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Doll | Jan 20 2003

On page 141 of A Lover’s Discourse, in a chapter entitled This Can’t Go On, Roland Barthes writes:

Once the exaltation has lapsed, I am reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance… I am Daruma doll, a legless toy endlessly poked and pushed, but finally regaining its balance, assured by an inner balancing pin (But what is my balancing pin? The force of love?). This is what we are told by a folk poem which accompanies these Japanese dolls:

Such is life
Falling over seven times
And getting up eight.

Having read A Lover’s Discourse long ago, I’ve often remembered the poem at the end of that passage and have quoted it many times to friends. Today, though, I happened to read the book again and was surprised to find I’ve been quoting the poem wrongly. In my version the poem ends with the word six not eight—a mistake that radically changes its meaning.

The way I’ve always remembered it, the poem is about death, about the final time you fall, the first and last time you fail to get up. It says: life consists of falling and getting up and falling and getting up until you finally don’t get up any more and it’s over.

Barthes’s version is about some freakish form of endurance. The legless doll is indomitable; no amount of abuse can knock it down, since abuse is what it was made for. In fact if abused in the right way, the doll is immortal; its fate is like that of Sisyphus but without all that nasty, backbreaking, spirit-crushing toil.

I doubt Barthes would care (he’s simply trying to describe the lover’s endurance: the intolerable yet tolerated state that follows from the “magical amazement of the first encounter”), but my version (which admittedly I didn’t write or anything) kicks that other poem’s indefatigable ass.