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.