" Le Journal de deuil de Roland Barthes : un écrit de vie paradoxal ? " (1)

Yet the Journal de deuil testifies that, despite the denial of time, mourning has indeed taken place, and carefully records its stages as grief and mourning become part of a story. The real mourning begins for Barthes with the reading of Proust, and the project of writing a book about his mother based on photography, this time with the acceptance that writing can dialecticize grief and accomplish mourning. This text on the late mother, to be written under the title La Chambre claire, bears witness to the "accession of grief to the active", in Barthes's words, nourished by the reading of Deleuze's Nietzsche , or to put it in Barthesian terms, the resolution of grief in Vita Nova through a scenario that does not consist in the negation of grief, but in its transformation into a life transfigured by grief. This movement out of mourning passes through an obligatory moment of emptiness, of annihilation of the self, to which Barthes gives learned and often exotic names, such as vacillation, fading, Zen experience or satori, all of which designate the "feeling of the passage of the wing of the definitive" that characterizes this moment of floating between an emotional state of ephemeral mourning, already fleeting, and the installation of a kind of lasting peace, of atonic eternity that gives it an impression of vertigo, as if in front of a hole. This passage from mourning to melancholy, analyzed by Freud, is dramatized by the Proustian narrator, who describes in Albertine disparue the emergence from a circularity of regret and constantly renewed memories, feeding off one another, like an amputation of memory, a sudden amnesia, provoking a sensation of emptiness. Through this self-imposed asceticism, the subject emerging from mourning escapes the second loss that Freudian "mourning success" achieves, by prolonging the egotism of mourning without betraying it. Language then presents itself as the possibility of erecting a monument to the mourning we leave behind, as an assumption that transforms it into an active, constructive movement: what was intolerable when discourse classified mourning becomes acceptable in the transfiguration by writing.

For Barthes, as for Proust, mourning is proof of the episodic nature of the self, which is described both diachronically and synchronically: from a synchronic point of view, at the rhythm of a day or a week, desire can be reborn in mourning, as shown by the episode of the "intermittences du cœur" in La Recherche ; from a diachronic point of view, on the scale of a lifetime, the experience of mourning supports Proust's thesis of the plurality of identity, made up of a succession of distinct selves that do not rely on any individual support of a self that would be permanent at different times of one's life.

The ordeal of mourning poses the enigma of a common place for the successive episodes of a life outside the arbitrariness of the proper name chosen to designate an individual. According to Proustian logic, the subject who emerges from mourning, who accepts the rupture between the old and the new self, should bear a new name. The emergence from mourning in Albertine disparue coincides with a return to the narrative, the novelistic, even the rocambolical, with a series of comic misunderstandings about the identity and names of the characters, at the end of which the narrator realizes that the self that loved Albertine is indeed dead.

The other model of mourning in À la recherche du temps perdu, the mourning for the grandmother borne by the narrator's mother, is much closer to Barthes's Diary in that the mother's character is described as definitively transformed by her mourning, prey to a sense of emptiness, to an "incomprehensible contradiction of memory and Nothingness", according to a Proustian formula taken up by Barthes. Proust shows the change in identity caused by mourning, with the mother adopting the figure of the deceased in a phenomenon he compares to the transmission of names in the aristocracy. For Barthes, the way out of mourning is provided by the entry into literature, through the writing of La Chambre claire , which is presented as the story of a quest for the essential photograph. The whole experience of mourning is displaced onto photography, to such an extent that we could apply to photography what the Diary says about mourning: both appear as the flip side of narrative in that they deny all confidence in the continuity of the world, the sine qua non of narrative - whether in the form of the life story, to which the writing of mourning is opposed, or the cinematic narrative, whose very movement is opposed to the photographic snapshot. Photography perpetuates mourning, retaining it in an eternal return of the same, excluding any dialectic, and hence any possibility of catharsis. It is anthropologically linked to death, through its power to immobilize time and interpretation.

This parenthesis on the link between mourning and narrative, opened on the occasion of the publication of Roland Barthes' Journal deuil , invites us to conclude that all literature is about mourning. Once again, the chosen authors illustrate this point, whether we're talking about Stendhal and the place he gives to the mother's mourning in The Life of Henry Brulard, Montaigne and his Essays conceived as a monument to the memory of La Boétie, whose genesis is linked to the absence of a friend with whom to exchange letters, or Proust, whose life's work is linked to mourning and places at its center the successive mournings of his grandmother and Albertine.

The paradox is removed if we take into account the double meaning of the word mourning: as the perpetuation of a state of grief, unchanging and indialectic, and as the active process of emerging from this state.