Barthes's Way: Un Amour de Proust

"It is not every day that you encounter that which is meant to provide you with precisely the image of your desire."

--Barthes quoting Lacan in Fragments of A Lover's Discourse, 20. ¹

Shortly after the death of his mother in 1978, Roland Barthes delivered a lecture at the Collège de France which contains in the Proustian reference of its title, "Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure," the desire of a son suffering from a profound separation anxiety. If Barthes, more explicitly here than anywhere before, draws on the Proustian intertext, it is in order to use it as a point of reference to dramatize an unmastered sense of mourning. I do not mean to suggest that Barthes was the pioneer in what might be considered today the narcissistic practice of personal criticism. Indeed, Barthes never directly evokes his mother's death in that lecture. However, through a series of oblique references, his discourse proceeds by indexing the critical crisis that was the symptom of Proust's maternal loss and which we are now able to understand as Barthes's very own.

In the four years preceding the beginning of the writing of A la Recherche du temps perdu (1909), Barthes suggests, Proust demonstrated a deep ambivalence concerning his future as a writer. ² To be sure, that lecture reveals that Proust had experienced a certain "indecision of genres" that left him torn between theoretical speculation and fiction writing. By suggestion, Barthes sees the Proustian enterprise as a reflection of the existential angst resulting from the loss of the mother, and Proust's "indecision of genres" as the product of an affective disorder linked to maternal loss. Ironically unlike Freud who had, seventy-five years earlier, asserted that the death of the father is the major event in a man's life, here it is not the father who is mourned, but rather the mother and, in Proust's case, by extension, the grandmother.

Through a reference to Dante in that same lecture, "nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita" ("in the middle of one's life"), Barthes meditates on the absolute otherness that is death and the narcissistic fright that it has inflicted on him--therefore rendering it no longer an abstraction. Finding himself on the precipice of the "middle of [his] life," Barthes ruminates on what he characterizes as "l'oeuvre à faire" ("the work to be written"), which turns out to be a narrative of mourning. What Barthes discovers in Proust is the invention of "une tierece forme" ("a third form"), a new novel of sorts whose hybrid texture engenders a critical fiction. In short, Proust, as Barthes had already characterized him in Le Plaisir du texte, functions as a mathesis and intertextual reference whereby the hermeneutics of life can only be explained through texts:

I read according to Proust. I savor the sway of formulas, the reversal of origins, the ease which brings the anterior text out of the subsequent one. I recognize that Proust's work, for myself at least, is the reference work, the general mathesis, the mandala of the entire literary cosmogony . . .

Proust is what comes to me, not what I summon up; not an "authority," simply a circular memory. Which is what the inter-text is: the impossibility of living outside the infinite text . . . the book creates the meaning, the meaning creates life. (PT, 36; emphasis original) ³

In using Proust as point of reference Barthes most certainly had in mind the celebrated passage in Sodome et Gomorrhe in which the narrator, remembering his now deceased grandmother, finds himself caught between the depression associated with loss and the possibility of recuperation through the power of memory. The unbuttoning of Marcel's shoe stimulates the unbuttoning of the unfinished work of mourning. Through the narcissistic process of interiorization he is able, at least momentarily, to resurrect through a kind of magical thinking the grandmother's lost...