As Roland Barthes crossed a zebra crossing, a laundry van knocked him flat. Disfigured, Roland Barthes was unidentified for hours in the ward. That was one of the shocking details about the death of Barthes. Italo Calvino, in 'In Memory of Barthes', connects his reading experience of Barthes’s final work, Camera Lucida, with his reflection on death and photography.
On 28th March 1980, a group of people waited for Barthes’s coffin to leave the hospital for the provincial cemetery to join his mother in her grave. Michael Foucault was among them; Italo Calvino later joined in the silent crowd, feeling ‘a grief that would not tolerate any other display but that of silence’ (Calvino, 73). Calvino got a glimpse of Barthes in the coffin. ‘Barthes’s face did not seem at all disfigured: it was him, exactly as he was when I regularly encounter him in the streets of the quartier, cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth’ (71). The funeral artist might have done a great job to recover his features; meanwhile, Calvino’s recognition appears to me symbolic, especially when I read his opinion that Barthes’s last book on photography is also about love.
Yes, but this one too was a book about love, as is proved by this passage about the difficulty of avoiding the ‘heaviness' of one's own image, the 'meaning' to give to one's own face: ‘For it is not indifference which erases the weight of the image - the Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police - but love, extreme love' (p. 12). (74)
Love makes the photo look less static, non-human. It makes sense why many dislike the cinema. Looking at the portrait, you feel deadly if not unloved. It is not at all ludicrous when the photographer often sweet-talk his model to boost his or her confidence.
Love symbolically explains why Calvino could recognise Barthes. Yes, Barthes might look far from disfigured in the coffin. But Calvino describes not the ‘heaviness’ of his face. The fixity of Barthes’s corpse should have reminded Calvino of ‘the fixity of the image of death’ (74) in photography. He writes none of these in his short essay. He gives back the image of Barthes we know to us, the one Calvino and Foucault would bear forever for their friend.
Reference List
Italo Calvino. Collection of Sand (2013). Penguin.