MLR, ., primary intertexts and critical discussions. His ample and complimentary attention to English-language Sarraute criticism is both welcome and unusual. Violette Leduc ’s descriptions of Sarraute are quoted at some length to balance the depiction of Sarraute’s fraught relationship with Sartre and Beauvoir that is so important to Le Planétarium. Yet Sartre will remain a privileged interlocutor: right up to Enfance and Tu ne t’aimes pas, ‘le texte sarrautien s’est construit à l’envers de Sartre’ (p. ). Surprisingly, given her criticism of him in , Valéry remains another lifelong subterranean interlocutor for Sarraute; Rocchi’s reading of their ‘bien troublantes convergences’ (p. ) rests on a sense of Sarraute’s own self-suspicion, and on her emphasis on writing as gesturing to its own failure to attain authenticity. us, Le Planétarium’s very title ironizes the activity of novel-writing as much as the Parisian intelligentsia to whose existentialist discourse it is no stranger. For those with time to read this study in its entirety, it is a treasure trove. Its detailed table of contents will be a navigational aid to readers in search of specific interconnections. Its index of names cited would be improved by inclusion of their works, while its -page, excessively subdivided bibliography would benefit from its own table of contents to help readers locate references. U C D E O’B Roland Barthes: e Proust Variations. By T B. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. . viii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. For a character in e Lion King (), stars are ‘fireflies that got stuck up on that big bluish black thing’. ough Disney is an unlikely bedfellow of Proust and Barthes, the celestial and the entomological are key to omas Baldwin’s latest monograph. Such imagery animates his reading of Barthes’s writing on Proust’s Recherche, a novel that for Barthes ‘emits the shiing lambency of a cloud of fireflies rather than the steady beam of a projector’ (p. ) and whose ‘particles’ Barthes described as a ‘galaxy’ (p. ). In Baldwin’s hands these abstract comparisons offer luminous and illuminating insights into two major literary figures. Despite—or because of—his admiration for Proust, Barthes rejected the label ‘proustien’. at he produced few analyses of Proust is, for Baldwin, less a sign of critical reticence than an indication of how Barthes understands ‘critique’ itself. e ‘messy inconsistency’ (p. ) of Barthes’s Proustian ponderings, Baldwin suggests, constitute rewritings of variations inherent to Proust’s novel, which ‘suggest new and productive possibilities for criticism’ (p. ). Both writers, Baldwin remarks, are ‘emblematic of a certain ethics of literature in which plurality, ambivalence and nuance are affirmed over and above stable and secure meanings and interpretations’ (p. ). is instability proves generative for Baldwin, who advocates that critical work ‘embrace inconsistency, insecurity and variation as endemic, vital and essential to its creative power and indeed its value’ (p. ), not least because ‘Proust’s work cannot be made to sit comfortably within the paradigms it is used to construct’ (p. ). Perhaps inevitably, Baldwin’s monograph recalls Malcolm Bowie’s Proust among Reviews the Stars (London: HarperCollins, ), which does not so much loom large in this study as twinkle in its firmament. Even Baldwin’s curt chapter titles echo Bowie’s holophrastic headings. A brief Introduction establishes Baldwin’s titular metaphor: borrowing from André Boucourechliev’s work on Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, Barthes argued that Proust provides no initial theme that is reworked during the Recherche. Rather, he produces diffracted variations without a theme, presenting not the same object in different lights, but different objects ‘in the same light which passes through them’ (p. ). Baldwin’s method mirrors this: his examination of variation is also an enactment of variation. Attention to variations without theme in Beethoven and Proust enables us to understand the ‘aesthetic character their works embody—a category that requires us to be alive to variety rather than to be fixed, unproductively, upon the identification of transcendental themes and their development in works of art’ (pp. –). Avoiding nebulous abstraction, Baldwin connects Barthes’s musings to specific aspects of Proust’s work: ‘the semantic decentring of the Proustian sentence’, for instance...
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Aug 28, 2023
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