Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Abbreviations and References
- Introduction
- 1 Barthes's Heretical Teaching
- 2 Leçon and ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure…’
- 3 Comment vivre ensemble, Le Neutre and their Context
- 4 Japonisme and Minimal Existence in the Cours
- 5 La Préparation du roman: The Novel and the Fragment
- Afterword
- Appendix List of Roland Barthes's Seminars and Lecture Courses at the École pratique des hautes études and the Collège de France, 1963–1980
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - La Préparation du roman: The Novel and the Fragment
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Abbreviations and References
- Introduction
- 1 Barthes's Heretical Teaching
- 2 Leçon and ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure…’
- 3 Comment vivre ensemble, Le Neutre and their Context
- 4 Japonisme and Minimal Existence in the Cours
- 5 La Préparation du roman: The Novel and the Fragment
- Afterword
- Appendix List of Roland Barthes's Seminars and Lecture Courses at the École pratique des hautes études and the Collège de France, 1963–1980
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
…et si Novalis n'a pas composé le texte de la ‘dissolution du poète’, ce n'est pas seulement parce qu'il est mort, mais parce que cette oeuvre, comme tous ses plus grands projets, ne cessait de se perdre dans la multiplication de ses propres semences. Ce qui pourrait peut-être vouloir dire que – dans le fragment tout au moins – le geste le plus spécifique du romantisme […] serait celui par lequel au sein même de la quête ou de la théorie de l'OEuvre il abandonne ou retranche […] l'OEuvre même – et se mue de façon à peine perceptible en ‘oeuvre de l'absence de l'oeuvre’…
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, L'Absolu littéraire, 1978Mid-way through his four-year tenure at the Collège de France, Barthes seeks a new form for his writing. As we have seen, his sense that a transformation of his writing is required is crystallised in a moment occurring on 15 April 1978, which he characterises as a ‘sorte de Satori ’ (PR, 32). The new form of writing fantasised by Barthes involves a productive tension between the aesthetic minimalism of the haiku and the maximalism of the ‘grande oeuvre’ as exemplified by À la Recherche du temps perdu : ‘Proust et le haïku se croisent’ (PR, 99). As Kuki points out, though the haiku is extremely condensed, ‘a very small thing contains the infinite just as much as does a thing of great dimensions’. Thus the focus in La Préparation du roman I on the haiku as the propaedeutic to the writing of a ‘roman’ is in Barthes's view entirely logical. He hopes that the fantasised ‘roman’ would achieve the notational intensity of the haiku, at greater length.
This chapter will examine the search for a new form which Barthes identifies at the opening of La Préparation du roman and in ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure…’ as being central to the attainment of a new lease of life as a writer. Instead of the encyclopedia, the idea of the ‘roman’ is now central to Barthes's pedagogy and his conception of his writing. The starting-point of Barthes's lectures on ‘la préparation du roman’ is the atomisation (‘défection’, ‘émiettement’) of the novel, in terms both of reading and of writing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Roland Barthes at the Collège de France , pp. 163 - 199Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012