Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations by Thomas Baldwin (review)

In ‘Une idée de recherche’ (1971), Barthes refers to Proust’s À la recherche as ‘l’une de ces grandes cosmogonies’, a work that ‘déporte le travail critique loin de toute illusion de “résultat”’ (cited by Thomas Baldwin, p. 51). Barthes was reacting against the critical tendency to reduce that novel to a set of themes, images, and motifs, and to extract what he elsewhere called ‘le sens obvie’ (‘Le Troisième Sens’, cited p. 48). Read against the back-drop of Barthes’s impatience with the notion of an analytical ‘result’, what are the scope and effects of Baldwin’s critical endeavour? With much focus having fallen on Barthes’s work in the last decade of his life, Baldwin’s study explores a much broader span, from 1950 to 1980, and conducts a series of analyses that reflect a wealth of critical acumen and rigour. Baldwin provides detailed, faithful exposition of Barthes’s complex arguments and yet is not in awe of his subject. Whereas Barthes, in a 1954 piece entitled ‘Littérature objective’, promotes Alain Robbe-Grillet’s technique of object-description seemingly at the expense of Proust, whom he places on the other side in a modern–classical divide, Baldwin shows blurring in Barthes’s own line of demarcation; he questions the reading of the masked ball in Le Temps retrouvé contained in ‘Une idée de recherche’; and while Barthes argues against the use of language to represent music, thereby disowning, as it were, Proust’s account of Vinteuil’s ‘petite phrase’, Baldwin shows how Proust’s writing more generally shares the properties of music. Which is indeed central to Barthes’s thesis: Baldwin draws his title from the proposition made by Barthes, in a 1972 round-table exchange with Gérard Genette, that À la recherche involved, like Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli Variations’, not variations on a theme but variations without one. Baldwin’s account is meticulous, wide-ranging, and resourceful. He draws on unpublished seminar notes for the 1969–70 academic year at the University of Rabat in which Barthes advises students that, in Proust, the signifier works as a ‘chaîne circulaire de substitutions sans origine (le I^er terme n’est premier que par linéarité)’ (cited, p. 123). The rhythm of frenetic permutation often to be found in the Proustian sentence — its ‘wildly substitutive’ character (p. 137) — provides a central point of focus in Baldwin’s analyses. Emblematic of this is his deft consideration of Charlus’s explosive linguistic performance in Le Côté de Guermantes, which formed the basis of Barthes’s ‘Le Discours de Charlus’ at the Collège de France in early 1977. It is in ways such as these that Baldwin responds to Barthes’s later injunction to curb the critical ‘will-to-possess’ (the ‘vouloir-saisir’, Comment vivre ensemble) that blights interpretation and commentary (p. 139). The account provided of both major authors is nuanced and discerning: in Barthes, for example, Baldwin tracks attentively the movement away from structural analysis and the emergence of a ‘critique pathétique’ (p. 140); and he demonstrates how À la recherche eschews any tidy antithesis between elements that convey writerly plurality and others that are ‘classical, realist, readerly’ (p. 113).