The Death of Roland Barthes / Vita NovaAdam Thirlwell

Mourning Diary by Roland Barthestranslated from the French by Richard Howard(Hill and Wang, 261 pp, $25)

The Preparation of the Novelby Roland Barthestranslated 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 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 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, self-analysis: 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 reality-effect’, 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 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 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.