That’s me: Roland Barthes gets to the bottom of Marcel Proust

In the autumn of 1978, when Roland Barthes made an excursion with the radio station France Culture to the places where Marcel Proust lived, in Paris and Illiers, a village twenty kilometers west of Chartres, he blurted out in a conversation with the journalist Jean Montalbetti: “The Combray actually appears , which we will see, that is Illiers, much smaller, not to say shabby (…), much more colorless than the extraordinary construct that we find in the ‘Research’.”

The irruption of literature into reality: Illiers became Illiers-Combray

The conversation on this excursion is one of the highlights of a book now published on the 100th anniversary of Proust’s death, which brings together the notes, essays and lectures of the great interpreter of symbols Roland Barthes, who died in 1980 after a traffic accident, including a selection of his many, many index cards that Barthes wrote about Proust created.

As early as 1932, when he was just 17 years old, Barthes read the first volume of “Recherche”. He likes the first book but thinks he’s too young for A Love of Swann. That changes, of course, and after writing “I am immersing myself in Proust” in his diary in 1963, he began taking notes and preparing lectures in the years that followed. The occupation intensified again when Barthes’ mother died in 1977 – a turning point for him, which he, well aware of this mythological analogy, equated with that of Proust’s mother in 1905. Proust understood this death, despite all the grief and pain, not least as a writing move.

Barthes identifies with Proust, not with the world-famous author, of course, but with the “tormenting, soon exuberant worker who has set himself a task”. He, too, has a novel in mind and would like to move away from essays, literary studies, and break with the “uniform intellectual orientation of my earlier writings”.

So he keeps coming back to the point in time, however difficult it is to grasp (September 1909 for him, but the 75 leaves were already there, which Barthes didn’t know), when Proust wrote his literature-essay hybrid “Against Saint- Beuve” gives up and starts “researching” almost “galloping”. Barthes is concerned with writing as Proust’s life’s work, in the literal sense of giving up life for writing, at the end of “research”, since for the narrator writing is only just beginning. This is followed by the complicated author-narrator relationship that retrospectively makes biographical readings so difficult.

Proust biographies are always a double of “research”

For Barthes, it makes no sense to look for “keys” in the “research”, equating the author (Proust), narrator (Marcel) and the novel’s self (even more difficult to determine). A biography like George D. Painter’s, which appeared in the mid-1960s, seems to him, for all its transparency, like “a double of the novel”. Because “it is the work that radiates into life.”

Barthes is, so to speak, at the bottom with his hero, completely against Saint-Beuve. Even if he often means himself, he brightens up Proust and the “research” in his reflections. Remembering, Barthes knows, is always better than going somewhere to draw something real. It is better “to have seen than to see,” he formulates a paradox to sum up the power of literature. But not only this: This is the only way to understand childhood as paradise.

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