Barthes Mother, or A Discourse for the Lover Who Knows No One Will Ever Reply

In the chapter “The Love Letter” of Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, there is a reflection on Freud:

“Like desire, the love letter waits for an answer; it implicitly enjoins the other to reply, for without a reply the other’s image changes, becomes other. This is what the young Freud explains so authoritatively to his fiancee: ‘Yet I don’t want my letter to keep remaining unanswered, and I shall stop writing you altogether if you don’t write back. Perpetual monologues apropos of a loved being, lead to erroneous notions concerning mutual relations, and make us strangers to each other when we meet again, so that we find things different from what, without realizing it, we imagined.’

“(The one who would accept the ‘injustices’ of communication, the one who would continue speaking lightly, tenderly, without being answered, would acquire a great mastery: the mastery of the Mother.)” (trans. from the French by Richard Howard, 1978, 158-159; originally published as Fragments d’un discours amoureux by Editions du Seuil, 1977)

I am quietly fascinated. What is this becoming other? When we write to someone there is an expectation of reply. If the reply never comes, is this person we wrote to a stranger?

And, if they are a stranger, were they always a stranger, even when we thought we were writing to them? Or do they only become a stranger when we address them and they fail to reply — to be there for us?

The truth is that I am thinking about these things because (I believe) they are connected to a recent experience: a week ago, I asked to meet the director of a writers’ festival. This director suggested we meet up. They suggested they were available, and happy to catch up. Then the meeting failed to eventuate.

A small interruption. But a small interruption in which any further interruption — like asking did you still want to meet up? did something happen? is either of us still the people we were when we seemed to agree that we wished, whoever those people were, to have them meet up, to appear for one another? — feels like another kind of finality: a blemish upon a past that we agreed upon but which failed, in the end, to arrive.