ROLAND BARTHES
543
text? Never! you aren't even close. Whence the depressive effect:
acceptable when I write, disappointing when I reread.
At boltom, all these failures and weaknesses designate quite clearly
a certain defect of the subject. This defect is existential. What the
Journal posits is not the tragic question, the Madman's question:
"Who am I?", but the comic question, the Bewildered Man's question:
"Am I?" A comic-a comedian, that's what the Journal-keeper is.
In
other words, I never get away from myself. And if I never get
away from myself, if I cannot manage to determine what the Journal is
"worth," it is because its literary status slips through my fingers: on the
one hand, I experience it, through its facility and its desuetude, as
being nothing more than the Text's limbo, its unconstituted, un–
evolved and immature form; but on the other hand, it is all the same a
true scrap of that Text, for it includes its essential torment. This
torment, I believe, consists in this: that literature is
without Proofs.
By
which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only
what
it says,
but even
that
it is worth the trouble of saying it. This harsh condition
(Play and Despair, Kafka says) achieves its very paroxysm in the
Journal. But also, at this point, everything turns around, for out of its
impotence to prove, which excludes it from the serene heaven of Logic,
the Text draws a
flexibility
which is in a sense its essence, which it
possesses as something all its own. Kafka-whose Journal is perhaps
the only one that can be read without irritation-expresses this double
postulation of literature to perfection: Accuracy and Inanity: " .. . I was
considering the hopes I had formed for life. The one which appeared
the most important or the most affecting was the desire to acquire a
way of seeing life (and, what was related, of being able, by writing, to
convince others) in which life would keep its heavy movement of rise
and fall, but would at the same time be recognized, and with a no less
admirable clarity, as a nothing, a dream, a drifting state." Yes, that is
just what the ideal Journal is: at once a rhythm (rise and fall, elasticity)
and a trap (I cannot join my image): a writing, in short, which tells the
truth of the trap and guarantees this truth by the most formal of
operations, rhythm. On which we must doubtless conclude that I can
rescue the Journal on the one condition that I labor it
to death,
to the
end of an extreme exhaustion, like a
virtually
impossible Text: a labor
at whose end it is indeed possible that the Journal thus kept no longer
resembles a Journal at all.
Translated by Richard Howard
