‘Faire ceci ou faire cela?’

This essay traces the interconnections between the rhetoric and actuality of Barthes’s proclaimed inability to choose between the polarised forms of the Album and the Livre, the fragmentary ‘note’ of the Diary and the all-embracing Novel. Barthes’s public rehearsal of this indecision, which takes place in the pedagogical context of his lecture course La Préparation du roman, is structured as the theatrical ‘deliberation’ of the writer faced with the obligation to choose. Yet Barthes underlines the appeal of thinking in terms of simplified alternatives, and leaves the formal decision hanging in the balance. I read this artificially constructed deliberation in conjunction with his analysis of Saint Ignatius’s Exercices spirituels, where a new language through which to solicit God’s will is elaborated through the theatrical preparation of an ‘election’. The symbiotic relation that Barthes identifies between Ignatius’s pedagogical Exercices and the personal Journal spirituel – in which Ignatius charts the progress of a practical election – takes me to the relation between Barthes’s Préparation du roman and his own private diaries. His 1979 essay ‘Délibération’ combines a general question (can a Diary be Literature?) with a practical issue to be resolved: should Barthes keep a diary with a view to publication?