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 asa 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, nothingwasnatural: and no meaning wasinnate, and soin 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 textwas 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 bodiesreminded 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 theinaugural lecture that was later published so blandly and ironicallyas ‘Leçon’, since 1954 his focus had changed. First, he had discovered one place where the‘fascism’ of meaningcould 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 proposeda 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, hisvita 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 playThackeray 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 Neutralbut 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 calledMourning Diary and the course notes forThe 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 thedeep 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 –theMarxism, Sartrism, structuralism, semiology. Hewanted 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 playfullydismantled. 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 –tofind 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 conflictualdonnées of discourse.’ The true utopian form of writing, therefore, was a combination of these twoideals: 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 wasin 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 Bartheswas 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 ofThe 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 novelas 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 self-exposed 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 betweenthe essay and the novel. HIs solutionto 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 wasa 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’sinventionhad led to readers becominggripped by what Barthes calls ‘marcellisme’: ananxious 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.