Reading Proust in Barthes’s Journal de deuil
ADAM WATT
Ô l’amour d’une mère! amour que nul n’oublie!
These words, taken from the opening poem of Hugo’s Les Feuilles d’automne, were
cherished by Proust. As an adult he quoted or alluded to them repeatedly in his
correspondence.1 This comes as little surprise from the author whose fifteen- or
sixteen-year-old self, completing a questionnaire in a keepsake book and faced with
the question (in English in the original) ‘[what is] your idea of misery?’ had
responded ‘Etre séparé de Maman.’2 Proust’s father, Doctor, then Professor Adrien
Proust, worked long hours, travelled a great deal and had significantly less to do with
his sons than did their mother. As is well known, the bond between Jeanne Proust and
her sickly elder son was extremely close.3 Proust’s brother married in February 1903
and moved out of the family home, so when Proust père died suddenly in November
that year, the thirty-two-year-old Proust and his mother began life à deux in the
apartment in the rue de Courcelles. It was a period of collaborative cohabitation –
Proust worked during this time on his translations of Ruskin using word-for-word
cribs provided by his mother. Although his nocturnal regime, already well established,
displeased her, she tolerated it since her son was finally immersed in a productive
endeavour and sticking to it.4 In mid-May 1905 Proust wrote what, for him, was quite
an upbeat letter to his friend Robert Dreyfus: ‘je ne suis pas trop malheureux en ce
moment. Je peux travailler un peu – sauf cependant depuis mes dernières terribles
crises – et je mène une vie très douce de repos, de lecture et de très studieuse intimité
avec Maman’ (Corr., V, 147). This blissful intimacy would only last a further four
months: Mme Proust’s health, already poor, steadily declined and she died of kidney
failure on 26 September 1905.
Seventy-two years and one month later, on 25 October 1977, the mother of
another French writer died. Married in 1913, the year Du côté de chez Swann was
published, Henriette Barthes née Binger was widowed three years later. Her son
Roland, born in 1915, suffered from ill health, above all tuberculosis, which prevented
him from military service during the Second World War, just as Proust’s health had
kept him from the trenches during the First. Henriette lived with her son for almost all
of his adult life in an apartment on the rue Servandoni, near the Jardin du
Luxembourg. When she died in October 1977 she left her son bereft and alone in a
domestic space that was saturated with her presence.5
The links, commonalities and affinities – both biographical and intellectual –
between Proust and Barthes are well known and have been widely researched.
Malcolm Bowie’s 2001 article ‘Barthes on Proust’ gives a characteristically
perceptive appreciation of the novelist’s place in Barthes’s writings; subsequent
articles and essays by Éric Marty, editor of Barthes’s complete works, and Kathrin
Yacavone, a scholar with a particular interest in the role of photography in the relation
between the two writers, supplement Bowie’s insights by drawing on materials
unavailable to him in 2001, namely the texts of Barthes’s last lectures and seminars at
the Collège de France.6 Most recently, Thomas Baldwin’s essay ‘On Barthes on
Proust’ offers an excellent snapshot of the critical field before going on to argue that
Barthes’s attitude towards Proust might fruitfully be read as representative of
Barthes’s own conception of what ‘la critique’ should be.7
What I want to do in this article is to add to this ongoing critical reflection on
the role of the novelist across the œuvre of the critic by focusing specifically on
Proust’s place in one of Barthes’s last texts, which appeared only in 2009 and has
received relatively little critical attention: the posthumously published Journal de
deuil.8 On 27 October 1977, the day after his mother’s death, on squares of loose-leaf
paper that he cut to size himself, Barthes started writing notes: a mourning diary, not
intended for publication but sustained, with varying intensity, as a means of recording
thoughts and emotions that could not necessarily be spoken. His intermittent notings
continued until 15 September 1979, amounting eventually to 330 sheets, published by
Seuil in collaboration with IMEC in February 2009.9
In an interview for Le Figaro published in July 1974, Barthes remarked that
for him:
Proust, c’est un système complet de lecture du monde. Cela veut dire que, si nous admettons tant soit peu ce système, ne serait-ce que parce qu’il nous séduit, il n’y a pas, dans notre vie quotidienne, d’incident, de rencontre, de trait, de situation, qui n’ait sa référence dans Proust: Proust peut être ma mémoire, ma culture, mon langage; je puis à tout instant rappeler Proust.10
It is quite in keeping with these remarks, then, that we should find traces of Proust
even in the context of the intimate pages of the Journal de deuil. I would like to argue
that Proust’s presence in the Journal goes well beyond those ‘feuillets’ that explicitly
mention the author or the novel À la recherche du temps perdu. In the Figaro
interview of 1974 Barthes tells his interlocutor that ‘Proust peut être ma mémoire’;
and as Proust more than any other has shown, memory can often be most powerful
when it is not willed and consciously recalled but involuntary. I will consider
Barthes’s overt Proustian references before examining in a little more depth a number
of ‘feuillets’ on which an involuntary or vestigial trace of Proust seems to show
through.11
The first direct reference to Proust comes about halfway through the Journal. Barthes
notes a page reference to George Painter’s biography of Proust, the pages on Proust’s
mother’s death, then writes the following:
Deuil/Chagrin(Mort de la mère)Proust parle de chagrin, non de deuil (mot nouveau, psychanalytique, qui
défigure). (Journal, p. 168, Barthes’s emphasis)12
The following day on a new sheet Barthes notes a later page in Painter, describing
Proust’s words to Céleste after a near-death experience from inadvertently taking too
much Veronal (a barbiturate he took to aid sleep): ‘– Céleste: “Nous nous
retrouverons tous dans la Vallée de Josaphat – Ah! croyez-vous vraiment qu’on doive
se retrouver? Si j’étais sûr, moi, de retrouver Maman, je mourrais tout de suite”’
(Journal, p. 169). A week later, but after just one intervening entry in the diary,
Barthes returns to Proust: he simply heads the page ‘Deuil’ and below this gives a
page reference to the first Pléiade edition of À la recherche then writes in brackets ‘La
mère après la mort de la grand-mère’ and quotes the words ‘cette incompréhensible
contradiction du souvenir et du néant’ (Journal, p. 172). From these references we can
see straight away how Proust’s life and his fiction offer crutches to Barthes as he
comes to terms with his loss. There is little consolation to be garnered from an
‘incompréhensible contradiction’ in one’s personal life, but finding that same
situation acknowledged in the pages of Proust softens the blow for Barthes, the
bruising realization that eventually ‘[le] souvenir’ will give way to ‘[le] néant’. As
Antoine Compagnon has put it, Proust’s letters, his novel and the biography by
George Painter represent ‘un viatique pour traverser le deuil’.13 Death confronts us
with the urgent wish to remember, to hold on to what we have of the departed – which
most often takes the form of memories. But this imperative often alerts us to the
painful reality of ‘le néant’ – it reminds us that with our own death, the memories that
we have striven to hold on to will also die.
The first phrase quoted from Proust in July 1978 (‘cette incompréhensible
contradiction’) in fact sends us back to an earlier page from the Journal, written in
October 1977 where Barthes effectively articulates the same realization and, in fact,
uses the same key word – ‘contradiction’. ‘“Jamais plus, jamais plus!”’, he writes.
Then below, as if spoken in another voice, ‘Et pourtant, contradiction : ce “jamais
plus” n’est pas éternel puisque vous mourrez vous-même un jour’ (Journal, p. 21).
The realization of our own finitude with which the death of others confronts us is
perhaps further complicated for the writer whose works will survive him or her.14 The
instinct of the writer, when faced with loss, may be to seek to counter that loss
through writing. Writing that bears directly on the departed loved one can perform the
function of memorialization and can thus perhaps combat – at least for a time – the
ineluctability of ‘le néant’. The problem, however, and one that Antoine Compagnon
emphasizes in his Collège de France lectures, is that mourning belongs to a different
temporality to that of ‘le récit’; we might in fact think of mourning, he suggests, as
‘l’envers du récit’. The risk, of course, is that the very act of writing in fact betrays the
deceased by making literature of them.15 Nevertheless Barthes was well aware of the
risks and noted, just five days after his mother’s death: ‘Je ne veux pas en parler par
peur de faire de la littérature – ou sans en être sûr que c’en ne sera pas – bien qu’en
fait la littérature s’origine dans ces vérités’ (Journal, p. 33). And literature whose
origins are found in the truths of a life lived has perhaps no better known example
than Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.
Barthes wrote the page of the journal citing Proust’s ‘incompréhensible
contradiction…’ during a trip to Morocco. On his return to Paris he visited the
Bibliothèque nationale, where he went to read about Proust around the time of his
mother’s death. Barthes then cites in the Journal Proust’s description of his perpetual
sense of guilt that through his ill health he had made his mother suffer during her
lifetime (Journal, p. 182). Barthes also cites at great length (it is the longest quotation
in the Journal) from a letter Proust wrote to Georges de Lauris when this latter lost his
mother in 1907. Here Proust dispenses knowing advice that clearly struck a chord
with Barthes:
Quand vous aviez votre mère vous pensiez beaucoup aux jours de maintenant où vous ne l’auriez plus. Maintenant vous penserez beaucoup aux jours d’autrefois où vous l’aviez. Quand vous serez habitué à cette chose affreuse que c’est [d’être] à jamais rejeté dans l’autrefois, alors vous la sentirez tout doucement revivre, revenir prendre sa place, toute sa place près de vous. En ce moment ce n’est pas encore possible. (Corr., VII, 85; Journal, p. 183)
Even a cursory reading of these somewhat dizzying lines makes it clear how the
experience of mourning had given Proust to reflect deeply on the experience of time
and to arrive at a point where articulating our always-shifting relationship to both past
and future became possible.
Barthes passes no comment on these lines, a suggestion of how closely they
tally with his sentiments at the time. Less than a fortnight later he turns to Proust once
more. An essay on a nineteenth-century literary critic is perhaps not the first place
many of us would seek solace while mourning, but there is good sense in Barthes’s
taking up Contre Sainte-Beuve in August 1978. Firstly, he was beginning to work on
the lecture that would be delivered at the Collège de France in October that year,
entitled ‘« Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure »’, a lecture in which
Barthes considers how Proust came to write the book he did – a book neither wholly
novel nor wholly essay – but, as Barthes puts it ‘une tierce forme’, a hybrid that grew
out of the critical project for an essay ‘against’ Sainte-Beuve.16 At first glance we
might consider this a displacement activity: Barthes plunges himself into Contre
Sainte-Beuve and writes a lecture that points toward the possibility of himself one day
writing a novel (thus anticipating the seminars and lectures on La Préparation du
roman) in order to keep his mind occupied and away from thoughts of his mother.
Familiarity with Contre Sainte-Beuve, however, suggests another lure, though, in this
particular Proustian text.
‘Un récit du matin, du réveil, Maman vient me voir près de mon lit, je lui dis
que j’ai l’idée d’une étude sur Sainte-Beuve, je la lui soumets et la lui développe’
(Corr., VIII, p. 321). This is how Proust described the anticipated structure of what
became Contre Sainte-Beuve in a letter to Anna de Noailles in December 1908. His
mother, dead almost two years, was at the heart of his new writing project, written
into its frame-structure.17 The mother figure looms large, then, in Contre Sainte-Beuve
and although Barthes does not quote a passage where Proust refers to his mother, the
passage he does cite in the Journal becomes for Barthes a stimulus to reflection, once
more, on his loss. ‘La beauté’, writes Proust, ‘n’est pas comme un superlatif de ce que
nous imaginons, comme un type abstrait que nous avons devant les yeux, mais au
contraire un type nouveau, impossible à imaginer que la réalité nous présente’
(Journal, p. 195).18 After citing these lines Barthes notes, ‘De même: mon chagrin
n’est pas comme le superlatif de la peine, de l’abandon, etc., comme un type abstrait
(qui pourrait être rejoint par le métalangage), mais au contraire un type nouveau, etc.’
(Journal, p. 195). And this sense of the unknowability of the nature of personal grief
before it occurs, its very unanticipatable-ness, is a recurring concern of Barthes in the
pages of the Journal.
If Contre Sainte-Beuve is one conduit between the mourning diary and the
Collège de France lecture, another is to be found in the discussion, in both texts, of
Barthes’s realization of his own mortality. In dealing with his mother’s death, Barthes
finds himself acknowledging his own mortality for the first time: ‘Penser, savoir que
mam. est morte à jamais, complètement’, as he puts it, ‘[…] c’est penser, lettre pour
lettre (littéralement, et simultanément), que moi aussi je mourrai à jamais et
complètement’ (Journal, p. 130, Barthes’s emphasis). Antoine Compagnon identifies
this concern as ‘le premier motif insistant repérable dans ces fragments’,19 but he does
not pursue its presence as a preoccupation in ‘« Longtemps, je me suis couché de
bonne heure »’, where we read: ‘Il arrive un temps (c’est le problème de la
conscience), où « les jours sont comptés » […]. On se savait mortel […]; tout d’un
coup on se sait mortel’.20 Barthes goes on to compare this new found awareness with
the Dantean realization, ‘Nel mezzo del camin…’ and the period in Proust’s life
between the death of his mother and the emergence of the hybrid Recherche from the
notes on Sainte-Beuve. And here Barthes’s own text begins to resemble the ‘tierce
forme’ he identified in Proust.21 Neither formal academic lecture nor intimate,
personal confessional, ‘« Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure »’ becomes
an extension of the Journal de deuil and a commentary on it as well as a stepping
stone towards ‘La Préparation du roman’. As Barthes puts it:
Un deuil cruel, un deuil unique et comme irréductible, peut constituer pour moi cette “cime du particulier” dont parlait Proust ; quoique tardif, ce deuil sera pour moi le milieu de ma vie ; car le “milieu de ma vie” n’est peut-être jamais rien d’autre que ce moment où l’on découvre que la mort est réelle et non plus seulement redoutable.22
I would like now to turn to two slightly different Proustian aspects of the
Journal. Firstly, I will consider a marked absence in the text, or, rather, a set of
references that circle around an unmentioned central notion – Proust’s conception of
the ‘intermittences du cœur’. Secondly I will close by pursuing a further set of
Proustian references that lead us to La Chambre claire, the other major text that
Barthes began to prepare during the time of the Journal de deuil.
The death in À la recherche which provokes most thought, analysis and
conjecture from Proust’s Narrator is that of his beloved in Albertine disparue. Prior to
this, however, among the other deaths in À la recherche – those of Swann, Bergotte,
or La Berma amongst others – the one which receives most attention in the text and
whose impact, over time, is most comprehensively scrutinized, is that of the
Narrator’s grandmother.23 The representation of her death in the novel draws
extensively on Proust’s own experience of witnessing his mother’s final illness and
death. The grandmother’s death occurs at the start of the second part of Le Côté de
Guermantes24 but the reality of her loss, however, is not fully appreciated by the
Narrator until more than a year later when undoing his boots on a visit to Balbec
(which occurs in the second part of the following volume, Sodome et Gomorrhe),
triggers the sudden, intense memory of his grandmother’s face, followed immediately
by the brutal recognition of the permanence of her absence. This negative
manifestation of the experience of involuntary memory is what Proust called ‘les
intermittences du cœur’, a phrase that for some time he intended to use as the overall
title of his novel.
Meanwhile, Barthes writes in the Journal of his ‘chagrin’ as ‘chaotique,
erratique’ (Journal, p. 81); he refers to ‘brusques et fugitives vacillations, fadings très
courts’ (Journal, p. 127), this latter a term borrowed from telecommunications,
meaning a sudden drop in the intensity of a signal, and one Barthes had used in
Fragments d’un discours amoureux to describe the Narrator’s realization of his
grandmother’s demise shortly before her death.25 But for all this, not once in the
Journal de deuil does he make mention of ‘les intermittences du cœur’.26 He writes of
the moment, in a patisserie, when:
Servant une cliente, la petite serveuse dit Voilà. C’était le mot que je disais en apportant quelque chose à maman quand je la soignais. Une fois, vers la fin, à demi inconsciente, elle répéta en écho Voilà (Je suis là, mot que nous nous sommes dit l’un à l’autre toute la vie).
Ce mot de la serveuse me fait venir des larmes aux yeux. Je pleure longtemps (rentré dans l’appartement insonore). (Journal, p. 47)
Reflecting on this incident, Barthes sums up as follows: ‘Ainsi puis-je cerner mon
deuil. […] Il est là où se redéchire la relation d’amour, le « nous nous aimions »’
(ibid). The physicality of the chosen verb, redéchirer, communicates the pain, the
violence of the loss that has now unignorably imposed itself on him. The ‘relation
d’amour’ is ‘redéchir[ée]’ since it is torn the first time at the moment of death; but
because when a loved one dies we are not equipped immediately to take it in, the
actual realization of the death is only ever belated, retrospective. Thus Barthes’s
suddenly being able to ‘cerner [son] deuil’ is an experience analogous to the
‘intermittences du cœur’ of Proust’s fictional narrator in Balbec, stooping to undo his
boots and being torn by the irreparable loss of his grandmother.
The scene from the end of his mother’s life recalled in the patisserie (‘Une
fois, vers la fin […]’) provides the link to the last comments I would like to offer.
Barthes cared for his mother through her final illness. He discusses this in La
Chambre claire, which he started drafting during the period of the Journal de deuil.
Indeed, moments of the genesis of La Chambre claire can be found in the Journal and
the diary entries whilst this work is in progress become more sparse. In an entry for
11 June 1978 Barthes writes: ‘Commencé le matin à regarder ses photos. Un deuil
atroce recommence (mais n’avait cessé)’ (Journal, p. 151). Two days later he writes
‘Ce matin, à grand peine, reprenant les photos, bouleversé par une où mam. petite
fille, douce, discrète à côté de Philippe Binger (Jardin d’hiver de Chennevières, 1898).
Je pleure’ (Journal, p. 155). This page, in a way an ‘avant texte’ of La Chambre
claire, has a number of interesting resonances. The photo that most enigmatically
captures his attention and that will play such a central role in La Chambre claire is
one in which his mother is five years old – ‘[une] petite fille’. In Le Côté de
Guermantes, when his grandmother dies, Proust’s Narrator describes the scene as
follows: ‘Sur ce lit funèbre, la mort, comme le sculpteur du Moyen Age, l’avait
couchée sous l’apparence d’une jeune fille.’27 What is more, Barthes describes his
discovery of the Jardin d’Hiver photo as one by which he is ‘bouleversé’. The pages
in Sodome et Gomorrhe devoted to the ‘intermittences du cœur’, in which the
Narrator finally recognizes the reality of his loss, are introduced by a sentence so brief
and telegraphic that it might seem more suited to the Journal de deuil than to the
Recherche: ‘Bouleversement de toute ma personne’ (RTP, III, 152).28 Barthes’s
personal ‘bouleversement’ is substantial and the writing process, or the period that
leads to writing becoming once more a possibility, is protracted. ‘Sans doute je serai
mal’, Barthes notes in December 1978, ‘tant que je n’aurai pas écrit quelque chose à
partir d’elle (Photo, ou autre chose)’ (Journal, p. 227).
In La Chambre claire, Barthes acknowledges a link between the Jardin
d’Hiver photo and the ‘intermittences du cœur’, although still, curiously, not by name:
‘Pour une fois’, we read, ‘la photographie me donnait un sentiment aussi sûr que le
souvenir, tel que l’éprouva Proust, lorsque se baissant un jour pour se déchausser il
aperçut brusquement dans sa mémoire le visage de sa grand-mère véritable’.29 This
reference (one that conflates Proust and his Narrator) is an overt acknowledgement of
what I have identified as a latent presence in the Journal de deuil. Just three pages
later in La Chambre claire we find an expansion of the moment recalled in the
patisserie in the Journal:
Pendant sa maladie, je la soignais, lui tendais le bol de thé qu’elle aimait parce qu’elle pouvait y boire plus commodément que dans une tasse, elle était devenue ma petite fille, rejoignant pour moi l’enfant essentielle qu’elle était sur sa première photo.30
And with these lines we find another curious moment of imbrication. Barthes
describes an individual who, aided by a parent-figure, drinks tea and effects an
unwarranted return to her youth, a situation that we cannot help but associate with the
Proustian moment par excellence: ‘Un jour d’hiver, comme je rentrais à la maison,
ma mère, voyant que j’avais froid, me proposa de me faire prendre, contre mon
habitude, un peu de thé […]’ (RTP, I, p. 44).
It would be critically and emotionally short-sighted to suggest that Barthes, in
mourning his mother, was in any way trying to pay homage to Proust. But as I hope to
have shown, a close reading of the Journal de deuil reveals a persistent presence of
the author of À la recherche du temps perdu even on those pages where he is not
explicitly evoked. The privileged place Proust held for Barthes, avowed in Le Plaisir
du texte, in ‘« Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure »’ and elsewhere, makes
this understandable. But the nature of the vestiges of Proust in the mourning diary, the
memories of Proust that surface in Barthes’s own grief and suffering, offer an
intriguing insight on intertextual relations. Proust for Barthes in some ways resembles
Barthes’s mother: they are both constants, frames of reference, points of departure and
return.
‘When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has
realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally
ceased to feel even the need of it.’ These lines are spoken by the protagonist of Iris
Murdoch’s 1954 novel Under the Net, who continues: ‘But then what one achieves is
no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the
guises of love.’31 Love and knowledge, of course, are two of Proust’s and Barthes’s
great, shared preoccupations. Proust coexisted with his mother, and Barthes with his;
Barthes coexisted with Proust’s writing, which led him to observe, when
contemplating the possibility of writing a novel, that ‘[le] sentiment qui doit animer
l’œuvre est du côté de l’amour’.32 Reading the Journal de deuil is to follow the
intimate interweave of Barthes’s relation to his mother and his relation to Proust,
considered at once as bereaved son and tutelary writer. In the Fragments, written at a
time when Barthes was surely growing increasingly aware of his mother’s fragility, in
the section entitled ‘Fading’, he writes of Ulysses ‘dans la région des Ombres’. He
writes of the shades – ‘Ulysse leur rendait visite, les évoquait (Nekuia); parmi elles
était l’ombre de sa mère’ – but then curiously shifts to the first-person: ‘j’appelle,
j’évoque ainsi l’autre, la Mère, mais ce qui vient n’est qu’une ombre.’33 If the Journal
de deuil, in which Henriette’s shade coexists with those of Jeanne and Marcel Proust
and the Narrator’s grandmother, is a continuation of this proleptic scene, it might be
most cogently understood as a free and unsystematized articulation of Barthes’s two
greatest loves.
1 ‘Ce siècle avait deux ans!’, in Victor Hugo, Œuvres poétiques, I, ed. by Pierre
Albouy (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 717. Proust quoted the line or alluded to it
repeatedly between 1910 and 1920. See Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. by
Philip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1970–93): X, p. 165; XI, p. 239; XVII, p. 65; XIX,
p. 136. Subsequent references to Proust’s letters will be given in the abbreviated form
Corr., followed by a volume number and page reference.
2 The questionnaire is reproduced in Contre Sainte-Beuve précédé de Pastiches et
mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris:
Gallimard, 1971), p. 335.
3 A good deal has been written about this relationship. Most germane here is Michael
Schneider’s Maman (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), a work which offers a sustained
interrogation of Proust’s relation with his mother and how this shapes and can be read
through À la recherche. In her article ‘How to begin a novel: Proust’s À la recherche
du temps perdu and the author-reader relation’, French Studies, 63 (2009), 283–94,
Suzanne Dow engages with Schneider’s book: see pp. 284–5.
4 On Proust’s translations of Ruskin and his mother’s role in the process, see Cynthia
Gamble, Proust as Interpreter of Ruskin: The Seven Lamps of Translation
(Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 2002). See also Edward Bizub, La Venise
intérieure: Proust et la poétique de la traduction (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1991).
5 For a detailed discussion of the relation of mourning to place in Proust’s work, see
Anna Elsner’s chapter ‘Mourning and the Uncanny Space’ in ‘Mourning and
Creativity in À la recherche du temps perdu’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge,
2011, pp. 77–125.
6 Malcolm Bowie, ‘Barthes on Proust’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14:2 (2001),
513–18. See also Diana Knight, ‘Roland Barthes, or the Woman without a Shadow’,
in Jean-Michel Rabaté, ed., Writing the Image after Roland Barthes (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 132–43; Beryl Schlossman, ‘The
Descent of Orpheus: On Reading Barthes and Proust’ in Rabaté, ed., Writing the
Image, pp. 144–60; Éric Marty, ‘Marcel Proust dans « la chambre claire »’, L’Esprit
créateur, 46 (2006), 125–33; Kathrin Yacavone, ‘Barthes et Proust: La Recherche
comme aventure photographique’, L’Écrivain préféré, Fabula LHT, 4 (2008): see
<http://www.fabula.org/lht/4/Yacavone.html> [accessed 17 April 2013]; ‘Reading
Through Photography: Roland Barthes’ last seminar “Proust et la photographie”’,
French Forum, 34 (2009), 97–112; ‘The ‘Scattered’ Proust: On Barthes’ Reading of
the Recherche’, in ‘When familiar meanings dissolve…’: Essays in French Studies in
Memory of Malcolm Bowie, ed. by Naomi Segal and Gill Rye (Oxford: Peter Lang,
2011), pp. 219–31. See also Lawrence Kritzman, ‘Barthes’s Way: Un amour de
Proust’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14:2 (2001), 535–43; and Anne Simon,
‘Marcel Proust par Roland Barthes’, in Proust et la philosophie aujourd’hui, ed. by
Mauro Carbone and Eleonora Sparvoli (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2008), pp. 207–21.
7 Thomas Baldwin, ‘On Barthes on Proust’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 48
(2012), 274–87.
8 A short but detailed study of Barthes’s text has been published by Éric Marty:
Roland Barthes, la littérature et le droit à la mort (Paris: Seuil, 2010); this is the text
of a lecture given at the Collège de France, accessible as a podcast here:
<http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/antoine-compagnon/seminar-2010-02-09-
17h30.html|> [accessed 28 November 2013]. See also Kathrin Yacavone, Benjamin,
Barthes and the Singularity of Photography (London: Continuum, 2012); and Neil
Badmington, ‘Punctum saliens: Barthes, Mourning, Film, Photography’, in
Paragraph, 35.3 (2012), 303–19.
9 Roland Barthes, Journal de deuil (Paris: Seuil/IMEC, 2009); subsequent references
will be incorporated in the text with the abbreviation ‘Journal’, followed by a page
reference. The subject matter as well as the material substance and dimensions of the
Journal make it reminiscent of Mallarmé’s notes published as Pour un tombeau
d’Anatole, ed. by Jean-Pierre Richard (Paris: Seuil, 1961). Neil Badmington considers
this relation: see ‘Punctum saliens’, note 10, p. 316.
10 Roland Barthes, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Eric Marty, 5 vols (Paris: Seuil, 2002),
IV, p. 241; Barthes’s emphasis.
11 In the wake of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [1917, English translation
1925], the twentieth and early twenty-first century have yielded a wealth of critical-
theoretical material, much of it psychoanalytical in approach, that tackles the nature of
grief and loss. Given Barthes’s dismissal of the psychoanalytical approach in the
Journal de deuil, my focus in what follows is not explicitly informed by
psychoanalysis. For an overview of recent scholarship, particularly, though not
exclusively, in relation to Proust, see Elsner, ‘Mourning and Creativity in À la
recherche du temps perdu’.
12 Barthes’s observation is backed up by computational scholarship: as Anna Elsner
has noted, drawing on the Frantext database, there are only 33 occurrences of ‘deuil’
in Proust’s novel vis-à-vis 191 occurrences of ‘chagrin’; see Elsner, ‘Mourning and
Creativity’, pp. 7–8, n. 17.
13 See Compagnon’s first 2009 Collège de France lecture on the Journal:
<http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/antoine-compagnon/course-2009-03-10-
16h30.htm#|q=../antoine-compagnon/course-2008-2009.htm|p=../antoine-
compagnon/course-2009-03-10-16h30.htm|> [accessed 17 April 2013].
14 Jacques Derrida repeatedly confronts this situation in the writings provoked by the
deaths of friends and associates collected in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde
(Paris: Galilée, 2003); in relation to the present article, see in particular ‘Les Morts de
Roland Barthes’, pp. 57–97. For a recent consideration of mourning in Proust and its
relation to Derrida’s conception of ‘demi-deuil’, see Jennifer Rushworth, ‘Discourses
of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch and Proust’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2013,
especially Chapter Three, ‘Proust’s Recherche, Derridean ‘demi-deuil’ and mimetic
mourning’.
15 See Compagnon, full web page reference in note 13.
16 Roland Barthes, ‘« Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure »’ in Le
Bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV (Paris: Seuil, 1984), pp. 333–46 (p.
336).
17 As Barthes puts it in the lecture, ‘À la mort de sa mère, en 1905, Proust traverse une
période d’accablement, mais aussi d’agitation stérile; il a envie d’écrire, de faire une
œuvre, mais laquelle?’ Ibid., p. 334.
18 Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 87.
19 See Antoine Compagnon, ‘Écrire le deuil’ (published 4 March 2013), Acta Fabula,
‘Let’s Proust again!’, <http://www.fabula.org/revue/document7574.php> [accessed 17
April 2013]. This short article is a distillation of Compagnon’s 2009 Collège de
France lectures (see note 13).
20 Barthes, ‘« Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure »’, p. 341; Barthes’s
emphasis.
21 This generic complexity goes further back, however: Barthes’s sui generis
Fragments d’un discours amoureux, which appeared in the spring of 1977, was his
last major publication before his mother’s death; loss is a recurring theme in this
discursive, digressive, patchwork text, and mourning often occurs as a metaphor for
the effects of lost love. See Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977),
pp. 39; 47–8; 123–5; 129–30.
22 Barthes, ‘« Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure »’, p. 342.
23 For a reading of the Narrator’s loss of his grandmother in relation to Freud’s
‘Mourning and Melancholia’, see Richard E. Goodkin, ‘Mourning a Melancholic:
Proust and Freud on the Death of a Loved One’ in Around Proust (Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 127–45.
24 Barthes alludes to the death of the grandmother in ‘« Longtemps, je me suis couché
de bonne heure »’, describing how he recently rediscovered the scene, commenting
that ‘c’est un récit d’une pureté absolue; je veux dire que la douleur y est pure, dans la
mesure où elle n’est pas commentée’ (p. 343).
25 Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 129.
26 Compagnon, for his part, also makes the connection between Barthes’s experiences
as recorded in the Journal de deuil and the ‘intermittences du cœur’: see ‘Écrire le
deuil’.
27 À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard,
1987–89), II, p. 641. Hereafter RTP.
28 This connection is also noted by Compagnon: see ‘Écrire le deuil’.
29 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du
cinéma/Gallimard/Seuil, 1980), p. 109.
30 Barthes, La Chambre claire, p. 112.
31 Iris Murdoch, Under the Net [1954] (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 268.
32 Barthes, ‘« Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure »’, p. 344.
33 Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 130.