Roland Barthes
DELIBERATION
I've never kept a journal-or rather I've never known if I
should keep one. Sometimes I begin, and then, right away, I leave off–
and yet, later on, I begin again. The impulse is faint, intermittent,
without seriousness and of no doctrinal standing whatever. I guess I
could diagnose this
diary disease:
an insoluble doubt as
to
the value of
what one writes in it.
Such doubt is insidious: it functions by a kind of delayed action.
Initially, when I write the (daily) entry, I experience a certain pleasure:
this is simple, this is easy. Don't worry about finding something
to say:
the raw material is right here, right now; a kind of surface mine; all I
have to do is bend over-I don 't need to transform anything: the crude
ore has its own value, etc. Then comes the second phase, very soon after
the first (for instance, if I reread today what I wrote yesterday), and it
makes a bad impression: the text doesn 't hold up , like some sort of
delicate foodstuff which "turns," spoils, becomes unappetizing from
one day to the next; I note with discouragement the artifice of
"sincerity," the artistic mediocrity of the "spontaneous"; worse still: I
am disgusted and irritated to find a "pose" I certainly hadn 't intended :
in a journal situation, and precisely because it doesn't' 'work" -doesn't
get transformed by the action of work-/ is a
poseur:
a matter of effect,
not of intention, the whole difficulty of literature is here. Very soon,
continuing my reperusal, I get tired of these verbless sentences ("Sleep–
less night. And the third in a row." etc.) or whose verb is carelessly
condensed ("Passed two girls in the Place St.-S.")-and try as I will
to
reestablish the propriety of a complete form ("I passed... ," "I spent a
sleepless night"), the matrix of any journal,
i.e.,
the reduction of the
verb, persists in my ear and exasperates me like a refrain.
In
a third
phase, if I reread my journal pages several months, several years after
having written them, though my doubt hasn't dissipated , I experience
Translation copyright
©
1980 by Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. This excerpt from
A Barthes
R eader,
edited by Susan Sontag, will be published by Hill
&
Wang this winter.
