Fragmenting in the Original English: Barthes, Me, and Destiny

So many airports. It's April 15^th and I’m drinking coffee in Casablanca Mohammed V Airport on my way home from my annual yoga bootcamp, and watching the clouds. I'm mulling on this day 39 years ago, and recalling a wondering of last year, when I was last in Morocco.

Weather in Casablanca

CMN to RAK. I went to COP21 in 2015 of course. Lots of talk and not a lot of action. Interesting I warrant, but in Paris everyone is pleased with themselves. All that pontoon-faced structuration theory. If we really want to address climate change, we have to choose to. Last November, in Menara Airport, Marrakech, it felt like a different world. COP22 was a much more dour affair. Dejectedly I flitted through the latest London Review of Books, with it's disturbing article on the May administration. Honestly. Another time. Then, a fascinating article about Brutalism by that lovely golden-haired boy Owen Hatherley. I rather enjoyed his book on regeneration though Tony was spitting bricks. Or prefabricated panels. But then, a new biography of Roland Barthes, reviewed by Michael Wood. I always wonder what you have to do to get motorway services named after you. Anyway. Barthes. Wood talks about Barthes’s last work. He’d had, while gazing at clouds in Casablanca, what he called a “conversion” experience on the 15^th April 1978, and thereafter intended to “enter into literature, into writing, to write, as if I had never written before: to do only that.” Later he poured water on the suggestion that he planned to write a novel, and by March 1980 he was dead. Wood says: “Many of his readers have regretted the loss of what might have been easily recognisable as a novel […] [some] critics […] have thought Barthes’s last book, Camera Lucida, was his novel; and still others see the notes for what Barthes called his Vita Nova as a conceptual framework for the novel we are all invited to write.

Well. I knew Barthes well. I called him Rollie of course, as all his good friends did. I’d played many a hand of vingt-et-un with his mother, Henriette, and he. And so Wood’s article both grated and gratified. After that April day, Barthes did go all out for the conceptual novel that we are all invited to write. Perhaps I should outline a little of Rollie’s ouvre before that day. Of course there was his 1967 essay, The Death of the Author. He outlined there how one must separate the context of the author from text. The alert reader might wonder how his book Camera Lucida fits that frame, being so heavily laden with the image of his mother, Henriette. Well of course, vingt-et-un! Though he describes the pictures of his dear maman, and the book is laden with images, none are of Henriette. Every text, he says, is “eternally written here and now”. What’s important is the destination. The jetztzeit is what Walter Benjamin calls the here and now (nowtime, some translate it as, but I prefer the former as an indication of the spatial too). This is what Rollie saw in the clouds over Casablanca. A future where the choice dictated by language was all about destination (language is fascism he once said-didn’t-say). Where the reader was both free of and explicitly enchained by authorial intention. Rollie was a trickster. A slippy slidey eel to paraphrase Robbe-Grillet (whom I never really liked even before he referred to me as a “young girl, vehement and angry” in that little book on Barthes of his. That was in 1977 and like all good young people I hadn’t quite understood this French saying-is-not-saying nonsense. But Alain didn’t have a clue what was going on, and anyway, he hit on me in the cafeteria. I most certainly did not “pounce”). 

It was like this one

Well. I am meandering. On that April day, and in the subsequent months, Rollie determined to produce – for young minds, free as yet of authorial stamp – destinations. Well, apparently free, but also not-free. The difference – vingt-et-un! – he told me and Henriette, between choisir and chosiste. Between choice, and what I see translated often as thing-ist, sometimes as concrete (and I'd say, between choice-not choice and the here-and-now).

That’s where I come in. I’d become friendly with Rollie directly after that inaugural address when in trying to avoid Alain (who really is slippery) I’d missed my lift. Rollie kindly took me back to the little appartement I was borrowing, and interested and amused I suppose by my impassioned disquiet over his saying-not-saying, he invited me to a cards evening with his mother. Of course I accepted. And when, in May 1979 – I was a young barrister, and although serious about Tony, not yet married (well. E chat parti, les souris dansent) – Rollie offered me some part-time piece-work to fill some empty hours while I built my practice and earn a few more pounds, I was intrigued. I got the boat train to Paris to meet him and a few others, of all nationalities, men and women, and a few I wasn’t sure about. “My name,” he declared, theatrically, twinkly-eyed, Gitanes in hand, in his black poloneck; with his sweet and comical heavily French-accented English, “Is Packard. Edward Packard.” We giggled. He later explained his choice. Packard from that funny little Hewlett-Packard word processor he’d been given by Henriette in the late 1960s I think, and a new printer he used to refer to as Fin, for the end of both the work as he printed it, and the world of books as we’d known it, and some play on Finnegan’s Wake, I understood; and Edward, the Anglicisation of that wonderful and earnest book Edouard by Claire de Duras that Rollie always said was the advent of postmodern French theory. (Henriette said though, and I believe her, that it was also after Edouard de Villefort – the poor little son of the awful prosecutor in Le Comte de Monte Cristo – who falls prey to Dantes’s revenge machinations and sparks his first episode of remorse. She said she read it to him when he was too young.)

Like all those French chaps, Rollie loved American movies. Of course you know that. His plan, it emerged that day, was to construct a series of books which had multiple pathways. Printed books that were non-linear. That reflected – if not honestly, then avec amusement, the paucity of comprehension with which we take decisions, and the rollercoasteering nature of our lives. And with re-reading – re-living as it were – better choices are made. Choisir – chosiste.

He showed us his prototype: The Cave of Time, a Hegelian foxtrot and no mistake. But he left it mostly to us. He took no remuneration himself, but split the royalties and commission between us. Mine was No. 6: Your Code Name is Jonah. It’s got Russian defectors (it was 1978!), German femme fatales, crooked White House insiders, dodgy scientists. And whale song. My little homage? You are Roland Barthes. Choose your own adventure! 

My (your?) friend, Rollie Barthes, by Paul Granger (from Your Code Name Is Jonah) and from the cover of Camera Lucida

Barthes’s own homage? La mort de l'auteur, of course. This, from page 48 of his last book:

You don’t see the laundry van until too late. You barely feel the impact. The clean sheets fill the air above you, floating gently down. As you fall, enshrouded, you are reminded of clouds on an April day over Casablanca. It is all over for you. 

The end.