Deliberations: The Journals of Roland Barthes

Neil Badmington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138631120
• eBook ISBN: 9781351805551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

'I've never kept a journal', Roland Barthes declared in 1979, ' – or, rather, I've never known if I should keep one'. The form itself, he continued, was inferior and 'unnecessary', a 'minor mania of writing'. Barthes died months making this statement, and the years since then have revealed that he had actually been concealing a fondness for diary-writing. The publication in 1985 of Incidents brought to light an intimate journal entitled 'Soirées de Paris', while 2009 saw the appearance of two much longer diaries kept by Barthes following the death of his mother in 1977 and during a trip to China in 1974, respectively. Further journals lie in the archive, unpublished and largely unseen; it is not clear if these will ever enter the public domain.

This collection, which brings together some of the most prominent scholars in the field, considers the present implications of Roland Barthes' journals. How do these diaries invite us to reconsider aspects of Barthes' work which have become familiar through his reception as one of the twentieth century's most influential literary and cultural critics? What do they allow us to see for the first time? What is their relation to the works whose appearance Barthes authorised during his lifetime? Where and how do they fit in his oeuvre? How do they relate to each other across moment and mood? Why might they call for deliberations? This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

Antoine Compagnon

Writing mourning^†

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Roland Barthes wrote a diary after the death of his mother in 1977. His notes, which were published posthumously in 2009, explore the relations of mourning and time, the narrative. Writing mourning is analysed as an alternative to writing life, which Barthes will explore in his final series of lectures at the Collège de France in 1979–80, on The Preparation of the Novel. His mourning diary will also lead him to the composition of Camera Lucida, his essay on photography, which is also a monument to his mother and was published just before his own death.

The publication in 2009 of Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary stirred up a brief controversy: was it justifiable to publish this bundle of slips of paper, deeply private notes, written for himself after the death of his mother in October 1977 and not intended for others, traces of suffering, snippets of emotion leading gradually towards Camera Lucida, the monument raised in memory of his mother?¹ I do not know, but I read these pages with considerable discomfort. Back in 1977 and 1978, we saw one another on a regular basis. Discovering this text was an ordeal: I was aware of his depression, but I had not seen, or had not wanted to see, that it was so severe. Not only are these pages deeply moving – it is the auto-analysis of an experience of mourning, as intense as that of Proust’s Albertine Gone – but also this writing of mourning demonstrates, as if by means of the absurd, the essential link between narrative [récit] and life, which constitutes narrative identity as defined by Paul Ricœur: the writing of mourning, by refusing life, cannot become narrative.

Beyle, or Henry Brulard, was 7 years old when he lost his mother, Barthes was over 60: few experiences appear as far removed from one another, and yet the impact is the same. Here begins my moral life, said Brulard.² Here begins my mortality, suggests Barthes, as if his ‘own death’ had been inconceivable until then. The death of the mother makes possible, announces, the death of the son who never left his mother, who always lived with her, cared for her during her illness, accompanied her in death: ‘For the first time in two days, the acceptable notion of my own death’, he writes near the beginning of the diary (p. 12). In mourning there is ‘a definitive solitude, having no other conclusion but my own death’ (p. 35). This is the first clear motif to emerge from these fragments: the assumption of one’s mortality, setting out on the path of one’s ‘own death’.

To think, to know that maman is dead forever, completely [ … ], is to think [ … ] that I too will die forever and completely. (p. 119)

And again:

The truth about mourning is quite simple: now that maman is dead, I am faced with death (nothing any longer separates me from it except time). (p. 130)

As for death, maman’s death gave me the (previously quite abstract) certainty that all men are mortal. (p. 206)

The second motif to emerge is, precisely, the rejection of narrative. Yielding to narrative, to literature, would mean refusing, avoiding, or denying mourning. Barthes remarks repeatedly on the contradiction between mourning and narrative, or even between mourning and discourse, on their fundamental incompatibility: ‘I don’t want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it – or without being sure of not doing so – although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths’ (p. 23). For recounting it, ‘talk[ing] about it’ (about his mourning), would involve ordering it, accepting the passage of time, accomplishing the work of mourning, explaining, rationalising. By a negative formulation, mourning is the perfect illustration of the connection between narrative and time. In mourning, to reject narrative means to reject time – time for living.

The slip of paper, the note, the record of emotion, all produce a pure repetition of the instant. They refuse to be inscribed within a duration. On every page the Mourning Diary manifests the desire to stop time, to stand still, to be immobile. Yet Barthes is fully aware – this is his contradiction and the reason for his frequent qualifications – that ‘literature originates within these truths’, or in other words, that these are the experiences that allow us to write, to produce literature, but this fact cannot be expressed, cannot be recognised. His contradiction: mourning rejects literature, but there is no greater literature than that of mourning.

And so mourning, the experience of mourning, since it cannot become the object of a narrative, appears as a series of random occurrences, a succession of moments, intermittencies, flashes of memory, small details that make Barthes think of his mother. It is the epitome of the episodic approach to life writing. For example:

Purchase (frivolity) of an almond cake at the bakery. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl behind the counter says Voilà. The expression I used when I brought maman something, when I was taking care of her. [ … ]

The word spoken by the girl at the bakery brought tears to my eyes. I kept on crying quite a while back at the silent apartment. (p. 37; translation modified)

An almond cake, a small detail of pleasure, of life, followed by a word, a simple phatic exclamation, Voilà, eliciting emotion. The diary reproduces a series of emotions: ‘sometimes I feel that my mourning is merely a susceptibility to emotion’ (p. 43). Mourning is the realm of emotion, or the empire of emotions. The empire of mourning: ‘Mourning gets worse, deepens’ (p. 85; translation modified).³

Without narrative, mourning displays all the features of episodic writing. Mourning brings us face to face with the erratic Self, and Barthes emphasises that it is ‘chaotic’ (p. 31) or ‘stumbling’ (p. 40; translation modified):

What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character. (p. 67)

Mourning: I’ve learned that it was immutable and sporadic: it does not wear away, because it is not continuous. (p. 95)

Discontinuous, sporadic, repetitive, this is the very experience of eternal return: ‘No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass,’ not the suffering (p. 101).

Mourning, or the suffering of mourning, is pure repetition, and therefore eludes any formation of narrative [mise en intrigue], since it is a denial of temporality. The slightest suggestion of temporality is intolerable because it implies that mourning could become less intense, diminish, or come to an end. Barthes characterises his experience as ‘another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic’ (p. 50).

The Mourning Diary is opposed to the dominant ideology of life as narrative, yet it is also a paradoxical piece of life writing which can act as a reductio ad absurdum, or rather a ‘proof by contradiction’, supporting the thesis of an essential link between narrative and life: there is no life, or at least no life worth living, without a life narrative. Every one of Barthes’s notes on his emotional experience repeats his refusal of time, and so of narrative, which would otherwise mark the alleviation of his mourning, and reaffirms his desire to remain in ‘immutable and sporadic’ repetition. The time of mourning resists any process of narration, or rather it uses all the force and energy of its despair to oppose this narrative, which would deny it, resolve it, surpass it, in a dialectic that brings together narrative and life, the creation of meaning, the very continuity of life. Mourning is the opposite of narrative: it is the space and time of immobility and repetition.

Barthes emphasises the ‘flat, dreary country’ that surrounds him (p. 53). Mourning is described as a consciousness of space and time as being flat, the never-ending flatness of a landscape without horizon, much like that which surrounds the poet in many melancholy poems from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal or Le Spleen de Paris. The first leitmotiv of the Mourning Diary is the mortality of the son revealed by the death of the mother, his entry into the anticipation of death, but this death, or this anticipation of death, is flat, never-ending, just as Jean Starobinski speaks of a condemnation to never-ending life to describe Baudelaire’s melancholy, or melancholy in general. The Baudelairean concept of the eternal – an indefinitely repeated present – is closely associated with this same world, as an eternal present of damnation: ‘[ … ] unfortunately, I [have felt] condemned to live [ … ] for years, which to me have seemed like centuries’, writes Baudelaire to his mother in 1860.⁴

‘The high seas of suffering – leave the shores, nothing in sight’ (p. 213): Barthes rediscovers, in this empty horizon, an image familiar from many of Baudelaire’s poems. ‘Actually, as a matter of fact, always that: as if I were as one dead’ (p. 108). For the subject in mourning, any attempt to give meaning, to narrate, to create a dialectic, to escape from erratic repetition, would be scandalous and sacrilegious, impious, profane, since it would denature mourning, and find a way out. Barthes is moved with emotion – as it were, in the Proustian manner of ‘intermittencies’ – by the slightest sensation that reminds him of his mother, and he is moved entirely, completely overwhelmed, always the same as the very first day:

At each ‘moment’ of suffering, I believe it to be the very one in which for the first time I realize my mourning.

In other words: totality of intensity. (p. 75)

These emotions, or these reconnections with his past, are always absolute: ‘The self never ages’, writes Barthes after he is struck by the mention of rice powder in a film starring Bette Davis: ‘All my early childhood comes back to me’ (p. 112). (This rice powder is discussed again in Camera Lucida [p. 65] as a trigger for involuntary memory.) Again, in another ‘stupid, gross film’, One Two Two (1978), ‘all of a sudden, one detail of the décor overwhelmed me: nothing but a lamp with a pleated shade and a dangling switch. Maman made such things [ … ]. All of her leaped before my eyes’ (p. 125). Or once again, Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn, ‘something [ … ] which reminds me of maman’, the actress’ complexion, her hands (p. 172). Anything at all, a kitsch detail, can trigger this overwhelming emotion.

It is curious that, in the Mourning Diary, these complete reminiscences are elicited by films in which Barthes encounters the sort of salient detail that he terms the punctum in Camera Lucida, but which he then attributes to photographs alone, while denying that film possesses this emotive property (even though, at the end of Camera Lucida, an emotion is once again associated with Fellini’s Casanova). The reason why these total emotions are associated with films in the Mourning Diary is to be found in the state of receptivity in which one finds oneself at the cinema – ‘I was sad, the film exasperated me’ (Camera Lucida, pp. 115–16) – a receptivity which accentuates the melancholy state of anticipation, and makes these privileged moments of recollection possible.

In mourning, the Self remains intact, ready to be woken by the chance encounter with a punctum, revived in its entirety within a sensation, just as it is in Albertine Gone. Barthes, like the hero of Proust’s novel, experiences the anguish – and the guilt – of the gradual diminution of emotion: ‘To see with horror as quite simply possible the moment when the memory of those words she spoke to me would no longer make me cry … ’ (p. 57), referring to the last words of his mother: ‘My R, my R’ (p. 40). The subject in mourning battles with all its being against the projection of the Self in time. The death of someone close demands survival strategies, administrative and practical measures: ‘As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania’ (p. 6). Everybody else in the world seems possessed by ‘futuromania’, insane, obsessed with the future, whereas you, the bereaved, live in an eternal present and venerate eternal return. For example, when Barthes sorts through photographs of his mother eight months after her death: ‘A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus’ (p. 139). Barthes sees himself as the very hero of repetition, condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill only for it to roll down again each time before reaching the summit. Mourning is un-narratable. To begin narrating it, and so to leave the cycle of return of the same, would be to deny its essential immobility. This is why the Mourning Diary demonstrates, negatively, the essential relationship between narrative and life, or lived time.

And yet, irrevocably, the work of mourning takes place, despite its fundamental denial of time. Its various stages are noted, such as the separation that emerges between emo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Deliberations: the journals of Roland Barthes
• 1. Writing mourning
• 2. Barthes deliberates: Pascal, Ignatius and the question of the diary
• 3. Diary-writing and the return of Gide in Barthes’s ‘Vita Nova’
• 4. Barthes and Antonioni in China: the muffling of criticism
• 5. Roland Barthes’s Travels in China: writing a diary of dissidence within dissidence?
• 6. Bored with Barthes: ennui in China
• 7. Punctive grace: reading religion in Barthes’ Mourning Diary
• 8. Mourning Diary: love’s work
• Index