The Return of the Diary in Barthes’s ‘Vita Nova’

Abstract

This chapter examines a moment when the literary avant-garde returned to diary-writing and the writing subject, by focusing on Roland Barthes’s experiments with the diary (journal intime). These experiments take place in the context of his project for a ‘Vita Nova’ (seeking a unification of his life and writing, and a new, subjective form of literature), and are all related to his mourning for his mother. His Journal de deuil (written 1977–1979) pursues an impossible ideal of diary-writing, in which a univocal, fully present writing subject expresses a valuable interior experience to produce a literary œuvre. The impossibility of this ideal leads Barthes to his reflections on the diary in the article ‘Délibération’, and then to an almost perfectly opposite form of diary-writing project, with Soirées de Paris. These two diaries, exploring opposite extremes of writing, are placed by Barthes as components within his imagined novel (Vita Nova).