" L'aile du Non-Écrire "

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More attention was paid to " ultimate works " in painting and music than in literature, to Schubert 's Schwanengesang , to Poussin's L'Hiver. In part, but not exclusively, this was a reflection on the end of literary careers, with models as distant as Rimbaud and Philip Roth. A corollary question would be : is there such a thing as a "beyond writing" or, more simply, an "after "? Roland Barthes tackled this challenge head-on at the start of his last lecture on La Préparation du roman : can we stop writing, he asked ?

The ends of literature, then, would be completion and incompletion, denouement and prolongation, retreat and renewal, but also intention or purpose, to the exclusion, of course, of cessation for good.

The title " Fins de la littérature " is polysemous. The words " end " - in the plural - and " literature " have become ; the simplest way of linking them seemed to be the preposition de, which suggests multiple resonances. Ends are the end, the completion, the culmination, the achievement, but also the goal, the intention, the aim, the design, or the result. Ends are also the confines, the limits of literature, referring to an ever-present debate : can literature say everything ? Barthes comments on Valéry, evoking " literature as the art of deception ". In other words, literature deceives, abuses and disappoints ; at best, it disappoints for the better, according to the Swiss usage of the verb.

This title also stems from a personal motivation : 2020 will be the last year of this lecture. It does not, of course, mark the end of literature, but rather the fear of embodying the " Vieux Saltimbanque " in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris , that " vieux homme de lettres qui a survécu à la génération dont il fut le brillant amuseur ".

" Fins de la littérature " also coincides with a singular moment : the accompaniment of a loved one at the end of life. The loss questions literature and its ends. The result is melancholy. Mourning is one of the ends of literature, one of its limits but also one of its goals, from the myth of Orpheus to Albertine. The subject of literature is suffering," remarks the narrator in Le Temps retrouvé ; "but the search for the general causes of our grief through writing is a healthy discipline," he adds.

So we call on Baudelaire and Proust. Because quotation proceeds, according to Jean Starobinski, from melancholy, mourning narratives dialogue with literary mourning, replaying the experience of fidelity and infidelity, which is inseparable from mourning. In " Les intermittences du cœur ", the narrator suddenly becomes aware of his grandmother's death, and wants to preserve " the originality of [his] suffering ". The pain is also to say the unique with the words of others, which will undoubtedly be the final word of this lecture. In a time of unparalleled mourning, it was a question of providing a lecture on endings, disappointing by definition. What help is there, then, if not " work and faith ", as Sartre advises us at the end of Les Mots ? Another possible help is Pasolini's "desperate vitality ", mentioned by Barthes in his lecture on the Neutral. It's his final Nietzschean moral : a will-to-live devoid of will-to-seize.

The ends of literature can first and foremost concern the literature of the extreme, in the sense of the ultimate limit of things. As in Nathalie Sarraute's diary at the time of her husband's death : only the time is written, while appointments are crossed out, the page showing where literature ends. Similarly, on the manuscript of Saint-Simon's Mémoires, the text is interrupted by a mysterious line of symbols - perhaps crosses and tears - corresponding to the death of his wife. Saint-Simon marks a six-month pause in his writing, like a right to silence, and a duty. For both of these writers, however, the interruption was momentary and fruitful.

After his mother's death, Barthes asked himself whether or not he should write Can one voluntarily stop writing for ever ? Writing is a profanation, but also a necessity." Vitanova " chosen by Barthes, it prevents melancholy but can also prove an infernal cycle, " that tenebrous state to which [...] lead the wear and tear of repeated work and mourning ". Like Sartre, who saw himself as " machine à faire des livres ", Barthes experiences the tedium of routine activity, the antithesis of " vitalité désespérée ". The perpetually-restarted cycle ends in disappointment : one stops and starts again. Barthes states : " I only write to be finished; the only joy a book gives me is to have finished it. " Some die on the job, like Proust, Joyce or Musil. At the end of Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Chateaubriand " is discouraged to last ".

The final end, when one no longer writes, becomes a fantasy, like Rousseau'sotium studiosum . For Barthes, this aspiration, too, is terrifying: " Sometimes I feel the wing of Non-Écrire pass over me ", he declares, alluding to Baudelaire. In Greece, the idle manipulation of the komboloi seems to him an active emblem of emptiness, tinged with melancholy. Barthes observes the following gradation :otium studiosum, the Greek komboloi, and wuwei, which is the Tao's non-action, or complete nothingness. Absolute retirement is contrasted with the vita nova of literature, which produces, come what may, an ultimate work, a source of various prophetic readings as swan song or testament.