Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes (EPUB)

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“In the sentence ‘She’s no longer suffering,’ to what, to whom does ‘she’ refer? What does that present tense mean?” ―Roland Barthes, from his diaryThe day after his mother’s death in October 1977, Roland Barthes began a diary of mourning. For nearly two years, the legendary French theorist wrote about a solitude new to him; about the ebb and flow of sadness; about the slow pace of mourning, and life reclaimed through writing. Named a Top 10 Book of 2010 by The New York Times and one of the Best Books of 2010 by Slate and The Times Literary Supplement, Mourning Diary is a major discovery in Roland Barthes’s work: a skeleton key to the themes he tackled throughout his life, as well as a unique study of grief―intimate, deeply moving, and universal.

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Editorial Reviews: Review “A revelation to readers of the great Barthes.” ―Judith Thurman, The New Yorker podcast“This book’s unvarnished quality is the source of its wrecking cumulative power. Barthes’s ironic intellect is here wrapped around his nakedly beating heart.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times“Precise and touching memories intersect with spare and at times desperate notes on time, death and grief, written despite ‘the fear of making literature out of it.’” ―Julian Barnes, The Times Literary Supplement“A collection of aphorisms, sadnesses, self-analysis: a journal of savage intimacy.” ―Adam Thirlwell, The New Republic“A beautiful, lapidary portrait of mourning.” ―Meghan O’Rourke, Slate About the Author Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French cultural and literary critic, whose clever and lyrical writings on semiotics made structuralism one of the leading movements of the twentieth century. Barthes had a cult following and published seventeen books, including Camera Lucida, Mythologies, and A Lover’s Discourse.Richard Howard teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, USA. He has also translated works by Barthes, Foucault and Todorov. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Mourning DiaryBy Roland BarthesHill and WangCopyright © 2012 Roland BarthesAll right reserved.ISBN: 9780374533113MOURNING DIARYOctober 26, 1977–June 21, 1978 October 26, 1977First wedding night.But first mourning night? October 27—You have never known a Woman’s body!—I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying. October 27Every morning, around 6:30, in the darkness outside, the metallic racket of the garbage cans.She would say with relief: the night is finally over (she suffered during the night, alone, a cruel business). As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania. October 27Who knows? Maybe something valuable in these notes? October 27—SS: I’ll take care of you, I’ll prescribe some calm.—RH: You’ve been depressed for six months because you knew. Bereavement, depression, work, etc.—But said discreetly, as always.Irritation. No, bereavement (depression) is different from sickness. What should I be cured of? To find what condition, what life? If someone is to be born, that person will not be blank, but a moral being, a subject of value—not of integration. October 27Immortality. I’ve never understood that strange, Pyrrhonic position; I just don’t know. October 27Everyone guesses—I feel this—the degree of a bereavement’s intensity. But it’s impossible (meaningless, contradictory signs) to measure how much someone is afflicted. October 27—“Never again, never again!”—And yet there’s a contradiction: “never again” isn’t eternal, since you yourself will die one day.“Never again” is the expression of an immortal. October 27Overcrowded gathering. Inevitable, increasing futility. I think of her, in the next room. Everything collapses.It is, here, the formal beginning of the big, long bereavement.For the first time in two days, the acceptable notion of my own death. October 28Bringing maman’s body from Paris to Urt (with JL and the undertaker): stopping for lunch in a tiny trucker’s dive, at Sorigny (after Tours). The undertaker meets a “colleague” there (taking a body to Haute-Vienne) and joins him for lunch. I walk a few steps with Jean-Louis on one side of the square (with its hideous monument to the dead), bare ground, the smell of rain, the sticks. And yet, something like a savor of life (because of the sweet smell of the rain), the very first discharge, like a momentary palpitation. October 29How strange: her voice, which I knew so well, and which is said to be the very texture of memory (“the dear inflection . . .”), I no longer hear. Like a localized deafness . . . October 29In the sentence “She’s no longer suffering,” to what, to whom does “she” refer? What does that present tense mean? October 29A stupefying, though not distressing notion—that she has not been “everything” for me. If she had, I wouldn’t have written my work. Since I’ve been taking care of her, the last six months in fact, she was “everything” for me, and I’ve completely forgotten that I’d written. I was no longer anything but desperately hers. Before, she had made herself transparent so that I could write. October 29In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me. October 29The 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. October 29The measurement of mourning.(Dictionary, Memorandum): eighteen months for mourning a father, a mother. October 30At Urt: sad, gentle, deep (relaxed). October 30. . . that this death fails to destroy me altogether means that I want to live wildly, madly, and that therefore the fear of my own death is always there, not displaced by a single inch. October 30Many others still love me, but from now on my death would kill no one.—which is what’s new.(But Michel?) October 31I don’t want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it—or without being sure of not doing so—although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths. October 31Monday, 3:00 p.m.—Back alone for the first time in the apartment. How am I going to manage to live here all alone? And at the same time, it’s clear there’s no other place. October 31Part 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. October 31Sometimes, very briefly, a blank moment—a kind of numbness—which is not a moment of forgetfulness. This terrifies me. October 31A strange new acuity, seeing (in the street) people’s ugliness or their beauty. November 1What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers—a kind of sclerosis.[Which means: no depth. Layers of surface—or rather, each layer: a totality. Units] November 1Moments when I’m “distracted” (speaking, even having to joke)—and somehow going dry—followed by sudden cruel passages of feeling, to the point of tears.Indeterminacy of the senses: one could just as well say that I have no feelings or that I’m given over to a sort of external, feminine (“superficial”) emotivity, contrary to the serious image of “true” grief—or else that I’m deeply hopeless, struggling to hide it, not to darken everything around me, but at certain moments not able to stand it any longer and “collapsing.” November 2What’s remarkable about these notes is a devastated subject being the victim of presence of mind. November 2(Evening with Marco)I know now that my mourning will be chaotic. November 3On the one hand, she wants everything, total mourning, its absolute (but then it’s not her, it’s I who is investing her with the demand for such a thing). And on the other (being then truly herself), she offers me lightness, life, as if she were still saying: “but go on, go out, have a good time . . .” November 4The idea, the sensation I had this morning, of the offer of lightness in mourning, Eric tells me today he’s just reread it in Proust (the grandmother’s offer to the narrator). November 4Last night, for the first time, dreamed of her; she was lying down, but not ill, in her pink Uniprix nightgown . . . November 4Today, around 5:00 in the afternoon, everything is just about settled: a definitive solitude, having no other conclusion but my own death.Lump in my throat. My distress results in making a cup of tea, starting to write a letter, putting something away—as if, horribly enough, I enjoyed the now quite orderly apartment, “all to myself,” but this enjoyment adheres to my despair.All of which defines the lapse of any sort of work. November 4Around 6 p.m.: the apartment is warm, clean, well-lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother. November 5Sad afternoon. Shopping. Purchase (frivolity) of a tea cake at the bakery. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl behind the counter says Voilà. The expression I used when I brought maman something, when I was taking care of her. Once, toward the end, half-conscious, she repeated, faintly, Voilà (I’m here, a word we used to each other all our lives).The word spoken by the girl at the bakery brought tears to my eyes. I kept on crying quite a while back in the silent apartment.That’s how I can grasp my mourning.Not directly in solitude, empirically, etc.; I seem to have a kind of ease, of control that makes people think I’m suffering less than they would have imagined. But it comes over me when our love for each other is torn apart once again. The most painful point at the most abstract moment . . . November 6The comfort of Sunday morning. Alone. First Sunday morning without her. I undergo the week’s daily cycle. I confront the long series of times without her. November 6I understood (yesterday) so many things: the unimportance of what was bothering me (settling in, comfort of the apartment, gossip and even sometimes laughter with friends, making plans, etc.).My mourning is that of the loving relation, not that of an organization of life. It occurs in the words (words of love) that come to mind . . . November 9I limp along through my mourning.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”).—Pure mourning, which has nothing to do with a change of life, with solitude, etc. The mark, the void of love’s relation.—Less and less to write, to say, except this (which I can tell no one). November 10People tell you to keep your “courage” up. But the time for courage is when she was sick, when I took care of her and saw her suffering, her sadness, and when I had to conceal my tears. Constantly one had to make a decision, put on a mask, and that was courage.—Now, courage means the will to live and there’s all too much of that. November 10Struck by the abstract nature of absence; yet it’s so painful, lacerating. Which allows me to understand abstraction somewhat better: it is absence and pain, the pain of absence—perhaps therefore love? November 10Embarrassed and almost guilty because sometimes I feel that my mourning is merely a susceptibility to emotion.But all my life haven’t I been just that: moved? November 11Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say: I’ll be back at a specific time or who you can call to say (or to whom you can just say): voilà, I’m home now. November 11Horrible day. More and more wretched. Crying. November 12Today—my birthday—I’m feeling sick and I can no longer—I no longer need to tell her so. November 12[Stupid]: listening to Souzay* sing: “My heart is full of a terrible sadness,” I burst into tears. *whom I used to make fun of.1 1. See “L’art vocal bourgeois” in Mythologies, 1957. This essay is missing from the current English edition of Mythologies (Hill and Wang, 1972). It will be included in the complete, revised edition to be published by Hill and Wang in 2011. November 14In a sense I resist the Invocation to the Status of the Mother in order to explain my distress. November 14One comfort is to see (in letters I’ve received) that many readers had realized what she was, what we were, by her mode of presence in “RB.”1 Hence I had succeeded in that, which becomes a present achievement. 1. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1975 (Hill and Wang, 1977; revised, 2010). November 15There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic. November 15I am either lacerated or ill at easeand occasionally subject to gusts of life November 16Now, everywhere, in the street, the café, I see each individual under the aspect of ineluctably having-to-die, which is exactly what it means to be mortal.—And no less obviously, I see them as not knowing this to be so. November 16Sometimes roused by desires (say, the trip to Tunisia); but they’re desires of before—somehow anachronistic; they come from another shore, another country, the country of before.—Today it is a flat, dreary country—virtually without water—and paltry. November 17(Fit of depression)(because V. writes me that she still sees maman, in Rueil, dressed in gray)Mourning: a cruel country where I am no longer afraid. Hill and WangA division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux18 West 18th Street, New York 10011Copyright © 2009 by Éditions du Seuil/ImecForeword and annotations copyright © 2010 by Nathalie LégerTranslation and afterword copyright © 2010 by Richard HowardAll rights reservedOriginally published in French in 2009 by Seuil, France, as Journal de DeuilPublished in the United States by Hill and WangFirst American edition, 2010A portion of this book first appeared, in slightly different form, in The New Yorker.Continues…Excerpted from Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes Copyright © 2012 by Roland Barthes. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Roland Barthes was French, so his view of death is slightly different from that of Americans, who view of death a sort of tremendous hindrance, an “infection” caught by the survivor, which must be cured or rid of – a sort of psychological dis-ease.Self-help books abound on death, particularly the death of spouses and children. There are almost no books on the death of parents, but the fact is that the death of parents (particularly if one had a close, loving relationship with the parents) is a dramatic and life-changing event. Nothing will ever be the same after the death of parents.In his diary, Barthes is open about his feelings. Often his entries are one-liners, but always are clearly expressed. It explains the feelings of a survivor moving through mourning, which is something I was grateful for, after having read so many books intended to serve as self-help models on how to overcome the feelings that come with mourning. Whether religiously-based or secular, most books for mourners can’t help but bash mourners on the head just a little bit about how they “must” see the person is in “a better place,” and how they should start taking steps to “move on” and away from the person that passed. They dwell on this, while softening the blow by saying that one shouldn’t hurry. Prodding the mourner to stop it already, as if the mourner could stop the mourning behavior, or as if mourning were some sort of self-imposed toxic behavior, is what most books about death focus on. It can make a mourner feel a bit crazy to have this subtle get-over-it encouragement. Mourning is neither self-imposed, nor is it toxic to feel what is natural to be felt upon losing a very loved person that was an integral part of one’s life.This is not a book for anyone who believes living in denial about his/her emotions and feelings is preferable, and who opts to push those feelings deeply inside him or herself to a place where these emotions can reside forever, never understood or acknowledged.This book was a relief to find.

⭐Since this is a diary, that by the way was not meant to be published, I knew going in that it would be a slightly different read than usual, but let me just say that it was a bit strange. Roland Barthes, a literary theorist, philosopher, and linguist, wrote this immediately after the trauma of his mother’s death. There were some wonderful quotes, which I’m listing below, but other than that, this was quite boring. I may have appreciated it somewhat if I was familiar with Barthes’s work.Some quotes that I liked: “The measurement of mourning: eighteen months for mourning a father, a mother.”“Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude makes us less miserable.”“It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.”

⭐Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary is the most accurate, poignant written account of how grief is experienced. Barthes does not revert to cliche or overwrought metaphor–he does not attempt to apologize for the way he experiences mourning after his mother dies. Instead, these short fragments explore the process of living that one undergoes in the presence of absence that death most acutely is. This book is a treasured companion for any thinking mind who recognizes that “grief” is often most overwhelming when there is no feeling or emotivity involved.

⭐Unlike a few of the recent Barthes publications his estate is digging up, this one is a gem. I’d give it five stars but I tend to save that for complete masterpieces. It could be five though. He hits on subtle feelings that elude most writers, especially on a topic such as this one, that could so easily turn corny. If you like Barthes or poetic writing and detest self-help books this one should be a great fit.

⭐Some of his writing was hard for me to understand, but that is on me and not him, as it was more a result of my lack of understanding than his lack of expression. Many of his insights struck like a bolt of lightning and helped me to gain understanding as to how I was feeling after the death of Mom, with whom I was very close.

⭐An account of grief as unpredictable and scattershot as the feeling itself – captured in small memories, stray thoughts, moments where Barthes believed he couldn’t go on. A great book.

⭐I really liked this book. More than a critical or philosophical text, this is a window to enter into Barthes’ head since the moment his mother died. However, I think that this text might shed light on other Barthes’s books as Camera Lucida. It is a very personal book, intimate, but with a really good reflection about life and death

⭐I can tell how special the relationship was that Barthes had with his mother. It’s very touching. She truly was the most important person in his life. Barthes is able to show vulnerablity and sadness in a way that isn’t always present in these types of books.

⭐I always knew that Barthes was an interesting person, had great ideas and could write poetically; the downside is that sometimes he goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Not in this book he doesn’t. This is a diary of Barthes’ mourning for his mother, and in its clarity, brevity and poignancy it reminds me of books like ‘The Little Prince’. Definitely worth a read.

⭐A lesser known Barthes book but well worth a read. I have used it extensively for my photographic work references. Many of his writings I could personally relate to as I had recently lost my mother.

⭐Roland Barthes is honest and raw about his experiences in grieving the loss of his beloved Mother. His experiences are definitely transferable to other grief experiences, and the lay out of this book being a page by page diary entry is easy to digest when in early stages of grief can make it difficult to concentrate for extended periods of time. I highly recommend this book.

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