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(This piece was long-listed for the Anthony Burgess / The Observer Prize for Arts Journalism)

“Marcel Proust – Mélanges” by Roland Barthes 

Roland Barthes made himself ubiquitous on every campus with his “Death of the Author” theory. Every aspiring graduate quoting Barthes’ sallies immediately sounded urbane (rather than dusty) and far more likely to win the research grant, get the girl, and move to the left-bank all in one sitting. Editor Bernard Comment brings together Barthes’ writing on Proust in this genre-defying book and helps nuance our understanding of both. 

Perhaps the only readable member of the high court sixties French theory, Barthes earned a cult status far beyond his native country. For good reason. His books fizzed and whirred especially when set against the stodgier prose of his compatriots Derrida and Lacan. Books such as Mythologies brought him into the mainstream; he shows himself equally at ease in the wrestling arena as when he is “dissecting” Einstein’s brain. In S/Z, on the other hand, he reads a Balzac novella through the lens of semiotics – once a rather sexier discipline than hindsight now allows. Like his literary idol, he also wrote engagingly on himself, in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. How tragic that his death should be so quotidian. He was knocked down on 25^th February 1980 by a laundry van in Paris. He died the following month. History has a sense of timing. He was on his way to deliver a lecture on his favourite writer: Marcel Proust.  

“Marcel Proust” is the book Barthes never got round to writing. It’s a collection of cuttings from his life-long obsession with the most formidable French author of the last 100 years. It’s editor, Bernard Comment, has lovingly brought together an eclectic mix of essays, interviews, index cards (the French call them “bristols”) and photographs of the people from Proust’s world. Comment subtitles his book “melanges”. When this book is finally translated, I would suggest the more demotic “off cuts”. And what juicy off-cuts they are! 

The lions’ share of the book goes to the photographs that formed the basis of the lecture Barthes was due to deliver the day he was knocked down. The pictures themselves, taken by the legendary Paul Nadar, capture the cast of characters that Proust knew and used as models for the characters in In Search of Lost Time. In the first photo we see Alfred Agnostinelli, dandyism personified, leaning on the back of a chair. Undeath the photo, rather than the theory-fuelled gymnastics that we find elsewhere in Barthes, we are treated to his notes. Here we learn factual details about each photograph almost to the point of dryness: “Né á Monaco en 1888. Fils d’un Italien de Livourne…Secrétaire de Proust…” We can never know what Barthes added in person but nowhere is it apparent that Agnostinelli was Proust’s long-time lover and probably the “clef” (literally, key but here, model), for Albertine, the principal love interest in Proust’s novel. There are occasional easter eggs for Proust afficionados. For instance, Agnostinelli’s use of the pseudonym “Marcel Swann”, a compound of the author’s name and a major character in the book, when enrolling in pilot training school. However, here and elsewhere in Comment’s volume we are arrested by Barthes in an unfamiliar mode: in this book we find the scholar rather than arch-theoretician – and so much the better! 

Freed from the shackles of own nomenclature, Barthes starts to freewheel and improvise out of enormous reservoirs of research in a France Culture radio discussion “Un homme, une ville”. Broadcast in 1978, the programme was recorded in three locations that were important to Proust: Paris, Illiers-Combray, and the Bois de Bologne. Barthes and Jean Montalbetti, the presenter, become radio flaneurs, rediscovering the geography of the right bank around the pleasingly named “Madeleine” intersection of boulevards. We don’t have to struggle too hard with the French either; Barthes’ crayon sketch of the area is to be found at the back of the book – the pleasure of minutiae in these drawings and elsewhere shows Barthes living out his earlier ideas on textual pleasure; the whole series would be at home on Radio 4 at its most donnishly entertaining. To read this pop-professorial Barthes, in awe of a prose master, reconstructing the details is infectious: he points us back to Proust’s six-volume novel, even without a lockdown to get through it. 

We are still fascinated by the myth of Roland Barthes. But in “Marcel Proust” there is no central thesis or semiotic axe to grind. Like eager students we take a peek at the master’s working out and, now and again, rediscover what made Barthes so exciting all along: “Le monde ne fournit pas les clefs du livre, c’est le livre qui ouvre le monde.” The world does not provide the keys to the book, it’s the book that opens the world.