Abstract
Barthes quotes as instances of “moments of truth” in reading — those fulgurations in which an overwhelming emotion is conjoined to a sense of truth — two death scenes from War and Peace and Remembrance of Things Past where the coincidence between what is written on the page and what is felt by the reading subject takes place on the level of sympathy and compassion. This article purports to analyze Ralph’s deathbed scene in The Portrait of a Lady as one such “moment of truth”, in which the discourse and the truth of affect are given full play in keeping with one of the missions that Barthes assigns to the novel, namely to express, from the heart of intimacy and subjectivity, “the brilliance and suffering of the world”.
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