How a shut-in became Marcel Proust. If you’ve been trying to write a novel for years, this is a comforting read.
“It All Comes Together”
How did Marcel Proust become a great writer?
By Roland Barthes
What is at play in this change is, as I see it, the following: all Proust’s writings preceding A la recherche are, to some degree, fragmentary and short—short stories, articles, scraps of texts. One has the impression that the ingredients are present (as we say in cooking), but the operation that’s going to transform them into a dish hasn’t yet taken place: it’s “not quite there.” And then, suddenly (in September 1909), “it all comes together”: the mayonnaise thickens and it’s just a question of gradually producing more and more. Moreover, Proust increasingly works with a technique of “adding in”: he is constantly reinfusing food into this organism which now begins to thrive because it is well set up. The physical writing itself changes: admittedly, Proust always wrote “at the gallop,” as he put it (and that manual rhythm is perhaps not unrelated to the movement of his sentences), but at the point when A la recherche takes off, the writing changes: it “tightens,” “becomes more complex,” and overflows now with energetic emendations. To sum up, a kind of alchemical operation occurred within Proust during that month of September which transmuted the essay into a novel and a short, discontinuous thing into a long, sustained, and fully formed one.
Read the Barthes essay at Lapham’s Quarterly.
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