A Lover's Discourse

by Xiaolu Guo

  – No female point of view at all. But still, women like the book.

  What did Barthes know about love? Even though I was the one who really loved his A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, I didn’t know anything about this French author’s emotional life. Actually, you were the one who knew more about his personal life.

  ‘Roland Barthes was homosexual. He never dated a woman in his life,’ you told me in one of those bedtime reading hours. Those hours were always the best time to conduct an interesting conversation.

  ‘Really? But it cannot be true!’ I reacted with exasperation. I always thought someone like Barthes must have been a typical Frenchman with multiple romantic relationships with bohemian ladies.

  ‘You never noticed that he barely mentions women in his books? Especially in A Lover’s Discourse?’

  ‘Oh.’ I tried to recall what I had read some years ago. ‘Hmm, I never thought about this.’

  ‘The only woman he wrote about was his mother. And she was the only woman he lived with in his entire life.’

  I was very surprised. I looked at you suspiciously. How could a landscape architect know so much about Roland Barthes’s life?

  ‘It’s not that mysterious. I studied Barthes at university, and read a biography about him. I also read biographies of Nietzsche and Kaiser Friedrich II, if you’re interested.’

  I didn’t quite know who Kaiser Friedrich II was, but I wouldn’t ask now.

  You went on: ‘Barthes’s father was killed during World War I. So he grew up with his mother and lived with her for sixty years, until the day she died. He had a few erotic encounters with boys in Morocco. But that was all.’

  I went silent.

  For me, Barthes’s discourses on love represented the complex relations between a man and a woman. I had always thought of it as heterosexual love. Now you told me this love expert had never really been romantically involved with any woman. Everyone, including me, believed the book had been about two points of view – man/woman and woman/man thinking about each other and reflecting on their desire. I had always identified myself with the supposed woman in the discourse. But in fact the book was a homosexual man’s view about love and desire. There was no discourse, at least no dialogue between men and women. Nor was there between men and men. It was like a solipsistic monologue.

  For all these years, the book had been a personal document for me, speaking to me. But now I had to admit it wasn’t speaking to me, or of me, exactly. Or not in the way I thought it had. What should I make of it after this?

  ‘No female point of view at all,’ you said. ‘But still, women like the book.’

  Putting down a photographic book about landscape designs in Colorado, you got up and went to the front deck.

  The boat was swinging very slightly in the water. I liked these floating moments, feeling the wind and the water around us. It was never static like living in a concrete house. But still, if what you said was true, would I still like the book as much as I used to? Did I feel cheated? For a woman like me, love was romantic first, then it grew domestic, and then it became concrete and there would be no room for an ungrounded play of romance.

  Had I completely misunderstood Barthes?

  Or had I misunderstood myself?

  Barthesian Love Discourse 2

  – I know it’s a different kind of love. But even if Barthes had loved some men, it would be nothing compared to his love for his mother, right?

  – Yes. But it’s more this: any romantic love would not be able to gain space if the person were totally tied to his maternal love.

  So for the next few days, I sat in a cafe near the boat and read about Barthes’s life. I found out more. A contradictory figure. In the daytime Barthes was an orderly Protestant who wrote and worked, but at night he would abandon himself in Parisian gay bars. He was a champion of hedonism who never publicly proclaimed his homosexuality. Certainly he was not a figure like Pier Paolo Passolini or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who had fearless lives when it came to their homosexuality. So was Barthes totally bourgeois and willing to live in hypocrisy, a double life, because of cowardice?

  And then there was his mother. The only constant love in his life was the love for his mother. I read a paragraph from his diary Journal de Deuil:

  The awesome but not painful idea that she (mother) had not been everything to me. Otherwise I would never have written any work. Since my taking care of her for six months long, she actually had become everything for me, and I totally forgot ever having written anything at all. I was nothing more than hopelessly hers. Before that she had made herself transparent so that I could write . . . Mixing-up of roles. For months long I had been her mother. I felt like I had lost a daughter.

  Then again, about his mother’s death:

  Do not say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not in mourning. I’m suffering.

  And an even more heartbreaking paragraph:

  In the corner of my room where she had been bedridden, where she had died and where I now sleep, on the wall against which her headboard had stood I hung an icon – not out of faith. And I always put some flowers on the table. I do not wish to travel anymore so that I may stay here and prevent the flowers from withering away.

  I reread this line: I do not wish to travel anymore so that I may stay here and prevent the flowers from withering away. So sad. Unbearable. This love for his mother had to be the deepest love Barthes experienced.

  ‘I know it’s a different kind of love. But even if Barthes had loved some men, it would be nothing compared to his love for his mother, right?’ When I said this to you, I felt a total revelation about the author.

  ‘Yes. But it’s more this: any romantic love would not be able to gain space if the person were totally tied to his maternal love.’

  I thought of what you just said. I didn’t know about you, but I sensed that neither you nor I were totally tied to our mothers or our fathers. Did that suggest our romantic love would be strong and complete?

  Barthesian Love Discourse 3

  – As I understand it, for Barthes, the deepest love was not sexual. It was beyond sexual.

  – Beyond sexual! That was exactly how I felt.

  Then I thought about my relationship with my parents. My father was perhaps the only man I loved deeply, but I never expressed this love to him. It was not our culture to express love in a verbal way. The only physical intimacy between us that I could remember was when I was a child and we tried to cross busy roads – he would hold on to one of my arms and I would cling on to him as cars roared past. Both my father and I were short-sighted, and we worried about each other whenever we walked in busy streets. Otherwise, our bodies were apart. Just as our goals in life were apart. Years later, when he was dying in the hospital, I had held his hand. His skin was wrinkly and leathery, and felt damp and cold. That was the last moment our bodies were near to each other.

  I was not so close to my mother, even during the final months before she died. She was not a tiger mother like other Chinese women who were strict with their children. But she was unaffectionate. She never enjoyed her life. ‘To live is just to suffer. Nothing good comes out of it.’ That was her daily motto. She believed this for all her life, and she wanted me to believe it too. Perhaps it was because of the hardship her family had suffered in the past, or because of the total lack of any education. For her, life was only about dealing with practical matters. Anything non-practical for her amounted to stupidity. And I was very impractical. I wanted to write and make films when I was at school. Later on, when I became an adult, I chose to study something which would contribute nothing to practical day-to-day life. ‘Eat to live, or live to eat?’ She would scorn me. And it was so clear for her that there was only one answer: ‘Live to eat.’ That was why, from when I was quite young, I had talked only to my father. But my attachment to him ended when he passed away. And when my mother
died, my attachment to China began to die too. I came to Europe. I wanted my adult life to be in Europe. Now as I thought of my love for you, it was like an extension of my love for my father, or a father in a different land, who would teach me how to live, away from familiar landscapes and languages.

  ‘As I understand it, for Barthes, the deepest love was not sexual,’ you remarked. ‘It was beyond sexual.’

  ‘Ah. Beyond sexual!’ I looked at you.

  That was exactly how I felt after being with you for almost a year. We went through the first winter together, and we were still very much in love. My love for you was to do with this boat life, this water, this landscape, and where we would finally moor.

  THREE

  东

  EAST

  Self-indulgence & Self-absorption

  – Do you like Duras’s work?

  – Oh, please. She is such a pain. A perfect case of self-­indulgent self-absorption.

  When I read Duras’s The Lover, I could see vividly in my mind’s eye the interactions between the young French girl and the Chinese man, their conversations, their ways of making love. I felt keenly the power play between the two. He is rich but he is Chinese. She is poor but she is European. Which character did I immediately identify with? It felt natural to me to identify with the French girl. I would behave exactly like her. But why did I not identify with the Chinese man, since I too am Chinese? For me, being female trumped everything else. I felt everything that French girl felt. Absolutely everything. Even though I had first read the book at university in China, and had never travelled abroad at that point. I hadn’t felt any cultural barrier between my life and the French girl’s life. Strange. But there it was.

  The different kinds of sensuality expressed by different authors seemed to be a primal factor in my reading experience. There was always a barrier for me to cross when I read books by male authors. The sole exception was Barthes. Barthes was like a woman who could not stop talking. A good woman brimming with words. I always had problems reading Balzac, Dickens or even Hemingway. Somehow I found their tone pompous, and their unbending masculinity was impossible for me to penetrate. Only when I found paragraphs that carried a sense of the defeated, the ignored and the dying did I feel connected. Only then did I feel at last there was something in their books that I could get closer to. Then I remembered reading an interview with Duras. She was talking about how she felt suffocated by reading classical novels, especially Balzac. She pointed out that Balzac describes everything in his books. Absolutely everything. And it’s exhausting for readers. In Balzac’s novels, there’s no place for the reader, I remember Duras said.

  I felt the same with most of the classical novels taught at school. They were too male, too indigestible and too exhaustive.

  ‘Do you like Duras’s work?’ I asked you.

  ‘Oh, please,’ you said, showing the white of your eyes as they rolled upwards. ‘She is such a pain. A perfect case of self-indulgent self-absorption.’

  ‘Fuck you! I am asking you about her work, not her as a person!’

  ‘Is there any difference?’ You looked at me, with a mocking smile. ‘She is totally narcissistic. A narcissist can’t love anyone but herself.’

  I was angry. In my eyes, great writers, singers and artists were usually narcissistic, but we loved them nevertheless. That was because they were reflections of ourselves, our lives and our minds. How could you separate us from them? Or maybe you were scared of emotions, and didn’t want to be too close to certain ideas about yourself?

  Vaterland / Fatherland

  – In this case I prefer the German – Vaterland, rather than motherland. I rather think China is my fatherland.

  – But in our Vaterland we still speak Muttersprache.

  During my second summer in Britain, the trip came. And I had to leave you as well as the boat or I would fail my PhD. I told you that I would only be gone for two weeks. You said you would miss me. But you would occupy yourself with work on the boat and on some landscapes. ‘I’m very used to being alone,’ you added, and then in hesitant Chinese: ‘yi ge ren’.

  Yes. Yi ge ren. Alone.

  After handing over a dozen administrative forms, and receiving signed permission from my supervisor, I took some camera equipment with me and left our boating life for China. I was flying to a hot and bustling southern province near Shenzhen. I was not going back to my home town, a home town with two new gravestones and sombre memories. The umbilical cord was finally cut, forever.

  ‘In this case I prefer the German – Vaterland, rather than motherland,’ I said to you, before I headed off to Heathrow. ‘For me, I rather think China is my fatherland.’

  ‘But in our Vaterland we still speak Muttersprache,’ you responded, walking me to the train station.

  After a long and agonised flight, my plane landed in Shenzhen. Heat and dampness kissed my face as soon as I got off the plane. Tropical plantations with large leaves and bright red rhododendrons welcomed me by the highways. Here I was, back in my country after a year as a researcher, with foreign eyes and a Western perspective. I liked this feeling, I thought to myself. So I didn’t need to bear the heavy weight of this country. I was just passing through, like I was passing through England.

  I found it strange – this word fieldwork in anthropology study. ‘Field’ made me think of the yellow soil, paddy fields and deep mountain valleys where I came from. And fieldwork was compulsory for university students and professors during the Cultural Revolution in China. Farmers were our teachers. But these days, there was not much ‘field’ left to work, especially in the West. As a would-be film anthropologist, I was heading to a modern industrial Chinese ‘village’. There, everyone worked and lived in their concrete blocks, their bodies hooked to numerous mobile phones and video games – an electrical field, a technical farm.

  When I arrived in the village, I found myself a cheap hotel called South Star. It was located at the junction between the artisan village and the motorway which led to the throbbing heart of Shenzhen. I had been to Shenzhen in the past, but I had never visited this village on the outskirts. I checked in, and entered my room. It was late, but I didn’t want to sleep, and could not sleep. Wasting no time, I put down my camera equipment and walked into the village.

  It was about ten thirty at night. On the boat in England, I would be in my pyjamas hugging my hot-water bottle on the bed. But here, the day was just cooling down. Colourful neon lights glowed everywhere, especially in front of workshops and food stores. All sorts of advertisements, from karaoke bars to hair salons, from acupuncturists to MBA courses, all shining in the night sky. On the roadside, accompanied by music from the shops as well as their smartphones, people were drinking their noodle soup and talking loudly. Some seemed to be quarrelling over their meal and it looked like a fight was on the way, but very quickly a burst of laughter washed away the argument. Kids ran around in the night alleyways, water guns or battery-operated toys in their hands. So colourful, so full of life. This was something I didn’t have in England. The vitality. It was an essential thing I missed when I was away from my native country. What is more important, I asked myself: the vitality of Eastern life, or the order of Western civilisation? Sitting on a bench under the street lights aimlessly like a foreigner, I didn’t have the answer.

  An Ordinary Tradesman’s Job

  – It’s an ordinary tradesman’s job, why do you want to waste time recording this?

  – Maybe it’s ordinary. But I find it interesting.

  – No. It’s just placing one bit of paint on another.

  The next day, after sleeping in my sweat without turning on the air conditioning, I woke up in a sticky and slimy bed. It was almost forty degrees, and it was not yet noon. The humid subtropical climate affected my body with a very different metabolism. I was longing for an iced Coke, but there was not even a fridge in my hotel room. Only a plastic kettle sa
t by my bedside, waiting for me to boil some water.

  I took a cold shower. I’d almost forgotten the feeling of standing under a cold shower – something I had not done since I left China. Memories of childhood summers returned to me. I saw myself waking up from a siesta and eating a bowl of iced mint jelly, or killing mosquitoes with an electric fan in our backyard, or stealing watermelons from a field with the neighbourhood kids. Back then my father was healthy and happy. I could always turn to him if my mother was hassling me to do something I didn’t want to do. All this was gone now. People grew old, became ill and then died. And I had become a grown-up. Now I was a woman who lived in a cold northern country, trying to build my life with a white man, a WASP.

  After the shower, I put on a light dress and opened the window. The heat outside seeped in and soon evaporated my melancholy. I went down to the street with my camera equipment. By the road, I ate a bowl of wonton soup with two steamed buns as the dust rolled past. Right next to me, painting workshops and art stores lined up. You could find a copy of any artist you liked displayed in the shop windows: Monet, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Pollock, Chagall, Renoir, Picasso, Matisse. There were also the classical Chinese ones too, the inky landscape scrolls from Tang Dynasty Wang Wei and Wu Daozi.

  I entered one workshop, then another. After chatting with the workers, I checked a few more stores. It seemed to me that this artisan village was based on a traditional working household: the husband would be painting a Monet while his wife prepared a new canvas and the grandparents cooked in the back. At the same time their cousin or uncle would be making a picture frame in the yard, ready for the newly painted Monet. They spoke of simple things, and did not have much education. Almost all of them were migrants from poorer parts of China. They were easy to talk to, and almost oblivious to my camera.

  ‘It’s an ordinary tradesman’s job, why do you want to waste time recording me?’ The worker spoke in front of his painting, yawning, and carried on applying colour to his Monet.