Roland Barthes - the writer who has not been read yet

And perhaps the greatest paradox is that Barth, who died in a truck accident before he could deliver his lecture on Proust and show his pictures, remained in his death and writings a witness to the "incidents" of literature itself. Death here is not only the death of the body but the death of the witness, as Chateaubriand said. Nevertheless, because Barth wrote, we "know," and because we read, what remains of the testimony is alive. Barth's writing about Proust, about Morocco, and about himself are all facets of one long text, not fully written, but alive, just as Proust is to him: an endless trace, an inexhaustible reading, an unfulfilled pleasure. Thus, the text in Barth becomes a living practice, not belonging to criticism, nor to the novel, but to a third realm, which is the novelist as an horizon and practice, where life is narrated not as it happened, but as it should be lived in memory, in the body, and in language.