“The Dead With Me”: Ausonius’s Parentalia as Memorial to the Poet

Is it possible to remember our dead without inscribing ourselves in their memorials? Soon after the accidental death of Roland Barthes in 1980, Jacques Derrida was asked to compose a memorial for his friend and fellow theorist. The text, “Les morts de Roland Barthes,” is a wrenching response not only to Barthes’ death but even more to his “Death of the Author”—though without ever naming the essay. Derrida confronts the issues of death, authorship, and temporality so powerfully intertwined in Barthes’ essay and transforms Barthes himself into the exemplum of the dead author on myriad levels. At the heart of Derrida’s memorializing response is his struggle over the project—specifically his recognition that the reasons and intentions behind memorialization are always problematic—and his conviction that the dead honoree inevitably becomes a fabrication of and commodity for each person who memorializes him—something like the text of Barthes’ essay in the hands of its readers (Derrida 2001.50):

Or are we going to make the dead our ally (“the dead with me”), to take him by our side, or even inside ourselves to show off some secret contract, to finish him off by exalting him, to reduce him in any case to what can still be contained by a literary or rhetorical performance, one that attempts to turn the situation to its advantage by means of stratagems that can be analyzed interminably, like all the ruses of an individual or collective “work of mourning”? And this so called “work” remains here the name of a problem. For if mourning works, it does so only to dialectize death, a death that Roland Barthes called “undialectical.”

In 2001, following a conference about Derrida’s work on mourning and politics, the translation of “Les morts de Roland Barthes” was gathered with translations of Derrida’s memorials of thirteen other critics in a volume entitled The Work of Mourning.² The texts, but particularly the first one for Barthes, convey the difficulties in writing memorials strikingly similar to those expressed more than sixteen centuries earlier by Ausonius of Bordeaux in his Parentalia (370s and 380s c.e., according to Green 1991.298). The texts are united by this human struggle with facing mortality and its consequent urge to produce a lasting written monument of others as well as oneself. Examining Ausonius’s Parentalia in light of “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” offers an opportunity to connect the authorial presence and emotions of the late antique text with a reaction to memorializing the dead from our own time and culture—to locate both texts in a humanistic tradition. It is also an opportunity to revitalize our interpretation of the Parentalia, up to now consulted primarily for its prosopography of Ausonius’s dead family.³

The essay on Barthes opens Derrida’s collection by addressing the complications of naming the dead (hence the failure to “name” Barthes’ essay)—the same issue that is most central to the celebration of the rites of the Roman Parentalia and to Ausonius’s poetic version of it. Derrida, commenting on his own process of naming, particularly his use of the plural “deaths” in the essay’s title, hints at “The Death of the Author,” claiming that the connection between Barthes and death is so strong as a result of that revolutionary work that it need not be named: “And yet I can scarcely bear the apparition of a title in this place. The proper name would have sufficed, for it alone and by itself says death, all deaths in one. It says death even while the bearer of it is still living . . . Death inscribes itself right in the name, so as immediately to disperse itself there, so as to insinuate a strange syntax—in the name of only one to answer (as) many” (Derrida 2001.34; emphasis in original). For Derrida, Barthes’ dead author, intended to make room for a reader, seemed to presage Barthes’ own death.⁴ In the interpretation that follows, Ausonius as poet will also be seen to die with and in his...