ROLAND BARTHES
Sven Birkerts
I’ve been finished with reading Barthes for a week or so, but the rubbed up electricity of his mind is still with me, I can bring it in very quickly, and every time I do I get the feeling that something has been entered over on the plus side of the ledger. What has stuck with me in a more unsettling way, not that I haven’t known it for years, is the story of his death—how he had left a luncheon for Mitterrand and stepping off a curb was hit by a truck. For years I had it a bakery truck, but when I checked the obituary recently I saw that I was wrong. But I’ve already forgotten what kind of truck it was. And why should I care? A truck is a truck. Except that picturing a bakery truck slightly—only slightly—softened the sense of calamity, if only because bread is the emblematic French thing, and Barthes was the emblematic French intellectual. And it was not impossible to imagine Barthes himself, had it happened to someone else, making something of the semiotics. But it wasn’t a bakery truck, so I’ll let that rest. For me the irking thing is the obvious. I am interested in the manner of peoples’ deaths. Death is the last word of the text, the word without which the rest can’t really be understood, at least if we are looking at a life under its aspect of destiny. (I grant that many—maybe most—people don’t consider it this way). So of course the end—the how & when—throws its retro-light on absolutely everything, a fascination that is inexhaustible. Barthes’ end is troubling. It would maybe also offer the possibility of a liberating interpretation had he died instantly, instead of living on for another month. I don’t know the conditions of that living on—very likely it was unconsciousness, life-support. I should find out. It matters hugely whether the thinking consciousness of Roland Barthes was abruptly shut-off at that moment, or whether it flickered on and off in some hospital bed. In my mythology the truck was the finishing stroke, and for that reason it raises the impossible question of how a life so devoted to parsing nuanced meanings, not just about texts and phenomena, but about origins and ends, fates, the laws of life itself, could be extinguished without warning. Extinguished without the fact of the end entering the ongoing contemplation. The question may only be vexing to those who still believe that life has the possibility of meaning. Not that meaning is a given, but that it can be discovered and achieved. Barthes, if anyone, proceeded on that assumption. So what I wonder is whether the surprise trauma of his death undercut or disproved his project—if it was actually predicated on life having meaning—or whether the final impact still allowed him time enough. I wonder if his last conscious thought could have been in some construction an affirmation, a hurried but still vital rounding off. Or—another angle—could the man have so integrated the possibility of the sudden and unexpected that it was in some manner foreseen (though not predicted)? If not, does the manner, the unknown, cut against the whole larger sense of his sensibility? I’m very curious, and not just with Barthes, to know what one’s thinking life is finally brought around to. Was the thinking life of Barthes self-contained in its final satisfactions, or only gratifying en route to something? Intransitive or transitive? I can’t believe—never will—that a thinking life can have the possibility of its last thoughts just torn from it like a page from a book.