'I love you' and other clichés.

Roland Barthes, one of the founding fathers of semiotics, or semiology as it was then called in Europe, was born on this day in 1915. A man of great insight and a lyrical way with words, Barthes gazed upon the whole of French culture like a landscape spread out before him. As he looked around, he saw wrestlers, writers on holiday, soap powder, steak, milk, wine and many other features of everyday life in France. Using a semiotic lens, which Barthes himself was partly responsible for inventing, he looked closely at all these banal, familiar things and saw that each of them was bursting with meaning and was part of a large, complex and very French edifice of myth.

The examples I give here will be recognisable to many modern users of semiotics because they are collected in Mythologies, a volume of early essays by Barthes, published in the 1950s. The essays were written for an educated mass audience, so they are short, vivid and prioritise application over theory. They cover a wide range of topics. These are some of the reasons why Mythologies is Barthes’ best-known work. However, it is far from all he wrote. Today, maybe because it’s his birthday, I want to say some things about love, based on his book A Lover’s Discourse, published in 1978. More than twenty years have passed since his early adventures in semiotics and Discourse is a mature work in which he turns his unusually penetrating gaze on love and the plight of the lover.  

I cannot hope to summarise the whole book and indeed that might not be a very semiotic thing to do, especially as it explicitly presents itself as a series of fragments. Instead, let me paraphrase a few of Barthes’ insights concerning love and perhaps you will be tempted to read his own words.

The lover seeks oblivion. The language of love is the language of annihilation. Sickness and then death. I am overcome. I am overwhelmed by my feelings. I am slain. I succumb to love. I am sure I shall never recover, yet in the course of time, I ‘get over it’, as from an illness.

To call someone adorable is to speak of yourself and not of them. What does adorable mean? It has no residual meaning. It makes the person into an empty vessel, capable of being adored. This is their only characteristic. They are a theatrical prop and the drama is entirely about you.

Love has its religious elements, orthodoxy and intimate gravity. To socialise with friends while the loved one is absent is a distraction. It is slight and brittle, the laughter sacreligious, an unwanted infidelity. When your lover returns and removes you to the emotional space which only you two share, it is like a small child being collected from a party by its mother.

Love is iterative, it is a repetitive performance that both gains and loses value in its repetition. To become a lover is to become part of a ‘love story’, the shape and nuance of which will be dictated by the culture you live in. Each lover crucially imagines his feelings, relationship and love object to be unique and yet to participate in love, to enter the discourse of love, is immediately to become subject to the love story and recite the well-worn lines of script. ‘I love you’ is a phrase that is powerful because it gathers and accumulates meaning through repetition by lots of people, over time and in many situations. This is where it gains its power, as a phrase, to shape and foretell events, its power to command, to place obligations and duties. When someone says 'I love you,' you must reply promptly ‘I love you too’ or the incantation is not complete, things have not been done properly. The theatre of the lover is not performed correctly.

Let’s finish with a particular love story. It is a short story, set in China. Here it is, as it appears in A Lover’s Discourse.

A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. “I shall be yours,” she told him, “when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.” But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.

What Barthes wants us to understand is that the Mandarin’s love object is unattainable. She is out of reach and he is caught in the exquisite agony of waiting. She is not out of reach for ever, though. Eventually the waiting is over and she is available to him. There are no more barriers to overcome, they have been removed. Love dies. Satisfaction is the enemy of desire. But oh, how happy the Mandarin must have been on those 99 days.

Happy birthday, Roland Barthes, 1915-1980. A Lover’s Discourse is published in English by Vintage Classics.

 Key words: #semiotics #semiology #discourse #language #culture #love