By Dwight Garner
Published New York Times: October 14, 2010
Roland Barthes — the French literary critic, theorist and philosopher — died an absurd death. In 1980 he was hit by a laundry van in Paris, while walking home from a lunch given by François Mitterrand, the future president of France, and died a few weeks later. He was 64 and as dashing as he’d been at half that age.
October 26, 1977 — September 15, 1979
By Roland Barthes
Translated and with an afterword by Richard Howard.
Illustrated. 261 pages. Hill & Wang. US$25.
.Barthes, his grieving readers knew, had just come through his own period of mourning. His book “Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,” published shortly before his death, included an extended meditation on a cherished photograph of his mother, who’d died two years earlier. In “Camera Lucida” he ached, elegantly, for the woman he referred to as “my inner law.”
What the world didn’t know was that Barthes, the day after his mother’s death on Oct. 25, 1977, began keeping a diary of his suffering, written mostly in ink on small individual slips of paper. Those slips have now been gathered up by Barthes’s longtime translator, Richard Howard, and ushered into print.
There’s every indication that Barthes planned to publish this diary, in some form, someday. “The reader is presented not with a book completed by its author,” the volume’s annotator, Nathalie Léger, writes, “but the hypothesis of a book desired by him.”
Garner's full piece at NYT
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