Barthes on Proust

The huge bulk of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is a tantalising presence in the later writings of Roland Barthes. He pores over the surface of the novel as Ishmael pored over the vitreous skin of the Sperm Whale, detained by a "thick array" of signs and cyphers and drawn downwards from its topmost markings to the "far other delineations" that lie beneath. Yet Barthes, unlike Ishmael and Ahab himself, is anxious to avoid charges of obsessiveness and fanaticism. Proust's work is long, involuted and self-absorbed but there is no reason why these qualities should produce monomania in critics and ordinary readers of the novel.

In many of his comments on Proust, Barthes seems to warn against an excess of seriousness. Good readings, of this author at least, he suggests, are light, partial and tangential. Getting the book right is a matter of seeing the mighty body of the text aslant and askew. "D'une lecture à l'autre, on ne saute jamais les mêmes passages" (From one reading to another, one never skips the same passages), he writes in Le Plaisir du texte (1973). Besides, Proust's entire undertaking is in a sense an exercise in idling, he adds in one of the interviews collected posthumously as Le Grain de la voix (1981), and it would not be in keeping with the book's delicious associative textures to read it in an other than idly pleasure-seeking frame of mind. Repudiating the notion that he might be thought a Proust "specialist," he writes, again in Le Plaisir du texte, "Proust, c'est ce qui me vient, ce n'est pas ce que j'appelle; ce n'est pas une 'autorité'" (Proust is that which comes to me, not that which I call forth; he is not an "authority"). Only scholars and specialists would want to turn the reading of Proust prematurely towards long labour and goal-directed linearity. "Je ne suis pas 'proustien'" (I am not a "Proustian"), he repeats elsewhere in Le Grain de la voix.

To some extent Barthes's view of himself as a thoroughly negligent and opportunistic reader of Proust is borne out by the uses to which the brand-name "Proust" is put in his critical and theoretical writings. Barthes's A la recherche du temps perdu is a cabinet of curiosities inside which the reader's attention is endlessly dispersed, and an inexhaustible dossier of singular moments from which supporting evidence could be plucked for any general claim whatsoever. In L'Empire des signes (1970), the affected simplicity of Proust's princesse de Parme is called upon to illustrate a characteristically Western notion of good manners, just as Albertine and the "little band" are recruited to help explain the highly coded language of fashion journalism in Système de la mode (1967). In one of many Proust references to be found in Fragments d'un discours amoureux (1977), the refusal of the narrator's mother to answer his urgent plea for her presence--in the celebrated scene of the withheld bedtime kiss--becomes the very model of the rejected lover's fate: any answer is preferable to "no answer" when it comes to avowals of love. The living reality of Barthes's dead mother, in La Chambre claire (1980), is echoed by Proust's narrator's account of his dead grandmother momentarily restored to life by involuntary memory. One could go on.

In all such cases Proust's text is co-opted, in the form of an eloquent excerpt, to underwrite an argument or to reinforce an assertion. Remembering Barthes's central distinction between studium and punctum in La Chambre claire, one could say of this procedure that it causes the studious elaboration of Proust's long novel to come apart into a series of punctual intensities. Or again, remembering Barthes's commentary on Albertine's linguistic aberrations in Fragments d'un discours amoureux, one could say that each of these citations is a...