After He Had Gone

Abstract

When her father dies, his daughter turns to his books for comfort. She finds 13 volumes, favourite books, each one with a bookmark inserted. A friend tells her of Barthes’ Mourning Diary. The entries are short, phrases and fragments, often disconnected. The first entry was made on 26 October 1977, the day after his mother died, and the last on 15 September 1979. This two-year period saw Barthes writing and speaking in fragments and developing practices for their arrangement in books and albums. In A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments Barthes describes ‘these fragments of discourse’ as ‘figures,’ ( Barthes 1978 : 3), while in How to Live Together he talks of ‘presenting findings as we go along’ (2013: 133). Here, a daughter presents her own findings – fragments from Barthes and the books her father left behind – arranged as diary entries (from the day after Barthes’ mother’s death to the day after her own father’s death) according to the order of the 13 books she found after her father had gone.