Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures): 62

200 Pages·2019·1.919 MB·English

by  Thomas Baldwin

ROLAND BARTHES:
THE PROUST
VARIATIONS
R
O
This book confronts the singularity of the relationship between two
L
exemplary writers of the last century in order to challenge and to reinvigorate A
our notions of what art and criticism – literary or otherwise – can do. While N
D
it takes Roland Barthes’s encounters with Marcel Proust’s monumental

masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, as its specifi c focus, the B
implications of its argument are far-reaching. Indeed, the book argues A
R
that Barthes’s writing on Proust’s work between the early 1950s and 1980
T
(including a substantial set of unpublished notes for a seminar delivered
H
at the University of Rabat in 1969–70) proposes not only a critical culture E
of Proust that is productively inconsistent, but also, more generally, a fresh S
:
understanding of criticism as a creative activity that embraces insecurity
T
and variation as it refuses to remain fi xed upon reassuringly stable themes, H
meanings and interpretations. E

P
R
O
Thomas Baldwin is a Reader in French at the University of Kent.
U
S
T
‘Theoretically shrewd and brilliantly argued, this is the fi rst monograph to
V
off er a complete panorama of Barthes’s sustained engagement with the A
Proustian oeuvre. Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations will take its place R
I
among the best of Proust scholarship, continuing the legacy of the great A
Malcolm Bowie.’ T
I
Marion Schmid, University of Edinburgh O
N
S
T
H
O
M
A
S

B
A ROLAND BARTHES:
L
D
W
I THE PROUST
N
THOMAS
www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk
VARIATIONS
Cover image: Art & Language, Now They Are II, BALDWIN
2017 (detail).
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures
Series Editor
CHARLES FORSDICK
University of Liverpool
Editorial Board
TOM CONLEY JACQUELINE DUTTON LYNN A. HIGGINS
Harvard University University of Melbourne Dartmouth College
MIREILLE ROSELLO DEREK SCHILLING
University of Amsterdam Johns Hopkins University
This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contem-
porary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical
practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural
and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All
manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression
are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes
in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary
culture.
Recent titles in the series:
48 Yasser Elhariry, Pacifist Invasions: 55 Charlotte Hammond, Entangled
Arabic, Translation & the Otherness: Cross-gender Fabrications
Postfrancophone Lyric in the Francophone Caribbean
49 Colin Davis, Traces of War: 56 Julia Waters, The Mauritian Novel:
Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Fictions of Belonging
Twentieth-Century French Writing
57 Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters:
50 Alison J. Murray Levine, Vivre Ici: Women’s reading and the literary
Space, Place and Experience in canon in France since the Belle Époque
Contemporary French Documentary
58 John Patrick Walsh, Migration and
51 Louise Hardwick, Joseph Zobel: Refuge: An Eco-Archive of Haitian
Négritude and the Novel Literature, 1982–2017
52 Jennifer Solheim, The Performance 59 Ari J. Blatt and Edward J. Welch,
of Listening in Postcolonial France in Flux: Space, Territory,
Francophone Culture and Contemporary Culture
53 Sarah Wood and Catriona MacLeod, 60 Nicholas Harrison, Our Civilizing
Locating Guyane Mission: The Lessons of
Colonial Education
54 Adrian May, From Bataille to Badiou:
Lignes, the preservation of Radical 61 Joshua Armstrong, Maps and
French Thought, 1987–2017 Territories: Global Positioning in the
Contemporary French Novel
THOMAS BALDWIN
Roland Barthes
The Proust Variations
Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2019 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2019 Thomas Baldwin
The right of Thomas Baldwin to be identified as the author of this book
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 978-1-78962-001-6 cased
epdf ISBN 978-1-78962-408-3
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Note on the Text viii
Introduction 1
1 Objects 17
2 Eros, Rhythm 47
3 Music, Discourse 79
4 Neutral, Nuance 131
Afterword: Insect Life 165
Bibliography 175
Index 183

Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
Chapters One, Two and Three contain revised and extended versions of
material that has appeared in the following journal articles: ‘On Barthes
on Proust’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 48/3 (June 2012),
pp. 274–87; ‘Charlus/z’, Writing, Reading, Grieving: Essays in Memory
of Suzanne Dow, ed. Ruth Cruickshank and Adam Watt, Nottingham
French Studies (Special Issue), 53/1 (Spring 2014), pp. 90–101; ‘Rewriting
Proust’, What’s So Great About Roland Barthes?, ed. Thomas Baldwin,
Katja Haustein and Lucy O’Meara, L’Esprit Créateur (Special Issue),
55/4 (Winter 2015), pp. 70–85. I should like to thank all the publishers
concerned for permission to reuse material that originally appeared in
their pages.
I am indebted in many ways to the following people: Synne Ytre Arne,
Fabien Arribert-Narce, Jim Baldwin, Lynn Baldwin, Michael Baldwin,
Susannah Baldwin, Dan Brewer, Mária Minich Brewer, Kate Briggs,
John Chisholm, Claude Coste, Larry Duffy, Patrick ffrench, Alison
Finch, Charles Forsdick, Gonzalo Ceron Garcia, Marie-Odile Germain,
Suzanne Guerlac, Katja Haustein, Abi Heller, Cathy Hills, Lawrie
Hills, Richard Hills, Ben Hutchinson, Jon Kear, Diana Knight, Roland-
François Lack, Jo Malt, Éric Marty, Tim Matthews, Lucy O’Meara,
Mathilde Poizat-Amar, Nigel Saint, Cecilia Sayad, Samuel Smith, Andy
Stafford, Adam Watt and Shane Weller.
Susannah, this book is for you.
Note on the Text
Note on the Text
Unless indicated otherwise, all references to Barthes’s works are to the
five-volume edition of the Œuvres complètes, edited by Éric Marty
(Paris: Seuil, 2002). They take the form (I, 234), that is, volume number,
followed by page reference. References to À la recherche du temps perdu
are to the four-volume ‘Pléiade’ edition, produced under the general
editorship of Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, 1987–89), and are given in the form (ALR, IV, 321). Where
I have used a published English translation of Barthes’s work, this is
indicated in a note. Translations of Proust’s novel are taken from the
six-volume Vintage Classics edition of In Search of Lost Time, translated
by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (except for Time Regained, translated by
Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin), revised by Terence Kilmartin
and D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 2000–02). I have occasionally
tweaked passages quoted from the latter. All other translations of French
texts are my own.
Introduction
Introduction
By excavating and describing the multiple variations in Roland Barthes’s
encounters with Marcel Proust’s monumental masterpiece À la recherche
du temps perdu (1913–27), this book seeks out new creative tensions
between literary texts and critical approaches to them. ‘Proust’ is one
of the most powerful names in twentieth-century French literature
and indeed in modern European literature more widely. ‘Proustian’, in
current usage, designates an ill-defined variety of experiences, cultural
and historical points of reference, styles of living and of writing,
aspects of sexuality, love, hermeticism, aestheticism, a sense of déjà vu,
recovered memory, long sentences and the dominance of art over life. A
vague sense of his biography and an awareness of the remarkable scale
and difficult syntax of his novel also serve to single Proust out as the
ultimate example of a life lived in the name of art, and of literariness
as such. Furthermore, as several commentators have noted, objects and
artefacts that bear the name – or are conjoined with it – circulate in an
economy of Proustian objects, a species of ‘Proustiana’, which includes
not only items of clothing and a variety of trinkets,1 but also cookbooks,
self-help guides and works of popular science.2 Moreover, as André
Benhaïm observes, ‘“Proust” (the work, the man, their joint image)
has been so much read (that is, been so well assimilated), that it has
transcended the canonical library and has been adopted into the culture
at large’.3 The currency of Proust is thus distributed in the streams of
cultural production and reproduction: the Proust brand sells.
At the same time, Proust has a currency of a different nature. His
novel has been a privileged object of study for literary critics, theorists
and philosophers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Roland
Barthes figures prominently and distinctively among them.4 For him,
as Malcolm Bowie puts it, À la recherche is the ‘crucial empowerment’:
it is no less than an ‘emblematic distillation of literature itself in its
2 Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations
triumphant mode’.5 Barthes, too, is exemplary: he is among the major
critics and creative writers of the age (of the post-war era to the present);
his career both encompasses French structuralism and post-structuralism
and contributes significantly to making them what they are; and he, like
Proust, is emblematic of a certain ethics of literature in which plurality,
ambivalence and nuance are affirmed over and above stable and secure
meanings and interpretations.6
It is widely recognized that Barthes could not do without Proust,
especially in the last decade of his life.7 What has not been recognized,
though, is the relationship between Proust’s contradictory but persistent
circulation throughout Barthes’s oeuvre (to which we shall return in a
moment) and the vast array of metaphors Barthes uses to describe
the mobile and inconsistent texture of À la recherche. In January
1972, for example, two years after the publication of S/Z (1970) and
only one year before the appearance of Le Plaisir du texte, Barthes
began a round-table discussion at the École normale supérieure in
Paris by observing that the ‘particles’ of À la recherche are mobile
and transposable (‘les particules en changent de place et permutent
entre elles’).8 As such, he says, they constitute an infinitely explorable
‘galaxie’9 and bear significantly upon our attempts to respond to
Proust’s work critically:
In my view, À la recherche du temps perdu […] can only elicit ideas of
research and not research itself. In this sense, Proust’s text is excellent
material for critical desire. It is a true object of desire for the critic, since
everything is spent in the fantasy of research, in the idea of searching for
something in Proust, thereby making the idea of an end of that research
seem illusory. Proust is unique to the extent that all he leaves us to do is
rewrite him, which is the exact contrary of exhausting him.10
There is plenty that critics – literary or otherwise – might learn from
Barthes’s brief opening address. It contains clear echoes of S/Z: Proust’s
novel is described as the embodiment of a writerly – and rewritable –
ideal about which, Barthes suggests (in S/Z), there may be nothing to
say.11 Furthermore, as he kicks off the round-table discussion in 1972,
Barthes’s emphasis is on research as a productive activity that must
remain incomplete: it is driven, ultimately, by the quotient of pleasure to
be gained from it. (This rather deflates the idea of research as a positive
contribution to knowledge, or as an activity that makes the kind of
impact often imagined by academic authorities.) À la recherche, he says,
is an ideal space in which the fantasme of research can be played out.