So Much for the Granta
The National has just published my review of Roland Barthes’ notes after the passing of his mother, Mourning Diary.
This is really an amazing little book. I can’t imagine that there are more than 10,000 words in Mourning Diary, but each one of them is so painstakingly placed and remarkably evocative. In his review of the book, Eric Banks talks a lot about the concept of lagniappe (in fact, a concern one can trace throughout Barthes’ writings as a whole), and it’s really an apt idea. Rarely does a book overflow with meaning the way Mourning Diary does.
And now here’s a quote from my review:
A chronicle-in-fragments of the two years after his mother’s death, Mourning Diary is a work of profound intellectual and emotional strength. It consists of 330 notecards that Barthes began writing on as a way to cope with his loss. Exact and enigmatic, the notes feel like a natural extension of the terse books that Barthes specialised in, and their suggestive declarations make Mourning Diary feel substantial despite its small size. Though these notes offer only fragments of thought, they give an impression of immensity, as if they were the extremities of a submerged mass.
What one witnesses while reading Mourning Diary is Barthes in the process of creating a personal language with which to understand an event that has left him shattered. After two months of mourning he writes on December 7, 1977: “This is a flat condition, utterly unadjectival – dizzying because meaningless (without any possible interpretation)… A new pain.” These lines – at once so coolly analytic and wrenched with sadness – are representative of the approach that Barthes attempts here. He continually stresses the newness and inarticulability of his state, slowly constructing a complex framework around the very fact of his mourning’s inexpressibility.
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… Just to say thankyou for your review, and for Eric Bank’s as well. This book came out in February 2009, and at the time I threw in with the people who thought it was not something to be published. Thus I could justify not entering into this pain and its surprising, moving transmutation.
Your review brings those personal moments back, and I’m grateful for that. Not only my moments, but the Barthes moment as well: not only a brief increment of time, but something at times as big and as inapparent as an era. It was a time when we were learning new concepts to beat the band. And investing in dictionaries of foreign languages, and dictionaries of language and linguistics! There seemed no limit to what could be encompassed, especially with Barthes’s prose making it seem definitively palatable. It seems in retrospect that he was always already breaking with that confidence and energy in the powers of the concept.
You sent me back to the dictionaries, Scott. You say Eric Banks talks a lot about lagniappe in his review. Run to the dictionary. something given or obtained (from a merchant, say) gratuitously or by way of good measure. I noticed that Banks was talking more about another term than “lagniappe.” SUPEREROGATORY. I still can’t prononce the word, and will be careful not to use it at a dinner party that is going well! def: exceeding what is needed. Above and beyond the call of duty. Possible synonym: superfluous.
I’d take issue more with my Webster’s than with your conflation of the two terms. Lagniappe seems like the piece of candy you used to get at a grocery store. And something supererogatory is the thing you can’t calculate or include in a balance sheet, but something that happens “just like that,” just because the person feels Nietzschean that day: filled with life, and distributing largesses to the multitudes! Superfluous it is not, overabundant it is.
So now we have more than we bargained for. Reviews are to be included in the category of the supererogatory. Thanks again.