A favourite photo of my mother
(taken in 1947, aged 21)
"Does being able to live without someone you loved
mean you loved her less than you thought ...?"
I.
There are some books we love immediately upon first reading; and there are other books which it takes time (and several readings) to fall in love with.
Then there are books like Roland Barthes's Journal de deuil (2009) [a] which one only begins to appreciate once one has lived through a similar experience as the author - in this case, the death of a mother.
II.
The day after his mother's death, in October 1977, Barthes began assembling notes written on quartered slips of paper in which he reflected on his sadness, sense of loss, and the fact that modern society seems to leave no time or space in which to express one's grief; as soon as someone dies, there's a frenzied attempt to move on and the bereaved are encouraged to get over it, as if they have a minor illness [b].
During the following two years, Barthes wrote over 300 of these notes, the contents of which eventually being published in the form of a mourning diary.
I do not here wish to present an overview of these fragments of text, but simply comment on those ideas which most resonate with me at this time and express my agreement with Barthes that the individual should insist on their right to mourn; for it is also the right to "the loving relation it implies" [55].
In a nutshell, dear reader, don't let your suffering be stolen from you ... [c]
Note: the titles supplied below are mine.
III.
On the Corpse Bride
There was, I would suggest, something of the same high degree of intimacy between Roland Barthes and his mother as between D. H. Lawrence and his.
Thus, for example, the opening note of the former's Mourning Diary which suggests that the first night grieving for one's mother is comparable in terms of its passion and emotional intensity to a wedding night, reminds me of the opening verse from one of the latter's early poems:
"My love looks like a girl tonight,
But she is old.
The plaits that lie along her pillow
Are not gold,
But threaded with filigree silver,
And uncanny cold."
The same poem concludes:
"Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams
Of perfect things.
She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream,
And her dead mouth sings ..." [d]
On the Maternal Body
This first note is followed by one written the next day in which Barthes, who was homosexual, counters the accusation that he has never known a woman's body: "I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying." [4]
Me too: and it's only now that I stop to think of the strangeness of this fact; that one was fated to care for the body one was born of when that body approached its end and that from out of the death of this maternal body one is somehow issued anew.
To quote from Lawrence once more: "My little love, my dearest / Twice you have issued me / Once from your womb, sweet mother / Once from your soul ..." [e]
On Posthumous Desire
The fifth fragment dated 29 October is one of the most astonishing: it exactly summarises my position and how I feel. No commentary is required, it just needs quoting in full:
"The desires I had before her death (while she was sick) can no longer be fulfilled, for that would mean it is her death that allows me to fulfill them - her death might be a liberation in some sense with regard to my desires. But her death has changed me, I no longer desire what I used to desire. I must wait - supposing that such a thing could happen - for a new desire to form, a desire following her death." [18] [f]
On Turning Life (and Death) into Literature
I understand why Barthes didn't want to discuss his mother's life, let alone write about her death, for fear of "making literature out of it" [22].
However, as a writer, he just couldn't help himself - and neither can I.
For like Barthes, I recognise that literature originates with a death - the death of a porcupine, for example, or perhaps even the death of the author - and that Walter Benjamin was right to say that what we ultimately seek in art is the knowledge of an event that is denied to us in reality. [g]
On Last Words
Many people about to die do so in silence, particularly if, like my mother, Alzheimer's robbed them of their ability to communicate years earlier.
And I'm not sure there's anything further to say to the dying beyond a certain point; kind gestures - such as a smile, a kiss, a squeeze of the hand - seem to matter more at the very end.
Having said that, the romantic notion of last words - one which "falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes" [h] remains ingrained within our culture and even Barthes finds himself often thinking of his mother's words spoken "in the breath of her agony" [40].
Similarly, I find the final two words spoken to me by my mother constantly recurring; the first a word of greeting and the second one of recognition: Hello Stephen. The memory of these words will, I trust, always move me. [i]
On Courage
Barthes is right: mourning doesn't require courage; the time for courage is when your mother is sick and requires care; when you witness her suffering, her sadness, her confusion and have to conceal your tears (or, as in my case, control your anger and frustration).
On Absence [I]
Barthes is struck by the painful nature of absence; that it is not so much a lack, as a wound. And struck also by the fact that, with his mother gone, he no longer has anyone to announce his arrival to (or greet him) when he gets home.
Again, I understand this perfectly. But, luckily, I have Cat for company and whilst cats may or may not understand what it is to mourn, they certainly know when we are sad, depressed, or anxious and act accordingly (i.e., attempt to comfort us).
On Absence [II]
Everytime I go upstairs and look into my mother's room, "there unexpectedly rises within me, like a bursting bubble: the realisation that she no longer exists, she no longer exists ..." [78]
And I realise also that the dead are all equally dead and gone; it doesn't matter if they died two months ago, like my mother, 36 years ago like Barthes's maman, or two millennia ago like that Siberian princess preserved in ice.
Death is a flat and timeless ontological plane upon which nothing matters and nothing changes and to know this - to know that the dead are eternally and absolutely dead - is also to know that we too "will die forever and completely" [119] [j].
On the Truth of Mourning
The fragment dated 28 May, 1978, is another that is worth quoting in full:
"The truth about mourning is quite simple: now that maman is dead, I am faced with death (nothing any longer separates me from it except time)."
Unfortunately, being 60 - the same age as Barthes when he wrote this - there's not even a great deal of time any longer separating me from death (although, hopefully, I'll not be hit by a laundry van in the near future) [k].
But this tragic realisation enables one to understand why it was Nietzsche taught his readers not to pray, but to bless ...
On Some Sunny Day
In a very brief hand-scribbled note left for me and my sister, my mother expressed her hope that, one day, we'd meet again. I don't think that's very likely (or even very desirable; the thought of personal immortality is one I find laughable and abhorrent) [l].
But, like Marcel Proust, Barthes is devastated by the fact his mother has died and echoes the author of À la recherche du temps perdu when he writes: "If I were sure of meeting Maman again, I'd die right away." [157]
On Acedia
As we know, the ancient Greeks had a word for everything, including that state of listless indifference in which the heart slowly contracts and hardens: ἀκηδία - or, as we write in Latinised modern English, acedia (or accidie).
It's a concept that Christian theologians borrowed and developed in moral terms; and it's a concept that many writers in the 20th century seemed to have a penchant for, though tending to discuss it as a psychological (or existential) phenomenon. Aldous Huxley, for example, wrote an essay on the subject and concluded that it was one of the main afflictions of the modern age [m].
Walter Benjamin also gave acedia an important place within his literary criticism, describing it as an indolence of the heart [n]; whilst Barthes, writing in his Mourning Diary, notes that whilst he believed that following his mother's death there would be a liberation in kindness, what has actually happened is he finds himself "unable to invest lovingly in any other being" [118].
In a later fragment, he defines acedia as a form of desolating egoism and writes:
"Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don't know how to restore generosity to my life - or love." [178]
Again, it pains to me say, but I know exactly what he means ...
Maintaining the Quotidian
When my mother died, I thought I'd want to flee the house; to get out as often as possible and meet as many people as possible; to get back into the world.
But, two months on, I've been nowhere and seen no one and I think Barthes provides a clue as to why this is; one tries to continue living - for a while at least - as if she were still here and according not so much to her values, but her needs.
By maintaining the household order (or what Barthes terms the domestic quotidian) - cooking, cleaning, shopping, etc. - one shares in the activities that shaped her life and it's a way of remembering and silently conversing with her [o].
Anti-Mourning
Q: What is "the furthest from, the most antipathetic to" [196] mourning in gentle silence?
A: Reading Le Monde, "in its acid and well-informed tactics" [196], says Barthes, writing in 1978; checking social media, in its malevolent toxicity, say I, here in 2023.
In Memory / Filial Piety
Like Sade, Barthes has no concern for posterity; no desire to be read and remembered after he's dead; no wish for a monument. He is, he says, perfectly content to vanish completely [p].
However, Barthes cannot accept that this should be the case for his mother; "perhaps because she has not written and her memory depends entirely on me" [234].
That's why I'm writing this post (and those related to it); I would also like my mother's kindness and modesty to be recorded. As I said at her funeral [q], if I don't speak up for her, no one will (certainly not my sister).
But as Barthes's translator Richard Howard notes, perhaps the ultimate task of every son is neither to bury nor sing the praises his mother, but to show a little gratitude; "to exalt her exceptional contribution to his own happiness" [260].
Notes
[a] The English edition of this work by Barthes was translated by Richard Howard as Mourning Diary and published by Hill and Wang in 2010. All page numbers in the post refer to this edition.
Arguably, it might have been better to have come up with an alternative title. For in a note of November 30, 1977, Barthes instructs: "Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering." For Barthes, this Proustian notion of suffering is that which remains (ever present) when emotivity passes. See pp. 73 and 103-04.
[b] Barthes writes in the note dated 20 July, 1978, on p. 163, that he finds the idea of taking an anti-depressant drug to help him overcome his grief shameful; as if suffering were a disease, rather than something essential.
[c] In a fragment on p. 71 of the Mourning Diary, dated 29 November, 1977, Barthes writes: "I can't endure seeing my suffering being reduced - being generalized - (à la Kierkegaard): it's as if it were being stolen from me."
However, he later realises the importance of transforming suffering from a static stage to a fluid state. See the fragment dated 13 June, 1978, on p. 142.
[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bride', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 65-66.
[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin Mother', in The Poems, pp. 66.
[f] See also the fragment dated 16 November, 1977 on p. 53: "Sometimes roused by desires [...] but they're desires of before - somehow anachronistic; they come from another shore, another country, the country of before."
[g] Later in his Mourning Diary, Barthes will admit that writing is his salvation and that depression is when "in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing".
See the fragments dated 21 November, 1977 on pp. 59 and 62. See also the fragment on p. 105 dated 23 March 1978 in which Barthes speaks of integrating his suffering with his writing in his book on photography (Camera Lucida). And finally, see the notes dated 17 and 18 of January, 1979, on pp. 224-225, in which Barthes admits that since his mother's death he has no desire to construct anything new except in writing.
[h] Michael Erard, 'What People Actually Say Before They Die', The Atlantic (16 Jan 2019): click here.
[i] Having said that, Barthes acknowledges (with horror) the possibility that the memory of a mother's last words will one day fail to move (make cry or make smile). See the fragment dated 19 November, 1977 on p. 57.
"We shouldn't reify death, nor confuse the fact of our own individual death with non-being. At most, death might be seen as a temporary pause or refreshment before the inevitable return to what Nick Land describes as the compulsive dissipation of life."
[k]
On 25 February 1980, Barthes was knocked down by the driver of a
laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. He died
from his injuries one month later, aged 64.
[l] I'm a little more sympathetic to the idea of metempsychosis (i.e., the transmigration of souls) and like the idea of atoms being endlessly recycled and assembled into new bodies and objects of all kinds. Seeing the swallows flying "through the summer evening air" whilst on holiday in Morocco, Barthes tells himself: "how barbarous not to believe in souls - in the immortality of souls!" See the fragment dated 13 July, 1978 on p. 159.
[m] See Huxley's essay 'Accidie' in On the Margin (George H. Doran Company, 1923), pp. 25-31. Readers can also click here to read the essay online in the Project Gutenberg ebook.
[n] See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, (Verso, 2003).
[o] See the fragments dated 18 August, 1978 on pp. 190 and 192.
[p] In his will, the Marquis de Sade expressed the wish that his grave be strewn with acorns, so that it would be eventually covered with oak trees. In this way, "any trace of my grave will disappear from the face of the earth, just as I trust the memory of me will fade from the minds of everyone, save for the few who in their goodness have loved me to the last".
See the English translation (from which I quote) by R. J. Dent in Philosophy Now, Issue 143 (April/May 2021): click here to read online.
[q] See the post entitled 'From a Baby in a Basket ...' (27 Feb 2023) which reproduces in full the few lines spoken at my mother's funeral: click here.
"And so, my love, my mother,
I shall always be true to you."
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