Barthes's Way: Un Amour de Proust

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.