Dissecting the broken heart...
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What is love? Perhaps the question has never been answered more succinctly, more completely, and more devastatingly than in *A Lover's Discourse.* In this unique and sly little book, Roland Barthes deconstructs `love,' or, perhaps more accurately, subjects it to a thorough semiotic examination that reveals the psycholinguistic archetypes that comprise all great affairs of the heart--the very definition of which virtually dictates that they all end unhappily.
Barthes examines love in brief chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of the entire humiliating `catastrophe': the helpless infatuation, the agonizing wait beside the telephone that doesn't ring, the jealousy of anyone with access to the beloved, the infantile terror of abandonment, the sense of martyrdom, the suicidal despair...but also the inexplicable enchantment of the seemingly insignificant ((and yet all-too potent)) detail that fatally charms us--the crooked tooth, the dimple, the slant of an eye, the simplest gesture--that causes that one person of all possible people to appear to us as the very image of our desire no matter what suffering they subsequently bring upon us. And they do cause us to suffer, because the lover always loves the beloved more than he or she is loved in return.
It's hard to say whether this book helps to heal a broken heart or turns a stick in it--probably it does a little of both. One thing is certain: this is no *30 Days to Mend a Broken Heart* or such similar self-help collection of insipid platitudes. This is more like chemotherapy. To paraphrase the old joke, Barthes might have cured Cupid of his disease, but, unfortunately, the patient died. If nothing else, *A Lover's Discourse* vividly understands, like even the best of your friends do not, what you are going through when your heart is broken. What Barthes does that is so unique here is to put into words, with an almost scientific detachment and exactitude, the total emotional chaos of an experience that is beyond the power of one in the throes of it to express coherently. `Yes, that's it exactly,' the lover mutters, recognizing himself in these pages, `that's *exactly* how I feel.' Some aspects of love are simply too embarrassing to share with anyone--Barthes doesn't turn away from a single one of them. There's no modesty here: the heart is laid open. This is radical surgery.
One undeniably prescriptive advantage of this text is that it pinpoints with sobering exactitude the way one was *not* loved by the beloved. You no longer need doubt yourself, to be left on the hook forever questioning: `Did she love me/did she love me not?' At the same time you recognize yourself in Barthes' description of love and say `Yes, I loved her just like that' you also recognize your beloved, or more accurately, the absence of your beloved, and can finally assert without further doubt "Yes, that is precisely how she *did not* love me.'
An extraordinary work by an extraordinary intellect about an ordinary experience that leaves everyone stupefied, *A Lover's Discourse* comes as close as its likely to be possible to lucidly describing the indescribable. Is it a cure for a broken heart? Perhaps. If love is a disease that one is cured of simply by knowing the symptoms--an illusion whose power to charm is greatly reduced once you discover the magician's tricks. The magician, of course, being you.
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