The journalists, who as usual understand nothing, grumble when Balavoine reproaches them for never inviting young people (and there’s the inevitable rhetorical snigger: well, obviously we do—you’re here, you little twerp!).
But Mitterrand understands exactly what is happening. This young brat is showing them up for what they are—him, the journalists around the table, and all their kind—old farts who have been moldering in one another’s company for so long that they’ve become dead to the world without even realizing it. He tries to agree wholeheartedly with the angry young man, but each attempt to get a word in edgewise ends up sounding like misjudged paternalism.
“Hang on, I’m trying to read my notes … In any case, what I want to give you is a warning…” Mitterrand fiddles with his glasses, bites his lip. This is being filmed, it’s live on television, it’s a disaster. “What I want to tell you is that despair is a motivating force and that when it’s a motivating force, it’s dangerous.”
The journalist, with a hint of sadistic irony: “Monsieur Mitterrand, you wanted to speak with a young person. You’ve listened very carefully…” Now get out of that, you jerk.
And so Mitterrand starts to stammer: “What interests me very much is that this way of thinking … of reacting … and also of communicating!—because Daniel Balavoine also expresses himself through writing and through music—should have the rights of a citizen … should be heard and, in that way, understood.” Keep digging, keep digging. “He says things his way! He is responsible for his words. He’s a citizen. Like any other.”
It is March 19, 1980, on the set of a Channel 2 news program. It is 1:30 p.m. and Mitterrand is a thousand years old.
23
What does Barthes think about as he dies? About his mother, they say. His mother killed him. Of course, of course, there’s always the hidden personal business, the dirty little secret. As Deleuze says, we all have a grandmother who had amazing experiences … so what? “About his grief.” Yes, sir, he is going to die of heartbreak and nothing else. Poor little French thinkers, trapped in your vision of a world reduced to the pettiest, most formulaic, most flatly egocentric domestic concerns. A world without enigma, without mystery. The mother—mother of all responses. In the twentieth century, we got rid of God, and put the mother in His place. What a great trade. But Barthes is not thinking about his mother.
If you could follow the thread of his hazy reverie, you would know that the dying man thinks about what he was, but above all about what he could have been. What else? He doesn’t see his whole life in a flash, just the accident. Who ran the operation? He remembers that he was manhandled. And then the document disappeared. Whoever’s responsible, we are probably on the brink of an unprecedented catastrophe. Whereas he, Roland, his mother’s son, would have known how to make good use of it: a little for him, the rest for the world. His shyness defeated him in the end. What a waste. Even if he survives, it will be too late to celebrate.
Roland does not think about his mommy. This is not Psycho.
What does he think about? Maybe he sees this or that memory flash through his mind, things that are private or insignificant or known only to him. One evening—or was it still daylight?—he was sharing a taxi with his American translator, who was over in Paris for a brief stay, and Foucault. The three of them are sitting in the backseat, the translator in the middle, and Foucault, as usual, is monopolizing the conversation. He speaks in his animated, confident, nasal voice, like a voice from days of old, and he is the one in control, as ever. He improvises a little speech to explain how much he hates Picasso, how crappy Picasso really is, and he laughs, of course, and the young translator listens politely; in his own country he is a writer and a poet, but here, he listens deferentially to these two brilliant French intellectuals’ speeches, and Barthes already knows that he’s powerless to match Foucault’s loquacity, but he has to say something all the same if he doesn’t want to be left out, so he wins some time by laughing, too, but he knows that his laughter doesn’t ring true, and he’s embarrassed because he seems embarrassed, it’s a vicious circle. It’s been like this all his life. He wishes he could have Foucault’s self-assurance. Even when he speaks to his students and they listen reverently, he shelters his shyness behind a professorial tone, but it is only when he writes that he feels sure of himself, that he is sure of himself, alone, in the refuge of his page, and all his books, his Proust, his Chateaubriand, and Foucault continues to babble on and on about Picasso, and so Barthes, in order not to be left out, says that he, too, hates Picasso, and when he says this he hates himself, because he can see exactly what’s happening, it’s his job to see what’s happening: he’s debasing himself in front of Foucault, and no doubt the young and handsome translator realizes it too. He spits on Picasso but only timidly, a small gob of spit, while Foucault roars with laughter, he agrees that Picasso is overrated, that he has never understood what people saw in him, and I can’t be certain that he didn’t think this; after all, Barthes was above all a classicist who, deep down, did not like modern life, but really—what does it matter? Even if he did hate Picasso, he knows that’s not the point; the point is not to be outdone by Foucault; the point is that as soon as Foucault makes such a provocative statement, he would look like an old fart if he disagreed, so even if he genuinely didn’t like Picasso, he now denigrates him and mocks him, in this taxi taking him God knows where, for the wrong reasons.
Perhaps that is how Barthes dies, thinking about that taxi ride, that is how he closes his eyes and falls asleep, sadly, with that sadness that has always filled him, never mind his mother, and perhaps he spares a brief thought for Hamed, too. What will become of him? And of the secret he now guards? He sinks slowly, gently into his final sleep and, well, it’s not an unpleasant sensation, but while his bodily functions give out one by one, his mind continues to wander. Where else will this final reverie lead him?
Hey, he should have said that he didn’t like Racine! “The French boast endlessly about having had their Racine (the man who used only two thousand words) and never complain about not having had their Shakespeare.” There—that would have impressed the young translator. But Barthes wrote that much later. Ah, if only he’d had the function then …
The door opens slowly, but Barthes is in his coma and does not hear it.
It’s not true that he’s a “classicist”: deep down, he doesn’t like the seventeenth century’s dryness, those heavily layered alexandrines, those finely chiseled aphorisms, those intellectualized passions …
He does not hear the footsteps approaching his bed.
Of course, they were peerless rhetoricians, but he doesn’t like their coldness, their fleshlessness. The Racinian passions? Pfft, big deal. Phaedra, sure … well, the confession scene in the pluperfect subjunctive, tantamount to the conditional past … all right, sure, that was brilliant. Phaedra rewriting the story with her in Ariadne’s place and Hippolytus in the place of Theseus …
He doesn’t know that someone is leaning over his electrocardiogram.
But Berenice? Titus didn’t love her anymore, that was blatantly obvious. It’s so simple, you’d think it was Corneille …
He does not see the figure rummaging in his belongings.
And La Bruyère, so scholarly. At least Pascal conversed with Montaigne, Racine with Voltaire, La Fontaine with Valéry … But who would want to have a conversation with La Bruyère?