From Notting Hill Editions
In this extract from the introduction to Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary, Michael Wood examines Barthes' grief on losing his mother.
We like to think grief is private and temporal; that it belongs to us and will come to an end. It's probably good for us to sustain this belief while we can, but experience will almost certainly teach us a different story. Grief seems private because we often get on with our lives, and can be surprised at our ability to function as usual. But we have changed, and so has our relation to other people.
And grief ceases to feel temporal, because time only alters it, doesn't take it away. We don't necessarily know these things already. We may have to learn them slowly, and Roland Barthes'sMourning Diary is also the diary of his learning. His mother died on October 25, 1977, and his first entry, written, as his whole journal was, on small squares of paper kept for the purpose, is dated from the next day.
He is not yet writing in his vocational sense, he is not working - that will come later, in various essays and lectures and especially in his book on photography, La Chambre Claire (1980) - but he is doing what many writers do when what Barthes calls the irremediable arrives. He is thinking and feeling, watching himself do it, and trying to register in words the immediate movements of his consciousness.
'As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc): futuromania'. 'Part of me keeps a sort of despairing vigil, and at the same time another part struggles to put my most trivial affairs into some kind of order. I experience this as a sickness '. 'What's remarkable about these notes is a devastated subject being the victim of presence of mind '.
Barthes worries about words, finds metaphors. Mourning lies not in solitude or in ongoing life but in the moments when 'love . . . is torn apart once again'. 'Mourning: a cruel country where I am no longer afraid'. Does mourning ('deuil') even describe his condition? 'Don't say Mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering' ('J'ai du chagrin').
He sees the slight return of a taste for life as a first 'demobilization', a release from the army of mourners. There are two stages of mourning - he decides to stay with the word. It's not grief that fades, he thinks, it's the busy emotion of grief. Then he discovers that even the emotion doesn't fade, it returns, 'fresh as on the first day of mourning'.
As often in the later part of his writing career, this subtle man welcomes, although remains a littlebaffled by, the sheer ordinariness of what is happening to him. His former working method, as he told us in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, was to seek out banality and amend it, his goal was 'la banalité corrigée'.
Now he leaves banality alone. 'That's banal. Death, Suffering are nothing but: banal'. 'In taking these notes, I'm trusting myself to the banality that is in me'. And banality rewards his trust, permitting occasional declarations of uncomplicated complaint, an almost lyrical ease. 'There are mornings so sad'. '(How) long everything becomes, without her', more literally 'It's long, without her', and 'How long it is, without her'.
One note in this book dates from before the death of Barthes's mother: April 15, 1977. He thinks of the nurse who scolds the ostensibly irresponsible patient. The nurse doesn't know, he comments, hismother's silent verdict on this bullying behaviour, for him a definition of stupidity. 'People never speak of a mother's intelligence; as if that would diminish her affectivity, distance her as a mother. But intelligence is everything that permits us to live superlatively ('souverainement') with another person'.
The adverb suggests a sort of democratic, familial royalty, and the mother's intelligence includes her silence - has always included, Barthes suggests later, the many things she is not saying. 'Maman never made an observation about me' - or to me, the French also implies, she didn't make observations.
It would take a long essay to unravel the royal scorn that inhabits Barthes' repeated emphasis on the word, but for the moment let's say that an observation is one of those remarks we make where no remark is needed and all remarks are wrong.
This intelligent silence can also infiltrate speech, uncover a special kind of grammar, as in the phraseBarthes recalls among the last words his mother spoke: 'Mon Roland! Mon Roland ', usually evoked in the book with just the possessive and the initial, 'My R, my R' - as if intimacy was best seen as a shorthand. For the same reason, presumably, Maman appears most often as 'Mam'.
Barthes doesn't need to write out the whole word, and perhaps doesn't want to - with repetition, itmight seem too final, too careless of continuing grief. What haunts him is that he is Roland and that he was hers. And who is Roland if he is not hers - because no one is hers now, because she is no one?
In a remarkable moment in A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust's narrator summarizes all hisfeelings for his dead grandmother in a simple naming of the relation: 'She was my grandmother, I washer grandson.' The possessives again. She was mine and I was hers. But there is no possession here in the property-owning or demonic sense, only a moment of calm in Proust, and a sharp recurring sorrow in Barthes - because they have lost the person in the world for whom they were everything, or almosteverything in Proust's case.
The narrator of the novel is in this respect kinder and less desperate than its author, who responded to a sympathetic suggestion that he had been everything for his mother by saying this was not true: if she had really cared about him she would have managed not to die. Barthes had no such resentments; only an almost perfect grief, and a genuine difficulty in continuing to care for himself.
'I am my own mother,' he says at one point in these notes; but he was only an imitation parent ofhimself, and he knew it. In February 1980 he was hit by a van in a Paris street, and a month later he was dead.