Objects

Chapter One engages with Barthes’s discussion of a classical distance from worldly objects and of a modern – nouveau roman-esque – chosisme (which is predicated, Barthes says, upon a certain proximity between people and things) in order to bring the landscapes of Proust’s novel into relief. The chapter also reads Barthes’s paradoxical integration of Proustian elements within his own writing on the nouveau roman as a reflection – a rewriting – of the liminal (the simultaneously classical and modern) texture of À la recherche itself.

Music, Discourse

Rummaging further among Barthes’s critical metaphors, Chapter Three examines some of his essays on music (and on Proust on music) from the 1970s and from 1980 alongside his seminars on the ‘Charlus-Discourse’ and a set of unpublished teaching notes for a seminar series that took place at the University of Rabat between 1969 and 1970. Proust’s novel emerges here as ‘musical’, not in the sense that its author is a particularly adept commentator on music (Barthes insists that he is not), but by virtue of the diffractions, vacillations and melodic differentials of intensity and desire by which, according to Barthes, its sentences and its discourses are inhabited.

Eros, Rhythm

In view of Barthes’s suggestion in 1972 that his semiological fantasy has given way to the solicitations of a ‘theory of the signifier, of the literary erotic’, Chapter Two provides further evidence of the supple and variegated materials of which both À la recherche and Barthes’s writing on it are made. It considers the relationship between Barthes’s understanding of the erotic as an intermittent flicker of meaning (of signifiance), the enigmatic idea of variations without a theme, and his discussion, in Comment vivre ensemble: simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens, of rhythm and of what he calls the ‘Charlus-Discourse’. In so doing, it reveals not only that, for Barthes, the tirelessly mobile, erotic rhythm of Proust’s novel is such that it is only partially amenable to the fantasies of structural analysis (of the kind that, according to Barthes, inform his reading of Balzac in S/Z), but also that it demands an unprecedented critical activity that takes both logical or thematic developments and explosions of affect into account.

Introduction

The starting point for the book is a series of metaphors used by Barthes at a round table discussion on Proust in 1972. He suggests, for example, that À la recherche is comparable to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations insofar as it is made of ‘variations without a theme’, and he observes that a novel constructed in this way requires readers and critics to ‘rewrite’ and to ‘operate variations’ on the literary work rather than to interpret it. By unpacking these (and other) figures and connecting them to others that appear in Barthes’s (and Proust’s) writing, the remaining chapters of the book provide answers to the following questions: Are the variations in Proust’s novel indeed themeless? What is it that makes Proust’s writing, for Barthes or generally, both endlessly seductive, productive and unamenable to more conventional, hermeneutical forms of criticism? What does Barthes do with À la recherche, and how, in his approach, is Barthes different from other critics who have written about Proust? What possibilities do Barthes’s Proust variations open up for the future of criticism more generally?

Afterword

In order to describe the significance of Barthes’s Proust variations in the context of a society of the spectacle and in relation to the activities of civic-minded Proust critics, the Conclusion reads Barthes’s work on Proust in the light of Georges Didi-Huberman’s Survivance des lucioles. While Proust’s novel is uniquely indispensable and seductive to Barthes, the significance of the intermittent, firefly-like shimmers and flickers of his writing is also far-reaching: they shield À la recherche not only from the interpretative habits and strong-arm themes of the ‘Proustian’, but also from the stultifying influence of a still burgeoning field of ‘Proustiana’ that interposes layers of material between the novel and its (potential) readers, offering them little more than lifeless trophies. In doing these things, the Conclusion argues, Barthes on Proust beckons criticism towards a future that is creative inasmuch as it is gently luminous and productively unsteady in its intermittence and inconsistent variation.

Neutral, Nuance

Chapter Four explores Barthes’s work on Proust in (or across) three late texts (Comment vivre ensemble, ‘“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”’ and La Préparation du roman I et II) in order to show that the rhapsodic fabric of À la recherche is such that it outplays the very oppositions it is used (by Barthes) to build and to articulate: it is ‘neutral’ in this sense. Furthermore, this chapter argues that Barthes’s work on Proust’s paradigm-baffling work constitutes an intensely personal and convoluted space of vivid differences and variations, and that it is in this radical variety that the neutrality of Barthes’s writing is to be found. It shows for the first time that several passages in Le Discours amoureux and Fragments d’un discours amoureux can be read as rewritings – as intertextual nuancings and tintings – not only of specific passages in Proust’s novel, but also of Barthes’s Rabat seminar notes on them.