes” (261). Across these last works, Barthes seems to write to the scale of the quarter-page. In this Diary and in the book project he calls “Photo-Maman,” Barthes composes in short flashes, captions, and aphorisms (Mourning Diary 136).

Barthes, among theorists, is characteristically attuned to the material and the sensual—perhaps most notably in The Pleasure of the Text—and in Camera Lucida, he details the many material touches upon which photography relies, the shutter clicks and the chemicals, the feel of the paper’s edges. Among photographs and his own notes—he is at once author, producer, collector—Barthes discovers a late, flexible grammar for material association, a montage of attractions. He experiments with different ways of arranging and ordering notes and old photographs: in stacks and albums, strips and folders, frames and page proofs. It is amidst this passing, material traffic—and in the corres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Uncrossable Border
• Part II Trajectories
• Part III Aesthetic Crossings
• Index