Heart of darkness
Peter Ackroyd
A Lover's Discourse Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (Cape E6.95) La Rochefoucauld penetrated the heart of the mystery : 'Some people would never have been in love, had they never heard love talked about'. A Lover's Discourse investigates this paradox; how can individual human beings suffer the invasive powers of love' (so violently that the lover may even kill himself or the loved one) when the moods and codes of love are so impersonal, SO familiar and so hackneyed? Even its most Potent images tend to be trite, reflecting not the agony of the individual spirit but the blandishments of commercial entertainment. I am convinced that the lover's experience of loss and separation, for exam Ple, is coloured by those scenes of parting Obligatory in the War films of the late Forties and early Fifties: the train pulling out of the Platform, the wife or lover left behind, running after the train, the face behind the carriage window, the smoke and, sometimes, the rain. The lover will cry over this popular representation just as forcefully as he will anient his own condition; he may even insert himself into the scene in an act of vicarious homage, metaphorically standing on the platform as the train —the train 'of his life', as he might put it — pulls away from him. And Yet why is it that he will willingly enter the hanal and abstract repertoire of love's Images, when his own plight must seem to hint to be unique? Roland Barthes dwells on this question here by considering, in a number of short essays, the vocabulary of love; words which haunt the lover — waiting, embrace, exile, silence, gossip, will-to-possess — are preSented alphabetically to give at least the illusion of random objectivity. Physical sex literally, unspeakable and in its place M. Barthes unfolds its rhetoric; the lover, in the peculiarly vulnerable position of being 'in °1'ei, reaches out for these words as a camouflage and a defence, a carapace which does not have to include self-knowledge. C.lich6s, such as 'I am lost without you', are hIs one precious possession because they a.11ow him to rise above any proper consideration of his own position. These words and phrases have existed before, and will exist after, the lover's predicament — and yet they can be used to sanction, justify and even e, xPlain that predicament. That is why the Language of love is both so bland and so Plangent, so familiar and yet so powerful, infinitely analysable in its shallowness; it is hoth a social artefact and a register of intimate feeling. And so by tabulating this vocabulary of desire, intimace and absence M. Barthes provides a complete and 'objective' picture of love, seen from a distance like some planet wandering towards earth; although we know that it may destroy us, we see it whole. But, in contrast, love's career follows a predetermined course: the first sight, the capture, the familiarity, and then the days of boredom, incomprehension and anxiety as the original image of the loved one fades. M. Barthes explores the stages and the declamations of this process, where the words are always fresh and yet always the same: 'I make myself cry, in order to prove to myself that my grief is not an illusion: tears are signs, not expressions. By my tears, I tell a story, I produce a myth of grief, and henceforth I adjust myself to it . . .
A Lover's Discourse is a kind of mercurial elegy; in keeping with the simultaneously private and universal context of love, the book is both elaborately individual—with the syntactical ellipses and longueurs of Barthes's prose — and at the same time entirely anonymous. Anybody might have written it because it can, by its very nature, only repeat what has been said before, endlessly. As if in recognition of this, Barthes employs quite freely the words and sentences of other writers; and, since the roots of French theory (whether in Sartre or in more modish figures like Lacan) have always been orthodox and occasionally sentimental, it's quite natural that Barthes should want to use Werther as his principal source.
But the book is also the result of a private collusion, between the lover — the 'fragments' of whose 'discourse' are here exhibited — and the loved one who is called 'X'. Some extraordinary passion leaks through Barthes's lucid prose. But the impulse toward fiction, which is the conventional way of presenting such intractable material for public consumption, has become for M. Barthes the impulse toward organisation. He is a novelist who cannot bring himself to write a narrative; the horror has been systematised alphabetically; his only real characters are his words. Instead of delineating his misfortune in the discursive terms of prose narrative, Barthes quarantines the signs and codes.of love and covers them with ice — he isolates and sterilises these words so successfully that their internal relations, which ordinarily are blurred by conventional ways of seeing, become clear. And 'love' itself is transfigured in the process: 'For a hundred years literary madness has been thought to consist in Rimbaud's "Je est un autre": madness is an experience of depersonalisation. For me as an amorous subject, it is quite the contrary: it is becoming a subject, being unable to keep myself from doing so, which drives me mad. I am not someone else: that is what I realise with horror.'
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