“Proust: what I found in his work”. Barthes as a reader of the Recherche

Abstract

A century later his death, Marcel Proust is still alive; conferences, studies and unpublished sketches marked 2021. 2022 is similarly interested with Proust and his Recherche. In this context of homage it must be understood the recent publication of Marcel Proust by Roland Barthes, a collection of essays that the semiologist wrote about Proust and his masterpiece, a book that he didn’t write even if he wished he did. My contribution aims to investigate the innovation of Barthes’s approach to the Recherche, the increasing influence of Proust in his research in the later years and the presence of the Narrateur in La camera chiara, the latest work published by Barthes, two months before his death, in 1980. Barthes offers a modernist vision of Proust made by fragments, explorations, incompleteness; at the same time he finds in Proust a guide and in the Recherche a word whose exploration never ends.