Novel/Drama
The amorous subject cannot write his love story himself. Only a very archaic form can accomodate the event which he declaims without being able to recount.
1. In the letter he sends to his friend, Werther recounts both the events of his life and the effects of his passion; but it is literature which governs this mixture. For if I keep a Journal, we may doubt that this Journal relates, strictly speaking, to events. The events of amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing, what, by being written, exposes its own platitude: “I ran into X, who was with Y”. “Today X didn´t call me” “X was in a bad mood,” etc.: who would see a story in that? The infinitesimal event exists in its huge reverberation: Journal of my reverberations (of my rounds, my joys, my interpretations, my rationalizations, my impulses): who would understand anything in that? Only the Other could write my love story, my novel.
-R. Barthes, A Lover´s Discourse: Fragment
