The Death of Roland Barthes / Vita Nova
Adam Thirlwell
Mourning Diary
by Roland Barthes
translated from the French by Richard Howard
(Hill and Wang, 261 pp, $25)
The Preparation of the Novel
by Roland Barthes
translated from the French by Kate Briggs
(Columbia University Press, 512 pp, $29.50)
1
In retrospect, Roland Barthes once observed, his career as an intellectual
began with the modest aim of revolution:
‘It seemed to me (around 1954) that a science
of signs might stimulate social criticism, and
that Sartre, Brecht, and Saussure could
concur in this project. It was a question, in
short, of understanding (or of describing) how
a society produces stereotypes, i.e, triumphs
of artifice, which it then consumes as innate
meanings, i.e, triumphs of Nature…
Language worked on by power: that was the
object of this first semiology.’
Barthes made this observation in his inaugural lecture at the Collège
de France, in January 1977. He was famous as a professor of signs: a literary
critic for whom text was everywhere – in steak frites as much as a Balzac
novel – since everything was signification. The world was an endlessness of
signs. ‘In a single day,’ he once wrote, ‘how many really non-signifying forms
do we cross? Very few, sometimes none.’ No, nothing was natural: and no
meaning was innate, and so in 1967, a year before the événements in Paris of
May 1968, Barthes even proposed the Death of the Author: the principle of a
single source of meaning in a text was a stereotype that needed to be
deconstructed. This was the backstory of his lecture in 1977. His avantgarde
fame was total. He had recently published an encoded autobiography, Roland
Barthes; that spring he would bring out his analysis of love’s rhetoric: A
Lover’s Discourse. He was 61, and he was a sign himself: the intellect as
celebrity – the centre of a general barthouze. In a Q&A with French Playboy,
the editors offered this prefatory description:
‘Roland Barthes doesn’t like people making
him into a “guru”, as is currently fashionable.
He prefers people to call him a semiologist,
critic, essayist. But nevertheless there’s a
“Barthes phenomenon”, which isn’t only to
due to the diversity and importance of his
published work.’
And I sympathise with the editors of Playboy. Because Barthes was a
semiologist, true, but a semiologist who knew about chic, a famously
dilettantish cruiser of boys – who a year after his lecture, for instance, leaned
over the balcony at Le Palace, a newly modish nightclub of eclectic sexual
bravura, and in the pages of Vogue Hommes observed that this come-and-go
of young bodies reminded him of the ‘aquatic milieu’ of the Opera as
described by Marcel Proust.
But then: this was the essence of Barthes’s revolution: the assertion
that nothing was natural, that even desire had its code: such dizziness! And
yet, Barthes told his student audience, in the inaugural lecture that was later
published so blandly and ironically as ‘Leçon’, since 1954 his focus had
changed. First, he had discovered one place where the ‘fascism’ of meaning
could be undone. In the literary text, with its deliberate interweaved and
shimmering network of signs, he had discovered forms of resistance to the
way language was worked on by power. And now, he said, he proposed a
further possible metamorphosis. In his courses at the Collège, he would
attempt to ‘“hold” a discourse without imposing it’, to invent ways of showing
how signs imposed on humans without imposing on his students himself – to
teach a course that would be a form of literary style, based on the
complementary forms of fragmentation and digression: and so, added
Barthes, ‘this method, itself, is also a Fiction’. For each course would have as
its origin ‘a fantasy, that can vary from year to year’. And he finished this
discourse on new method with a final, personal paragraph: ‘At 51, Michelet
began his vita nuova: a new work, a new love. Older than him (it’s obvious
that this parallel is one of affection), I too am entering into a vita nuova,
marked today by this new place, this new hospitality.’
As 1977 progressed, however, his vita didn’t seem nova at all. He first
course, How to Live Together, began: the usual round of weekly lectures. In
the summer (while taking a small break, true, to play Thackeray in André
Téchiné’s film of the Brontës, Les Soeurs Brontë, alongside Isabelle Adjani
and Isabelle Huppert), Barthes wrote what would become his second course
at the Collège: The Neutral. Yes, it was the usual academic endlessness.
And then, that autumn, on October 25, 1977, his mother died. He had
lived with his mother almost his entire life.
Barthes had always worked by making small jottings on cards:
grouping and regrouping them. Now, he began a new group: that would
constitute a Mourning Diary – a text that would remain unpublished, and
unread, until its publication in Paris two years ago.
Outwardly, his life still continued according to the ordinary habits: a
bleakness of mourning and work. In the spring of 1978 he taught the first part
of his course on The Neutral. In April, the Collège broke for a month. And
then, on holiday in Casablanca, there occurred – on April 15, 1978 – what
Barthes called a moment of satori: an absolute revelation, a ‘literary
conversion’.
At this point, wrote Barthes, his real new life began.
He came back to Paris, taught the second part of his course on The
Neutral but then, that summer, began work on the first part of a new course.
On October 19, 1978, he gave his second open lecture at the Collège de
France – on Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, and on Barthes’s own
desire to become a writer. By the end of October, the entries in the Mourning
Diary had become much more sporadic. On December 2, his new course at
the Collège de France began: The Preparation of the Novel.
Both these works which are not quite works – the diary called Mourning
Diary and the course notes for The Preparation of the Novel – have now been
translated into English. And so the English-speaking reader can now consider
the intimate material and the abstract theory for a third, fantastical object that
doesn’t, in fact, exist: a novel by Roland Barthes. This is one story that needs
to be traced; but through it there also emerges, I think, a grander narrative: as
the reader follows these two texts – their precisions, and contradictions and
moments of pathos – it’s possible to sketch a mechanics of a future
avantgarde Novel.
Barthes had said that each course at the Collège would have its origin
in a fantasy. And the deep fantasy was now visible. His mother had died, and
her death marked an absolute caesura in his life. He would begin a new life,
which would be a new form of writing. The master of signs, who had
deconstructed the forms of literature so acidly, now wanted to write a novel
himself. And he already knew its title: the title, after all, was obvious.
His novel – such hopefulness! – would be called Vita Nova.
2
The story of Barthes’s desire to write a novel is the story of a conversion. Like
every story of an explosion, however, its true form is timelapse. The desire for
a new way of writing haunted Barthes in the late 70s: his books Roland
Barthes and A Lover’s Discourse were stippled with melancholy, passion, the
pathos of personal detail. He no longer wanted to write under the protection of
a system – the Marxism, Sartrism, structuralism, semiology. He wanted to
write texts of pure imagination. This was what he explained to a cautious
interviewer, in 1977. And of course, he admitted, this might seem to be a
betrayal of the avantgarde. But this wasn’t, perhaps, so bad: ‘one mustn’t be
afraid of “representation”, whose trial has been conducted too fast.’
Even in his semiological coldness, Barthes had been impish. The
structures of power in language were always playfully dismantled. And this
dismantling of signs had also come with a twin, a utopian ideal: to discover a
form of language that was not a form of power. This utopian style had two
forms. First, it would allow the individual human subject – let’s be more
precise, the individual Parisian subject – to find a way of speaking the full
language of his passions, that had been so ironised and dissolved by
deconstruction. The other feature of his ideal was investigated most
thoroughly in his 1978 course on The Neutral, which Barthes defined as
‘every inflection that sidesteps or foils the paradigmatic, oppositional, structure
of meaning, and consequently aims for the suspension of the conflictual
données of discourse.’ The true utopian form of writing, therefore, was a
combination of these two ideals: a language as a form of passionate
suspension. And Barthes’s moment of conversion, as he entered his 60s, was
to realise that this form was, very simply, the Novel.
This was what Barthes would explain at the end of 1978, a year after
his mother had died, in the second session of his course The Preparation of
the Novel:
‘The novel is neither affirmation, nor negation,
nor interrogation, and yet: a) it speaks, it
speaks; b) it addresses, it calls out (this is
what A la recherche and War and Peace do
to me). In relation to our idea of the Neutral, I
would say: the Novel is a discourse without
arrogance, it does not intimidate me; it is a
discourse that puts no pressure on me – and
therefore a desire of my own to attain a
discursive practice that puts no pressure on
anyone: preoccupation of the course on the
Neutral → Novel: the writing of the Neutral?’
With its mirage of fictional selves, the Novel would allow Barthes to
speak freely, to speak passionately, while avoiding the trap of language’s
structures of power.
For Barthes was a gorgeous prose stylist. His sentences proceeded
through delicate, miniature blocks – suites of colons and semi-colons: a
staccato drift, like the luminous movements of a goldfish. In English, his best
and most faithful translator has been Richard Howard, who invented a
corresponding English style that could accommodate Barthes’s switchbacks
and parentheses, his delight in arcane jargon, in fake Latin definitions. But
however indirect Barthes’s style was, it was still a form of pressure on the
reader: a web of aphorisms and aperçus. The Novel, thought Barthes, offered
the possibility of transforming these aphorisms into true ambiguities.
And yet, of course, for the avantgardes of the late 70s, this new love of
the Novel was crazy.
For the Novel, in so far as it was narration, had been dismantled most
thoroughly by Barthes himself, in his first published book: Writing Degree
Zero. In it, he had explained to the bourgeois reader how the love of narrative,
as ‘a form common to both the Novel and to History’, was the ‘choice or the
expression of a historical moment’: and its aim was clear: ‘the construction of
an autarkic universe’. The Novel was fascist. Its grammatical essence was the
passé simple, he wrote, the ‘factitious time of cosmogonies, myths, Histories
and Novels’, and it aimed ‘at maintaining a hierarchy in the empire of facts’: it
represented an outmoded politics. After Barthes’s act of dismantling, only the
most attenuated fictions had remained: the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet
and Sarraute and their école: their novels that tried not to be novels at all.
And yet now – 20 years later – Barthes thought that the Novel was not
a code at all: it was in fact precisely the form that could evade power, could
endlessly foil and sidestep the machinations of language’s stereotypes.
But the drama of Barthes’s investigations of the novel is how distracted
he was by his previous scepticism. His love of the Novel was demented by
indecision. He wanted to write not just a novel, but a new form of the Novel
entirely. Famously, the first page of Roland Barthes was a facsimile of a
sentence written in Barthes’s handwriting: ‘It must all be considered as if
spoken by a character in a novel.’ The sentence was taken from a section late
on in the book – ‘The book of the Self’ – where Barthes wrote how although
‘consisting apparently of a series of “ideas”, this book is not the book of his
ideas; it is the book of the Self, the book of my resistances to my own ideas…’
This was why it should all be ‘considered as if spoken by a character in a
novel’. And this neurotic ‘as if’ recurs towards the beginning of The
Preparation of the Novel – as he closes the introduction. The course is called
The Preparation of the Novel, after all:
‘Will I really write a Novel? I’ll answer this and
only this. I’ll proceed as if I were going to write
one → I’ll install myself within this as if: this
lecture course could have been called “As If”.’
And so although Barthes says that in this course he will stage his own
preparations to write a novel, it will also be possible, he writes, that ‘the Novel
will remain at the level of – or be exhausted by – its Preparation…’ Perhaps,
he says, the fantasised Novel is impossible; which would mean, he argued,
that ‘the labor that’s beginning = the exploration of a grand nostalgic theme.
Something lurks in our History: the Death of literature; it’s what roams around
us; we have to look that ghost in the face, taking practice as our starting
point…’
Such hysteria! If Barthes fails to write a novel, then it will only be
because the novel as a literary form is dead. Yes, there is an infinite
procrastination and ambivalence at work in Barthes’s account of the Novel –
whose causes are occluded and encoded by Barthes – and it is this
ambivalence that makes his account so moving, and so valuable. This
swerving and evasion is partly intellectual: an embarrassment at his project of
conversion. But it is also, I think, more melancholy. The project had been
prompted by his mother’s death. Its matter was absolute intimacy: the most
private souvenirs of his self. But Barthes would not address this privacy. His
privacy was unapproachable.
Instead, therefore, Barthes digressed: or, in other words, he lectured.
He talked about himself, by talking about Marcel Proust.
Barthes’s lecture on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in October 1978, just
before his course on the Novel began, represented Barthes’s most selfexposed attempt to explain what he now wanted to write.
Proust, wrote Barthes, knew ‘that every incident in life can give rise
either to a commentary (an interpretation), or to a fabulation’: like Barthes, he
was caught between the essay and the novel. HIs solution to this impasse
had been to invent a third form: neither Essay nor Novel, but an amalgam of
the two. And the nucleus of this form was a mobile ambiguity: an ‘I’ who was
only an effect of writing, who only incompletely overlaps with the ‘I’ of Marcel
Proust. This ‘I’ allowed Proust to relax the borders of the essay and the novel,
and yet paradoxically, Barthes added, the success of Proust’s invention had
led to readers becoming gripped by what Barthes calls ‘marcellisme’: an
anxious desire to identify the banal biographical facts of Proust’s mondain life.
And Barthes was a melancholy marcelliste. He’d already announced,
with sad chutzpah, that he wanted to speak about his identification with
Proust: now, he explained the roots of this personal obssession. Barthes
wanted to be a writer, and Proust’s novel, he told his audience, ‘is the story of
a desire to write…’ Most importantly, Proust’s life was also marked by
mourning. The death of Proust’s mother in 1905 had been a crucial trauma in
Proust’s life – and in the genesis of A la recherche. The recent death of his
own mother, Barthes felt, was similarly epochal. As he explained more fully
two months later in the lecture hall, bereavement marked the ‘decisive fold:
bereavement will be the best of my life, that which divides it irreparably into
two halves, before/after…’
Proust’s novel, therefore, was partly a portrait of the difficulties in
preparing a novel: this was one surface interest. But its deeper importance
was that it was a monument: it demonstrated how a novel could be imagined
as
‘a means to vanquish Death: not his own, but
the death of loved ones; a way of bearing
witness for them, of perpetuating them by
drawing them out of non-Memory.’
With Proust in mind, Barthes tried to explain the three central aspects
of his ideal and future Novel. First, it would ‘permit me to say those I
love…and not to say to them that I love them’; and this instantiation of the
people he loved would allow a second effect – ‘the representation of an
affective order, fully, but indirectly’; and so, since this ideal novel would
present ideas and sentiments indirectly, through intermediaries, ‘the Novel,
therefore, does not put pressure on the other (the reader)’. It would be, then,
the pure form of the passionate and the Neutral – and its models were two
moments from Barthes’s reading: the death of Prince Bolkonski in War and
Peace, and the death of the Grandmother in A la recherche. Both episodes,
he wrote, were ‘moments of truth’: and their root was the same paradoxical
pain: ‘what Lucifer created at the same time love and death?’
Barthes’s emerging ideal novel was a machine for pathos: and we were
still, added Barthes, this sad semiologist, far from a pathetic theory or history
of the Novel.
But then, once again, as his lecture came to an end, Barthes swerves
away. Perhaps, he said, he doesn’t even want to write a novel. Perhaps it
won’t be possible to call the work he desires, which will break with the
uniformly intellectual nature of his past writing – however much their rigour
was tempered with the novelistic – a novel. He only knows that he will
proceed ‘as if’ he is writing a novel: with the hypothesis of writing a novel. This
was Barthes’s shimmering project, as 1978 ended: a novel that would be
begun not in private, but as a hypothesis, to be investigated through the
medium of seminar.
Simultaneously, Barthes also wrote a series of small essays and journal
entries. As his course on the Novel began, he also started a weekly miniature
column in Le Nouvel Observateur which lasted until the following March 1979:
a journal of his everyday. The first part of The Preparation of the Novel ended
that month. In the vacation, Barthes then wrote, very quickly – between 15
April and 3 June, 1979 – Camera Lucida: his book on photography that was
really an essay on death.
And then, finally, that summer, he made sketches for his possible
novel: Vita Nova.
Between the novel, the journal, and the photograph: this is the network
of Barthes’s investigations, in the years after his mother had died.
Later that summer he tried a new experiment with the journal intime:
‘Soirées de Paris’. It ended two days after the final entry in another journal: his
Mourning Diary. That winter, he published a text, ‘Deliberation’, on the
aesthetic problems of the journal as a form. And meanwhile, throughout
October, he worked on the second part of The Preparation of the Novel, which
he taught that winter. Camera Lucida came out early in 1980. He wrote a text
on Stendhal – ‘One never manages to talk about the things one loves…’ –
and made notes for the Seminar that would accompany the second part of
his course on The Preparation of the Novel: on Nadar’s photo-portraits of
Proust’s circle.
And then, on 25 February 1980, Barthes was hit by a laundry van as he
left the Collège. A month later, on March 26, 1980, he died. He was 64.
But really, of course, he had only just been born. All that existed of his
novel Vita Nova were eight pages of notes: schemas for a structure. And the
first section, in every draft, is one word: ‘Mourning’.
3
The Mourning Diary, therefore, is the closest the reader will get to the matter
of Barthes’s prospective novel. It is collection of aphorisms, sadnesses, selfanalysis: a journal of savage intimacy. The publicly refined, mischievous, gay
intellectual is mined and harried by the memory of his mother’s loved and
dying body – Henriette’s ‘cool and wrinkled cheeks’, her ‘pink Uniprix
nightgown’. Two days after her death, he notes this imaginary inquisition:
‘ – You have never known a Woman’s body!
– I have known the body of my mother, sick
and dying.’
He made notes on the language of mourning: ‘In the sentence “She’s
no longer suffering,” to what, to whom does “she” refer? What does the
present tense mean?’ He identified mourning’s topology: a ‘duration,
compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse’ – its
successive layers of blankness: ‘Layers of surface – or rather, each layer: a
tonality. Units.’ All the complications of self-doubt, Barthes noted them in
sentences – ‘Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you
loved her less than you thought?’ Or even: ‘I live in my suffering and that
makes me happy.’
This, of course, is the mess out of which a novel can be made. And yet
a novel is never mentioned in these notes. Instead, he talks, in November
1977, two months after his mother’s death, about the idea of the Vita nova,
the ‘necessity of discontinuing what previously continued on its own
momentum.’ Nearly a year later, he elaborates on this idea: ‘Since maman’s
death, despite – or because of – it, a strenuous effort to set up a grand project
of writing...’ This grand project, however, coexists with other books: a ‘book
about Photography’, and a ‘Photo-Maman book’, and also a ‘text about
maman’. That this grand project of writing does and does not overlap with
these prospective books is one of the alluring confusions of these notes. And
then, the following year, on March 29, 1979, he notes how he himself has ‘no
desire for a “monument” – but I cannot endure that this should be the case for
maman…’ It is the last entry in the Mourning Diary before he began Camera
Lucida. But the book about maman is not Camera Lucida, since in Camera
Lucida he notes how the monument is still to be written: ‘what I wanted – as
Valéry wanted, after his mother’s death – was “to write a little compilation
about her, just for myself” (perhaps I shall write it one day, so that, printed, her
memory will last at least the time of my notoriety).’ It implies, in fact, that the
true book on his mother will be a novel – in the same way as he had argued
that Proust’s novel was a monument for his own mother.
But this novel, or monument, was never written: instead, he taught a
course about how one might hypothetically write a novel. The deep pain,
therefore, remained in the notes of the Mourning Diary. And its central motif is
an episode first sketched on November 9, 1977:
‘Constantly recurring: the painful point: the
words she spoke to me in the breath of her
agony, the abstract and infernal crux of pain
that overwhelms me (“My R, my R” – “I’m
here” – “You’re not comfortable there”).’
This souvenir of his mother’s essential gentleness – that cry: My R, my
R – comes back to him throughout the following year: in July he also adds, in
parenthesis: ‘(I’ve never been able to tell this to anyone).’ Until finally, in
December 1978, there is this painful, occluded word-game of the
unconscious: ‘I am writing my course and manage to write My Novel. And
then I think with a certain laceration of one of maman’s last utterances: Mon
Roland! Mon Roland! I feel like crying.’ In English, the association is only a
ghost: in French, the link is clearer: mon roman, mon Roland.
The central photograph discussed in Camera Lucida is a picture of his
mother as a young girl in the Winter Garden of her family home – a photo he
discovered in June 1978, as he began to sort through his mother’s
belongings. From this photo, wrote Barthes, floats ‘an essence of the
Photograph’. And when he tries to describe why this photograph moves him
so much he returns to the time when he nursed his mother through her final
illnes: ‘I nursed her, held the bowl of tea she liked because it was easier to
drink from than from a cup; she had become my little girl, uniting for me with
that essential child she was in her first photograph.’ But as Barthes goes on to
play with the reversals of the unconscious – ‘I, who had not procreated, I had,
in her very illness, engendered my mother’ – I think it’s now also possible to
argue that this is not the true meaning of his mother for Barthes. The truth is
even more lacerating, and it is in that cry occluded from Camera Lucida –
‘Mon R, mon R’ – which proves, with an infinite pathos, that even in her
illness, even when reduced to his imaginary daughter, she was still the mother
who cared for her son.
But he was never able, or never willing, to tell it to anyone: not even an
absent reader.
The deep perception of Camera Lucida was that a photograph, which
transformed a subject into an object, was a form of death. And as I read the
Mourning Diary I suddenly think: but this is also a kind of definition of the
novel! Every novel is a machine where the novelist turns himself into an
object: a novel is a form of suicide. This kind of suicide is not for everyone –
and it was not for Barthes: but it was Barthes who, in his melancholy, fragile
sidesteps around the idea of the Novel, revealed the complicated essence of
the Novel as a form: the narcissistic, cannibalistic, messy art of fiction – a
machine for producing, or restaging, the most private and most luminous
moments of truth.
4
And so it was that, in December 1978, a year after his mother’s death,
Barthes began his course on The Preparation of the Novel. It was the
beginning of his possible grand project. He had decided to start, Barthes told
his audience, with the Haiku.
Obviously, this has its crazed comedy: to begin a course on preparing
a novel with the Haiku… But it does have its logic. For Barthes’s intention in
this course was to reconstitute the novel from its most minute element – and
the Haiku, he writes, was the pure form of notation: the most minimal form of
literary work possible. Its essence is to memorialise the weather, the fleeting
seasons: what is ‘unrepeatable and yet intelligible’ – the daily prose of the
world. It proceeds through nuance. And its material is the concrete – ‘words
having as their referent concrete things, objects’: ‘tangibilia’.
In 1968, Barthes had famously invented the term ‘the reality-effect’ to
ironise the function of detail in the art of prose: details which were ‘said to
directly denote the real’ but which in fact do nothing other, Barthes hazarded,
than signify ‘the category of the “real”…’ Now, over ten years later, he silently
and massively altered his definition of this effect: ‘I understand by realityeffect’, he told his class, ‘the vanishing of language to be replaced by a
certainty of reality: language turns on itself, leaves and disappears, exposing
what it says.’ Suddenly, it led not to the statement of a code, but of the truth.
And to explain how these concrete details work in prose, he turned for
comparison to the photograph – anticipating Camera Lucida, which he would
write two months later. A photo gives the certainty that something ‘has been’,
wrote Barthes – while a haiku, being a form of language, instead gives ‘the
impression (not the certainty: urdoxa, noeme of the photo) that what it
enounces has taken place…’
In both cases, the photo or the haiku, detail convinces the reader that
something has taken place; it has no other meaning – for the nature of the
haiku, writes Barthes, ‘is to impose silence, finally, on every meta-language:
that is the authority of the haiku’. The absolute kernel of every linguistic
structure, it is the form of individuation: the constituent point of a shimmering
network. And its highest examples, he says, are the two moments Barthes
had mentioned in his lecture on Proust: the death of Bolkonski in War and
Peace, and the death of the Grandmother in A la recherche: they both
represent moments of Truth: the total literal: ‘a surge of the uninterpretable, of
the last degree of meaning, of the after which nothing more to say…’
And it‘s here, I think, that Barthes reaches towards a new idea of the
novel: that wold be true to its strange ability to create signs that function as
truths.
But instead of then trying to analyse how such moments of truth will be
arranged in a novel’s composition, he simply concludes, at the end of the first
past of his course, that these moments will be ‘scattered’ within the fabric of a
novel. A novel, he argues, ‘would begin…when one mixes without warning the
true and the false…’. And maybe this, he wonders, is why he is still unable to
write a novel: he has a moral resistance, says Barthes, with unbelievable
primness, to this mixing of fiction, and moments of truth.
That was where he finished, in April 1979: in December 1979 he returned to
teach the second part of his course. In between, he had made his skeletal
notes for his novel Vita Nova. This second part departed from the mode of
ordinary literary criticism: now, he reimagined the problem of writing in purely
practical terms. And it is curiously inert, unoriginal, pedestrian: it is oddly
depressed. For three weeks, he analysed the abstract desire to write,
rehearsing the usual clichés of influence and inspiration. Having conceived
this desire, Barthes continued, the writer is confronted with three Tests (which
Barthes would treat over the following six weeks). And the first Test – the
choice of a Form – represents the hidden sadness in Barthes’s project. As he
describes a writer’s indecision in choosing a literary form, Barthes describes
his own, much more absolute vacillations. Once again, he returns to Proust,
caught between the novel and the essay, and wonders if Proust’s delay in
beginning his novel was that ‘To write (Tendency) had for a long time been
slowed down by the law of the Object (to write what? a novel? an essay?...)’.
But then, adds Barthes, the Novel is the genre that obeys no genre: and this
freedom represents his ideal – first outlined in the ‘romantic (German) theory
of the Novel’, the Novel as a ‘mélange of genres’.
It’s true, of course, that the Novel is a genre that isn’t quite a genre: but
Barthes’s sketched account ignores how much the Novel’s formal fluidity is
conditioned by its content – the mess of the world it tries to represent.
Because Barthes: well, Barthes doesn’t think it’s possible to talk about
content. No, he says, he prefers just to talk about form: ‘For it’s not definite
that it’s Content that is fantasised, that is projected by Desire.’ Instead, he
concludes, ‘“content” (the subject, the quaestio) is doubtless not, or not
initially a poetic category (poiesis: from “to Make”), it’s a “Meta” category:
category of critics, professors, theoreticians…’ But as I consider these two
statements, I remember a much subtler line from de Kooning: ‘Content is a
glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny – very tiny,
content.’ For content, in fact, isn’t a theoretical concept at all: content is pure
practice. It’s very tiny, but it isn’t nothing – and it’s the recalcitrant contraption
that produces the novel’s elastically signifying forms.
But Barthes, of course, was in flight from content. He was in an ecstasy
of privacy. And so he turned to the second of his Tests – Patience: the daily
prose of composition. And this, oddly, is the loveliest section of Barthes’s
course, for although it represents a deep avoidance of the true test he had set
himself, to simulate what it might be like to begin a work, since no novelist
begins a novel by analysing how it might be neccesary to keep to a timetable,
in this digression Barthes shows that style is everything, after all: it
encompasses the tribulations internal to the Work itself – the draftings, the
breakdowns and boredoms, the literal typing and penning; and also all the
apparent ongoing trivialities, like diets, or phone calls, or answering one’s
post. They represent, as Barthes beautifully shows, the self-consciously selfdeceiving egoism necessary to sequester oneself from the world, in pursuit of
a fantasy novel.
It is an abstract version of his own fantasy novel that Barthes outlined
in the final sessions of the course: ‘this blank Work, this Degree Zero of the
Work’. (Degree Zero!) His ideal Novel, he wrote, would have the qualities of
Simplicity, Filiation, and Desire. And he ended with a phrase from
Schoenberg – the great exemplar of the avantgarde, who refused to see the
avantgarde as anything other than pure tradition. It’s still possible, said
Schoenberg, to write music in C Major. And that, wrote Barthes, in a lovable
paraphrase, was his modest, utopian ideal: ‘to write a work in C Major.’
5
If he hadn’t died, Barthes was going to give a Seminar on photo-portraits by
Paul Nadar – the mythologist of Paris’s haute-bourgeoisie at the end of the
nineteenth century. Nadar’s photographs form a record of Proust’s circle –
and, therefore, a record of the scattered models for the characters in Proust’s
novel. Marcellisme is an obsession: and his seminar, wrote Barthes in his
drafted introductory notes, would be for marcellistes – to leaf through a
portfolio of these photographs, to become ‘intoxicated by a world’. And so
they will ‘observe the sociological facts which form the basis of the ‘greatest of
paradoxes’ – ‘that the highest work of the XXth century should have come
from (been determined by) what can elsewhere be the lowest, the least noble
of sentiments: the desire for social advancement’. And also, these photos will
complicate the dream of the marcelliste – the dream of knowing the precise
models for Proust’s characters. For these photos will embarrass those
characters, who are often so much more elegant than their models; and they
will also disappoint the reader, who will be sad to see how much less
luxurious is, say, the Comtesse de Chévigné, in comparison to Proust’s
Duchesse de Guermantes.
Barthes saw this seminar, therefore, as about the Reader. But I’m not
so sure. These photos, dense with ugly social striving, with problems of the
model and the copy, are really about the Novelist. These photos are Proust’s
content. They represent the everyday of Proust’s life; and they represent the
people he loved – transformed into photographic objects; just as he too turned
them into objects, with the linguistic instrument he invented. A camera, wrote
Barthes, beautifully, and famously, in Camera Lucida, was once a clock for
seeing; but this is also a description of Proust’s novel: a visionary clock made
of words.
Yes, these photographs represent content: the objects of Proust’s love,
and of his art. They represent everything Barthes had avoided as he
considered the art of the novel.
And yet… There’s a pattern scattered through the various works Barthes
sketched before his accidental death: and this pattern shows that content was
there for Barthes to consider, if he only wanted to look. And this pattern
represents the final discovery of Barthes’s project of a Vita nova.
In Camera Lucida, Barthes wrote that a photograph ‘is never
distinguished from its referent (from what it represents)’: like the moment of
truth he described in a novel, the phot was a form of the absolutely literal. And
so the essence of the Photo, wrote Barthes, is that ‘in Photography I can
never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of
reality and of the past.’ And because this is true, the Photo is also intrinsically
a memorial: every photo album will become a mausoleum. For ‘by shifting this
reality to the past (“this-has-been”), the photograph suggests that it is already
dead.’
Earlier in the book, he had stated that a photo has two aspects. There
was the studium: the general cultural interest, the period detail. But every
important photograph also had a punctum: an ‘element which rises from the
scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.’ Another term for this
detail, of course, is ‘reality-effect’: it is this kind of detail – whether as the
punctum of a photo or the reality-effect of a novel – which convinces the
reader, or the viewer, that a sign is not just accurate, but true.
And this network of definitions and concepts leads in many directions in
Barthes’s late work. Most of all, it leads to the idea of time: of mourning and
memory. It leads to his dead mother. For the punctum works, after all, like the
Proustian madeleine: it is a random detail that has an infinite ‘power of
expansion’ in the imagination. Just as Barthes concluded, in Camera Lucida,
looking at the photo of his mother, that the deep structure of this kind of detail
was ‘Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (“that-has-been”), its pure
representation.’
The essence of this form is randomness, is rarity. And so it recalls the
way in which Barthes in his course on the preparation of the novel described
how ‘moments of Truth’ had to be scattered randomly throughout a novel.
There, he had offered an obscure definition of the moment of truth: ‘Moment
of truth = when the Thing itself is reached by the Affect; not imitation (realism),
but affective coalescence…’ And I think: but the same idea is explained more
lucidly in Camera Lucida, where Barthes describes the effect of a photograph:
‘The realists, of whom I am one…do not take
the photograph for a “copy” of reality, but for
an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an
art. To ask whether a photograph is
analogical or coded is not a good means of
analysis. The important thing is that the
photograph possesses an evidential force,
and that its testimony bears not on the object
but on time.’
This, I think, is where Barthes offers a way of proposing a future
avantgarde of the novel: a sign as evidence. A couple of years earlier, in
1977, he had written a short essay on photos by Daniel Boudinet (one of
whose photos he used as the frontispiece of Camera Lucida), in which he
argued that both photography and literature had the same dilemma: to
produce a ‘signifier that would be simultaneously foreign to “art” (as an
encoded form of culture) and to the illusory “natural” of the referent.’
Neither falsely encoded, nor falsely natural: this is the paradoxical
basis on which the real art of the novel is based. The ordinary categories of
show and tell, or essay and fiction, are inadequate. No, the real opposition is
between a reality effect that only signifies a general category of the real, and a
reality effect where the object occludes its signs, where an art is also a magic.
This was Barthes’s discovery, through his digressions around a novel called
Vita Nova, and his subsequent rethinking of the nature of detail: the
melancholy moment of truth – like the private, unrepeatable words of his dying
mother.
In The Preparation of the Novel, he wrote how he couldn’t be prevented from
preferring the way Proust talks about suffering to the way Freud talks about
mourning. It was a private reference to a small drama of the Mourning Diary.
‘Don’t say Mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering’,
he wrote, soon after his mother’s death, on November 30, 1977. But the
following summer, on July 5, 1978, while reading George Painter’s biography
of Proust, he made this note:
‘Mourning / Suffering
(Death of the Mother)
Proust speaks of suffering, not mourning (a
new, psychoanalytic word, one that distorts).’
The feelings of the essayist had been anticipated by the novelist’s dense
weave of concrete accuracies.
The penultimate photograph the reader encounters from Barthes’s
seminar, just before a photo of the young Marcel, is Nadar’s portrait of
Proust’s mother. Barthes showed the class the original print: even though
Nadar, famously, retouched this photo of Jeanne Proust: he took away the
staining under the eyes, her warts: he tried to minimise the signs of time.
Because the original photo is the only one adequate to the way Proust
represented his mother in A la recherche: by embedding the figure of his
mother in time, recklessly submerging her in the swamp of detail, Proust
transformed his mother into a posthumously live entity: his portrait of Maman.
For what removes words from the desert of codes is this technique of
indirection, the larger art of composition: the construction of mobile networks.
That Barthes was interrupted in his efforts to transform his maman into such
posthumous life is, of course, a sad story. But sadness is complicated. In
trying to reinvent his talent, he’d hinted at a new way of understanding the
pathos of fiction: how the art of the novel could rearrange the junk of the
everyday and reveal it as a punctum, as a truth – so that an abstracted
reader, in another language entirely, could be moved by someone else’s
mother crying out: my R, my R.