Kate Briggs’s wonderful translation finally makes available in English a most unusual book by one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. The Preparation of the Novel comprises the notes of the third and last lecture course Roland Barthes delivered at the Collège de France, cut short in 1980 by his untimely death. Although the three lecture series were posthumously published in French in the order they were given, Columbia University Press have brought out the final course before the first one (How To Live Together, their translation of the second appeared in 2005) – an indication of just how intriguing a book this is.

The uncertainty begins with the title. Is The Preparation of the Novel merely a course/class/series of lecture notes about the preparation of the novel, or is it also part of that preparation? From the outset, both interpretations are carefully invited: although Barthes denies, contrary to rumours circulating at the time, that he is writing a novel (and states that, if he were, he would not propose a course on its preparation), at the same time he acknowledges the deeply personal nature of the course’s origin and stresses that the “fantasy” it mobilizes is his own “Fantasy-of-the-Novel”. The ambiguity this creates about the book’s genre never disappears, reinforced by the contradictory positions adopted at different moments. For example, at the beginning of Part II (the 1979–80 classes), Barthes invites us to think of the Course as a “film or book”, whereas elsewhere he distinguishes it explicitly from “real writing, that of the book”. One of the text’s most enjoyable features is that the reader can never determine whether or not Barthes himself is practising what he teaches. This uncertainty is echoed in the strong parallels suggested between Barthes’s own situation and that of the writers he considers. This is particularly the case with his discussion of the decisive moment when Proust’s masterpiece, À la Recherche du temps perdu, suddenly “took” or fell into place. Proust’s passing from essay to novel in 1909, a few years after the death of his mother, corresponds closely to the turning point in Barthes’s own life evoked at the opening of The Preparation of the Novel: he recalls an afternoon not long after his own mother’s death when he found himself gripped by the necessity of a dramatic change, a vita nova. But for “someone who writes”, this new life could only involve a new writing practice. The choice of “The Preparation of the Novel” as the topic of Barthes’s course thus reflects a shift analogous to the one which resulted in Proust’s novel.

In a significant editorial departure from the French original, this translation appends a transcription of an eight-page sketch of a novel found in Barthes’s papers after his death. The translator’s nuanced discussion in her preface of the decision to include the pages wards against the danger that the relation would be read only in teleological terms, and justifies the decision simply but persuasively on the grounds that the project, although available in French, had not hitherto been available in English.

But what exactly does Barthes mean by the “novel”, and how does the Course “prepare” (for) it? The first paradox is the overwhelming focus in the 1978–9 classes on the haiku, which has exemplary status as a “Notation of the Present”: its extreme brevity enables it to approximate most closely and truthfully to the “instant” that, for Barthes, writing seeks to capture. But the haiku’s instantaneity is also a limit. With no room either for narrative or, especially, for the “interweaving” together of truth and falsehood in fiction, it throws the novel into relief. This idea of polarity helps to cast light on the fragmentary composition of another of Barthes’s posthumously published works, Incidents, available in a new translation by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Unlike the better-known A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (published in the writer’s lifetime), this text, akin to both an essay and a diary, is “preparatory” in that Barthes might well have chosen not to publish it as it stands. But its strange disconnectedness bears witness also to the author’s grappling with the tension between the need to remain as true as possible to the moments he portrays and his desire to embroider on them.

Part II of The Preparation of the Novel, which consists of an exploration of the “desire to write”, is if anything more disconcerting than Part I. Instead of the detailed textual analysis of the longer form that the preliminary discussion of the haiku led the reader to expect, the emphasis shifts from a definition of the novel as genre to an ethical one: “what I’m calling Novel is not a particular historically determined genre but any work in which egotism is transcended”. Moreover, if the term “novel” raises questions, “work” does so even more in the context of the writer who had famously called for literary studies to move away “From Work to Text” (the title of one of his most anthologized pieces). In The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes acknowledges the “about-face” in his position, recognizing the major contribution his essay “The Death of the Author” had made to the tendency in literary-critical circles to “erase the author in favour of the text”.

Part II returns both author and work centre-stage. Barthes investigates the emergence of writing as an intransitive activity, determined not by its object but by a “maniacal” urge in the author’s body. It focuses on the “operations” by which he (the writers considered are all male: Flaubert, Kafka, Mallarmé, Chateaubriand, Proust, etc) passes from the desire to write to creating the work. We learn about the minutiae of authors’ habits: where they write, when, at what rhythm or speed (“at a gallop”, in Proust’s case). For the writers Barthes discusses, the space of writing offers a retreat from worldly preoccupations: Flaubert asks for no more than a quiet room with “a good fire in winter and a pair of candles to light me at night”, whereas Proust favours the bed: “you can work, eat, and sleep in it”. Similarly, the time at which they choose to write often suggests a withdrawal from the world. While Barthes cites Paul Valéry as an example of an early morning writer, he devotes most space to those who wrote at night: Flaubert (sometimes), Rimbaud (once), Kafka (joyous at having written “The Judgment” in one night-time sitting) and, of course, Proust (always). The latter’s “complete inversion of day and night” leads on to a broader discussion of inversion in general as the source of a “perverse pleasure”: perhaps the reason why night work enjoys such privilege in Barthes’s imagination. Nevertheless, the most astonishing reversal of all in these lectures is the volte-face they represent in relation to Barthes’s previous view of the work. Gone is the valuing of the “writerly” text which obliges its reader to participate in the creative process: the principal qualities of the desired work are now readability, a clear narrative structure, and a lack of metalanguage or self-reflexivity. In a term borrowed from the book itself, Jonathan Culler reads this turn-about as a “spiralling” backwards rather than a regression. Leaving aside the question whether one is most convinced by Barthes’s earlier or later theoretical positions, The Preparation of the Novel excels at showing a generous, restless mind concerned to question both the world and itself.

Roland Barthes
THE PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL
Lecture courses and seminars at the Collège de France (1978–1979 and 1979–1980)
Translated by Kate Briggs 512pp. Columbia University Press. $89.50; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £62.
978 0 231 13614 3
INCIDENTS
Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan
184pp. Seagull Books. Paperback, £16.
978 1 906497 59 0

Mairéad Hanrahan is Professor of French at University College London.