ROLAND BARTHES
541
supplied, in my mind, with a nasty answer:
" Who cares? ",
or, more
psychoanalytically:
"It's your problem ."
All 1 have left
to
do is analyze the reasons for my doubt. Why do 1
suspect,
from the point of view of the Image,
Journal writing? 1 believe
it is because this writing is stricken, in my eyes, as though with an
insidious disease, with negative characteristics-deceptive and disap–
pointing, as 1 shall try to say.
The journal corresponds to no
mission.
Nor is this word laugh–
able. The works of literature, from Dante to Mallarme, Proust, and
Sartre, have always had, for those who wrote them, a kind of social,
theological, mythic, esthetic, moral end. The book, "architectural and
premeditated," is supposed to reproduce an order of the world, it
always implies, 1 believe, a monist philosophy. The Journal cannot
achieve the status of the Book (of the Work); it is only an Album, to
adopt Mallarme's distinction (it is Gide's life which is a "work," not
his Journal). The Album is a collection of leaflets not only inter–
changeable (even this would be nothing), but above all
infinitely
suppressible:
rereading my Journal, 1 can cross out one entry after the
next, to the complete annihilation of the Album, with the excuse that
"I don't like this one": this is the methoQ.,,?f Gro).lcho and Chico Marx,
reading aloud and tearing up each cla,llse of t.l)e contract which is
meant
to
bind them .-But can't the
Jou~'1 ~ !
ip
f9-.f1~1
be considered and
practiced as that form which essentially .wesses the inessential of the
world, the world as inessential?-For that, the Journal's subject would
have to be the world, and not me; otherwise, what is uttered is a kind of
egotism which constitutes a screen between the world and the writing;
whatever I do, 1 become consistent, confronting the world which is not.
How to keep a Journal without egotism? That is precisely the question
which keeps me from writing one (for 1 have had just about enough
egotism).
II
I
,I
Inessential, the Journal is unnecessary as well. 1
~aQ)19,tinvest
in a
Journal as 1 would in a unique and
m9n-PJ?~ntal
work "Yhich would
be dictated to me by an incontrovertible des' e. The regular writing of
the Journal, a function as daily as any other physiological one, no
doubt implies a pleasure, a comfort, but not a passion.
It
is a minor
mania of writing, whose necessity vanishes in the trajectory which
leads from the entry produced
to
the entry reread: "I haven't found that
what I've written so far is particularly valuable, nor that it obviously
deserves to be thrown away " (Kafka). Like any subject of perversion (I
am told), subjected to the "yes, but," 1 know that my text is futile, but
at the same time (by the same impulse) 1 cannot wrest myself from the
belief that it exists.
