Roland Barthes' "Mourning Diary" and "The Preparation of The Novel" - New Republic

8/18/14, 10:49 PM Roland Barthes' "Mourning Diary" and "The Preparation of the Novel" | New Republic
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FROM THE BACK OF THE BOOK DECEMBER 8, 2010
My Novel, My Novel
Mourning Diary
By Roland Barthes
Translated by Richard Howard
(Hill and Wang, 261 pp., $25)
The Preparation of the Novel
By Roland Barthes
Translated by Kate Briggs
(Columbia University Press, 463 pp., $29.50)

I.
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 artice, which it then consumes as
innate meanings, i.e., triumphs of Nature.... Language worked on by power: that was the object of this
rst semiology.
Barthes made this observation in his inaugural lecture at the Collge de France, in January 1977. He
was famous as a professor of signs: a literary critic for whom text was everywherein steak frites
as much as a Balzac novelsince everything was signi!cation. 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.
By Adam Thirlwell
No, nothing was natural, and no meaning was innate, and so in 1967, a year before the vnements
in Paris, Barthes methodically proposed the Death of the Author: even the principle of a single
source of meaning in a text was a stereotype that needed to be deconstructed. By 1977, his avant-
garde fame was total. He had recently published an encoded autobiography, called Roland Barthes;
and that spring he would bring out A Lovers Discourse, his extraordinary analysis of loves
rhetoric. He was sixty-one, and he was a sign himself: the intellect as celebritythe center of a
general barthouze. He was a semiologist, truebut a semiologist who knew about chic: a famously
dilettantish cruiser of boys who, a year after his lecture, 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 at the Opra as
described by his adored Proust.
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This was the essence of Barthess 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 Leon, his focus since 1954 had
changed. He had discovered one place where the fascism of meaning could be undone. That free
zone was the literary text. In the literary text, with its deliberate interwoven, shimmering network
of signs, he had identi!ed 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 Collge, he
would attempt to present a discourse without imposing it, to invent ways of showing how signs
imposed on humans without imposing on his studentsto teach a course that would itself be a
form of literary style, based on the complementary forms of fragmentation and digression. For
Method, too, he added, is a Fiction. Each course, he concluded, would have as its origin a
fantasy, which can vary from year to year. And he !nished this discourse on new method with a
personal observation: At !fty-one, Michelet began his vita nuova, a new work, a new love. Older
than he (you will understand that this parallel is out of fondness), I too am entering a vita nuova,
marked today by this new place, this new hospitality.
As 1977 progressed, however, his vita did not seem nuova at all. His !rst course, called How to
Live Together, began: the usual round of weekly lectures. In the summer (while taking a small
break to play Thackeray in Andr Tchins !lm about the Bront sisters, alongside Isabelle Adjani
and Isabelle Huppert), Barthes wrote The Neutral, which would become his second course at the
Collge. Yes, it was the usual academic endlessness. And then, that autumn, on October 25, 1977,
his mother died. He had lived with her almost his entire life.
Barthes had always worked by making small jottings on cards, grouping and re-grouping them.
Now he began a new group, which would eventually constitute Mourning Diarya text that would
remain unpublished, and unread, until its appearance in Paris about 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 !rst part of his course on The Neutral: a taxonomySilence,
Fatigue, the Andro"ynousof all the ways it might be possible to invent a form of writing that
would not be a form of imposition. (He enacted the Random himself, theatrically plucking each
seminars topic from a messed-up pile of notes.) In April, the Collge broke for a month. And then,
on holiday in Casablanca, there occurredon April 15, 1978what 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, and that summer
began work on the !rst part of a new course. On October 19, 1978, he gave his second open lecture
at the Collge de Franceon Prousts In Search of Lost Time, and on his 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 Collge de France began. It was called The Preparation of
the Novel.
Both these works which are not quite worksthe diary called Mourning Diary and the course
notes for The Preparation of the Novelhave now been translated into English. The English-
speaking reader can now consider the intimate material and the abstract theory for a third,
fantastical object that does not exist: a novel by Roland Barthes. And in the tale of this unwritten
book, I think, there emerges a grander narrative: a new idea of the novel.
Barthes had said that each course at the Collge would have its origin in a fantasy. His own deep
fantasy was now visible, and it was a form of literature. 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 way of
writing. The master of signs, who had deconstructed the forms of literature so acidly, now wanted
to write a novel himself. And its title was obvious. His novelsuch hopefulness!would be called
Vita Nova.

II.
The story of Barthess desire to write a novel is the story of a conversion. But like every story of an
explosion, its true form is time-lapse. The desire for a new way of writing haunted Barthes in the
late 70s: his books Roland Barthes and A Lovers Discourse were stippled with melancholy,
passion, the plangency of personal detail. He no longer wanted to write under the protection of a
systemMarxism, Sartrism, structuralism, semiolo"y. He wanted to write texts of pure
imagination. This was what he explained to a cautious interviewer in 1977, admitting that it might
seem to be a betrayal of the avant-garde. But perhaps this was not so bad: one mustnt be afraid of
representation, whose trial has been conducted too fast.
Even in his early semiological coldness, Barthes had been impish. The structures of power in
language were always playfully dismantled. And this dismantling of signs had come with a utopian
ideal: to discover a form of language that was not a form of power. This emancipated style had two
features. It would allow the individual human subjectmore precisely, the individual Parisian
subjectto !nd a way of speaking the full language of his passions, the vocabulary that had been
so ironized and dissolved by deconstruction; and it would also be true to Barthess de!nition of
The Neutral: every in#ection that sidesteps or foils the paradigmatic, oppositional, structure of
meaning, and consequently aims for the suspension of the con#ictual donnes of discourse
refusing the usual ways of creating meaning through opposition. The true utopian form of writing
was therefore a combination of these two ideals: language as a form of passionate suspension. And
Barthess moment of conversion, as he entered his sixties, was to realize that this form was, quite
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 would be neither a!rmation, nor negation, nor interrogation, and yet: a) it speaks, it speaks; b)
it addresses, it [calls out] (this is what In Search of Lost Time and War and Peace do to me). As to my
idea of the Neutral, Id say: the Novel is a discourse without arrogance, it doesnt intimidate me; a
discourse that puts no pressure on mehence my desire to arrive at a discursive practice that puts no
pressure on anyone else: preoccupation of the course on the Neutral Novel: the writing of the Neutral?
With its mirage of !ctional selves, the novel would allow Barthes to speak freely, to speak
passionately, while avoiding the trap of languages structures of power.
For Barthes was a gorgeous prose stylist. His sentences proceeded through small, delicate blocks
suites of colons and semicolons: a staccato drift, like the movements of a gold!sh. In English, his
best and most faithful translator has been Richard Howard, who skillfully invented a corresponding
English style that could accommodate Barthess switchbacks and parentheses, his delight in arcane
jargon, in fake Latin de!nitions. But however indirect Barthess style was, it was still a form of
pressure on the reader: a web of aphorisms and aperus. Only the novel, Barthes now thought,
o$ered the possibility of transforming these aphorisms into true ambiguities.
To the avant-gardes of the late 70s, of course, this new love of the novel was crazy. The novel,
insofar as it was narration, had been dismantled most thoroughly by Barthes himself in his !rst
book, Writing Degree Zero, which appeared in 1953. There 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 goal was clear: the construction of an
autarkic world. Its grammatical essence was the pass simple, 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, a kind of fascism. After Barthess act of dismantling, only the
most attenuated !ctions had remained: the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute and their
coletheir novels that tried not to be novels at all. But now, twenty years later, Barthes was
claiming that the novel wasnt a code: it was in fact precisely the form that could evade power, and
endlessly foil and sidestep the machinations of languages stereotypes.
Barthes wanted to write not just a novel, but a new form of novel entirely. He had already
experimented with the essay as novel. Famously, the !rst page of Roland Barthes was a facsimile of
a sentence written in his handwriting: All this must be considered as if spoken by a character in a
novel. The sentence was taken from a section late on in the bookThe Book of the Self where
Barthes wrote that 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
toward the beginning of The Preparation of the Novel. The course is called The Preparation of the
Novel, after all: Will I really write a Novel? Ill answer this and only this. Ill proceed as if I were
going to write one Ill 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 ofor be exhausted by
and accomplished byits Preparation. Perhaps, he says, the fantasized novel is impossible
which would mean, he argued, that the labor thats beginning = the exploration of a grand
nostalgic theme. Something lurks in our History: the Death of literature; its what roams around us;
we have to look that ghost in the face, taking practice as our starting point. Such hysteria! If
Roland Barthes fails to write a novel, then it will be only because the novel as a literary form is
dead.
Yes, there is an in!nite procrastination and ambivalence at work in Barthess account of the
novelwhose causes are occluded and encoded by Barthesand it is this ambivalence that makes
his account so moving, and so valuable. This swerving and evasion is partly intellectual: an
embarrassment at his conversion to a seemingly outmoded form. But it is also, I think, more
melancholy. The project was prompted by his mothers death. Its matter was absolute intimacy:
the most private souvenirs of his self. But Barthes would not address this privacy. It was
unapproachable. Instead, therefore, he digressedor more precisely, he lectured. He talked about
himself by talking about Proust.
Barthess lecture on In Search of Lost Time, delivered in October 1978, just before his course on the
novel began, represented his most revealing 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, Proust 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
e$ect 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, the success of
Prousts invention led to readers becoming gripped by what Barthes calls Marcellisme: an
anxious desire to identify the banal biographical facts of Prousts mondain life.
Barthes was himself a melancholy Marcelliste. He had already announced, with sad chutzpah, that
he wanted to speak about his identi!cation with Proust; and now he explained the roots of this
obsession. Barthes wanted to be a writer, and Prousts novel, he told his audience, is the story of a
desire to write. Most importantly, Prousts life was also marked by mourning. The death of
Prousts mother in 1905 was a crucial trauma in his life, and in the genesis of In Search of Lost
Time. The recent death of his own mother, Barthes felt, was similarly epochal. As he explained
more fully two months later in the introduction to his course, bereavement marked the decisive
fold: bereavement will be the best of my life, that which divides it irreparably into two halves,
before/after. Prousts novel was partly a portrait of the di%culties in preparing a novel; but its
deeper importance was that 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
linguistic incarnation of the people he loved would allow a second e$ect, the representation of an
a$ective order, fully, but indirectly; and so, since this ideal novel presents 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 neutraland its models were
two moments from Barthess reading: the death of Prince Bolkonski in War and Peace and the
death of the grandmother in In Search of Lost Time. Both episodes, he wrote, were moments of
truth, and their root was the same paradoxical pain: what kind of Lucifer created love and death
at the same time?
But then, once again, as his lecture comes to an end, Barthes swerves away. Perhaps, he says, he
does not even want to write a novel. Perhaps it will not be possible to call the work he desires,
which will break with the uniformly intellectual nature of his past writing, 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
Barthess strange project, as 1978 ended: a novel that would be begun not in private, but as a
hypothesis, to be investigated through the medium of the seminar.
At the same time Barthes also wrote a series of small essays and journal entries. As his course on
the novel began, he started a weekly miniature column in Le Nouvel Observateur that lasted until
the following March: a journal of his everyday. The !rst part of The Preparation of the Novel ended
that month. On vacation in 1979, Barthes then wrote very quicklybetween April 15 and June
3Camera Lucida, his book on photography that was really an essay on death. And then, !nally,
that summer, he made sketches for his possible novel: Vita Nova.
Between the novel, the journal, and the photograph: this is the network of Barthess investigations
in the years after his mother had died. Later that summer he tried a new experiment with the
journal intime, called Soires de Paris. It ended two days after the !nal entry in another journal:
his Mourning Diary. That winter, he published a text called 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 an essay on StendhalOne 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 Paul Nadars photo-portraits of Prousts circle. And then, on
February 25, 1980, Barthes was hit by a laundry van as he left the Collge. A month later, on March
26, he died. He was sixty-four.

III.
All that existed of his novel Vita Nova were eight pages of notes: schemas for a structure. And the
!rst section, in every draft, is one word: Mourning.
Mourning Diary, therefore, is the closest the reader will get to Barthess prospective novel. It is a
collection of aphorisms, sadnesses, self-analysis: a journal of savage intimacy. The publicly re!ned,
mischievous, gay intellectual is mined and harried by the memory of his mothers loved and dying
body: Henriettes cool and wrinkled cheeks, her pink Uniprix nightgown. Two days after her
death, he notes this imaginary inquisition:
- You have never known a Womans body!
- I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying.
He made notes on the language of mourning: In the sentence Shes no longer su$ering, to what,
to whom does she refer? What does that present tense mean? He identi!ed mournings topolo"y:
a duration, compressed, insigni!cant, not narrated, grim, without recourseand its successive
layers of blankness: Layers of surfaceor rather, each layer: a totality. Units. He recorded the
complications of the mourners self-doubtDoes being able to live without someone you loved
mean you loved her less than you thought? Or even: I live in my su$ering and that makes me
happy.
This, of course, is a 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 mothers death, about the
idea of Vita Nova, the necessity of discontinuing what previously continued on its own
momentum. Nearly a year later, he elaborates on this idea: Since mamans death, despiteor
because ofit, a strenuous e$ort 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 monumentbut 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 wantedas Valry wanted, after his mothers deathwas 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 own notoriety). It implies, in fact, that the true book on
his mother will be a novelin the same way as he had argued that Prousts novel was a monument
for his own mother.
But instead of writing this novel, or monument, he taught a course about how one might write one.
The deep pain, therefore, remained in the notes of the mourning diary. And its central motif is an
episode !rst 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 RIm hereYoure not
comfortable there).
This souvenir of his mothers essential gentlenessMy R, my Rcomes back to him throughout
the following year; and in July he adds, in parenthesis: (Ive never been able to tell this to
anyone.) Until !nally, 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 mamans last utterances: Mon Roland! Mon Roland! I feel like crying.
In English, the association is only a ghost, but 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 homea photo that he discovered in June 1978, as he began to sort
through his mothers belongings. From this photo, wrote Barthes, #oats 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 !nal illness: 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 !rst photograph. But even as Barthes goes on to
play with the reversals of the unconsciousI, who had not procreated, I had, in her very illness,
engendered my motherit is now apparent that this is not the true meaning of his mother for
Barthes. The truth is more piercing, and more conventional. It is in that cry occluded from Camera
LucidaMon R, mon Rwhich proves, with an in!nite pathos, that even in her illness, even
when reduced to his imaginary daughter, she was still the mother who cared for her son.
The deep perception of Camera Lucida was that a photograph, which transformed a subject into an
object, was a form of death. And, reading the Mourning Diary, it becomes obvious that this is also
an approximate de!nition of the novel. Every novel is a machine where the novelist turns himself
into an object: a novel is a form of self-immolation. This kind of self-erasure is not for
everyoneand 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 !ctiona contraption for producing, or re-staging, the most
private and most luminous moments of truth.

IV.
In December 1978, a year after his mothers death, Barthes began his course on The Preparation
of the Novel. He had decided to start, he told his audience, with an analysis of the haiku as a form.
Although this might seem comically crazy, to begin a course on preparing a novel with the haiku, it
does have its logic. For Barthess intention in this course was to reconstitute the novel from its most
minute element, and the haiku, he remarks, is the pure form of notation, the most minimal form of
literary work possible. Its essence is to memorialize the evanescent, the #eeting seasonswhat is
unrepeatable and yet intelligiblethe daily prose of the world. It proceeds through nuance. And
its material is the concrete: words having as their referent concrete things, objects, or
tangibilia.
In 1968, Barthes had famously invented the term the reality-e$ect to expose the function of detail
in the art of prose. Details that were reputed to denote the real directly, Barthes declared, in fact
do nothing other than signify the category of the real. Now, more than a decade later, he silently
and massively altered his de!nition of this e$ect. By e$ect of the real, he told his class, I mean:
language fading into the background, to be supplanted by a certainty of reality: language turning in
on itself, burying itself and disappearing, leaving bare what it says. Now, it led not to the statement
of a code, but to the statement of a truth.
To explain how these concrete details work in prose, Barthes turned for comparison to the
photographanticipating 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 photograph) that what it
says took place. In both cases, the photo and the haiku, detail convinces the reader that
something has taken place: detail has an absolute authority. And the highest examples of what he
means by this, Barthes says, are the two moments he had mentioned in his lecture on Proust: the
death of Bolkonski in War and Peace and the death of the grandmother in In Search of Lost Time.
They both represent moments of truththe total literal: the sudden bursting forth of the
uninterpretable, of the last degree of meaning, of the after which theres nothing more to say.
It is here, I think, that Barthes reaches toward a new idea of the novel, which would be true to this
strange ability to create signs that function as truths. But instead of trying to analyze how such
moments of truth will be arranged in a novels composition, he simply concludes, at the end of the
!rst part of his course, that these moments will just be scattered within the fabric of a novel. A
novel, he argues, would start out from ... the point at which truth and falsehood mingle without
warning. And maybe this, he wonders, is why he is still unable to write a novel: he has a moral
resistance (such primness!) to this mixing of !ction and truth.
That was where he !nished, 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 re-imagined the problem of writing
in purely practical terms. His discussion is curiously inert, unoriginal, pedestrian; it is oddly
depressed. For three weeks, he analyzed the abstract desire to write, rehearsing the usual clichs
of in#uence and inspiration. Having conceived this desire, Barthes continued, the writer is
confronted with three tests (which Barthes would treat over the following six weeks). The !rst test
is the choice of a form, and it represents the hidden sadness in Barthess project. As he describes a
writers indecision in choosing a literary form, Barthes describes his own more absolute
vacillations. Once again he returns to Proust, caught between the novel and the essay, and wonders
if Prousts delay in beginning his novel was that Writing (Tendency) had long been stalled 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!rst outlined in the (German)
Romantic theory of the Novel, the novel as a mixture of genres.
It is true, of course, that the novel is a genre that isnt quite a genre. But Barthess sketch ignores
how much the novels formal #uidity is conditioned by its contentthe mess of the world that it
tries to represent. Barthes, by contrast, doesnt think it is possible to talk about content. No, he
says, he prefers to talk about form: Its not clear that its Content thats fantasized, that is to say
planned out in accordance with Desire. Instead, he concludes, content (the subject matter, the
quaestio) is probably not, or at least not initially, a poetic category (poetic: from Making), its a
Meta category: category for the critics, the professors, the theoreticians. But as I consider these
two statements, I remember a much subtler comment by de Kooning: Content is a glimpse of
something, an encounter like a #ash. Its very tinyvery tiny, content. For content is not a
theoretical concept at all: content is pure practice. It is very tiny, but it isnt nothingit is the
contraption that produces the novels elastically signifying forms.
But Barthes was in #ight 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 Barthess course. Although it represents a deep avoidance of the true test he had set himselfto
simulate what it might be like to begin a work: no novelist begins a novel by analyzing how it might
be necessary to keep to a timetablein this digression Barthes shows that style is everything, after
all. It encompasses the tribulations internal to the work itselfthe draftings, the breakdowns and
boredoms, the typing and penning; and also all the apparent ongoing trivialities, such as diets, or
phone calls, or answering ones mail. They represent, as Barthes beautifully shows, the self-
consciously self-deceiving 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 !nal sessions of the
course: that blank Work, that Degree Zero of the Work. 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 avant-garde, who refused to see the avant-garde as anything other than pure
tradition. It is still possible, declared 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.

V.
If he hadnt died, Barthes was going to give a seminar on photoportraits by Paul Nadar, the
mythologist of Pariss haute bourgeoisie at the end of the nineteenth century. Nadars photographs
form a record of Prousts circle, and therefore a record of the scattered models for the characters in
Prousts novel. His seminar, wrote Barthes in his drafted introductory notes, would therefore be for
Marcellistesto leaf through a portfolio of these photographs, to become intoxicated by a world,
and to observe the sociological facts which form the basis of the greatest of paradoxes that
the greatest work of the twentieth century should have emerged from (should have been
determined by) what in other circumstances can be the lowest, the least noble of sentiments: the
desire for social advancement. These photos will complicate the dream of the Marcellistethe
dream of knowing the precise models for Prousts characters. For these photos will embarrass their
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 Chvign, in
comparison to the Duchesse de Guermantes.
Barthes saw this seminar, therefore, as about the reader. But I am 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 Prousts content. They represent the everyday of Prousts life; and they show the
people he lovedtransformed into photographic objects, just as he, too, turned them into objects,
with the linguistic instrument that 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 Prousts novel: a
visionary clock made of words.
Yes, these photographs represent content: the objects of Prousts love, and of his art, and
everything Barthes avoided as he considered the art of the novel. And yet content was there for
Barthes to consider, if he only wanted to look. In Camera Lucida, he wrote that a photograph is
never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents): like the moment of truth that he
described in a novel, the photo was a form of the absolutely literal. And so the essence of the photo
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 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 Barthes had stated that a photo has two aspects. There was the studium: the
general cultural interest, the period detail. And there was the 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-e$ect: it is this kind of detailwhether as the punctum of a photo or the reality-
e$ect of a novelthat convinces the reader, or the viewer, that a sign is not just accurate, but also
true.
This network of de!nitions and concepts leads in many directions in Barthess 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 in!nite
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 such a form is randomness, and rarity. And this 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 o$ered an obscure de!nition of the moment of truth:
Moment of truth = when the Thing itself is a$ected by the A$ect; not imitation (realism) but
a$ective coalescence. But the same idea is explained more lucidly in Camera Lucida, where
Barthes describes the e$ect of a photograph:
The realists, of whom I am one ... do not take the photograph for a copy of reality, but for an emanation
of past reality: a magic, not an art. To ask whether a photograph is analogical or coded is not a good
means of analysis. The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its
testimony bears not on the object but on time.
This, I think, is where Barthes o$ers a new opening for the novel: the sign as evidence. A couple of
years earlier, in 1977, he had written a short essay on photographs by Daniel Boudinet, in which he
argued that both photography and literature had the same dilemma: to produce a signi!er 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. And so the old and ordinary categories of show and tell, or essay and !ction, are
inadequate. No, the real opposition is between a reality e$ect that only signi!es a general category
of the real and a reality e$ect where the object occludes its signs, where an art is also a magic. This
was Barthess discovery, through his digressions around a novel called Vita Nova, and his
subsequent rethinking of the nature of detail: the melancholy moment of truthlike the private,
unrepeatable words of his dying mother.
In The Preparation of the Novel, he wrote that he preferred the way Proust talks about su$ering to
the way Freud talks about mourning. It was a private reference to a small drama of the Mourning
Diary. Dont say Mourning. Its too psychoanalytic. Im not mourning. Im su$ering, he wrote,
soon after his mothers death, on November 30, 1977. But the following summer, on July 5, 1978
while reading George Painters biography of Proust, he made this note:
Mourning / Su"ering
(Death of the Mother)
Proust speaks of su"ering, not mourning (a new, psychoanalytic word, one that distorts).
The feelings of the essayist had been anticipated by the novelists dense weave of concrete
accuracies.
The penultimate photograph the reader encounters from Barthess seminar, just before a photo of
the young Marcel, is Nadars portrait of Prousts mother. Barthes showed the class the original
print, even though Nadar famously re-touched this photo of Jeanne Proust. He took away the
staining under the eyes, and her warts: he tried to minimize the signs of time. But the original
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photograph is the only one adequate to the way Proust represented his mother in his novel: by
embedding the !gure of his mother in time, recklessly submerging her in the swamp of detail,
Proust transformed her into a posthumously living beinginto his portrait of Maman. For what
removes words from the desert of codes is this technique of indirection, the larger art of
composition: the immersion of detail within a network. That Barthes was interrupted in his e$orts
to transform his maman into such posthumous life is a sad story. But in trying to reinvent his
talent, he hinted at a new way of understanding the pathos of !ction: how the art of the novel
could re-arrange the junk of the everyday and reveal it as a punctum, as a truthso that an
abstracted reader, in another language entirely, could be moved by someone elses mother crying,
My R, my R.
Adam Thirlwell is the author, most recently, of The Escape (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This article
ran in the December 30, 2010, issue of the magazine.
Click here - http://www.tnr.com/subscribe - to subscribe to TNR and follow us
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8/18/14, 10:49 PM Roland Barthes' "Mourning Diary" and "The Preparation of the Novel" | New Republic

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