548
LEO BERSANI
most explicit and least obscure theoretician for the idea of a "free,"
nonderivative art which would create the human reality it describes
from the ways in which this art constantly "encounters" its own ma–
teria l. The idea, as I have tried to show elsewhere, is important for
A La Rechehche du temps perdu:
each page of Proust's potentially
endless work is rich with novelistic possibilities which chart the future
of the story as well as Marcel's unpredictable self-renewals and self–
expansions. Proust's novel is perhaps the best illustration we have in
literature of that art and ethic of verbal surfaces which has found its
most brilliant theoretical statement so far in Gilles Deleuze's
Logique
du sens.
If
it is true that Barthes' efforts "to establish a new status in
writing for the agent of writing" correspond to a primary (if often
impli cit ) goal in modern literature, it nonetheless often seems intel–
lectually perverse to apply a formalistic distinction between person
and non-person to the analysis of particular Eterary discourses.
" ... He," Barthes announced at Johns Hopkins, "is absolutely non–
person," and even " ... the linguistic I [which, with
thou,
designates
person] can and must be defined in a strictly a-psychological way."
Presented in more general terms as an attack against the "realistic
illusion" ( in which the " I " was the "transparent expression of ...
psychological subjectivity"), such statements, which Barthes passes
on to us from Emile Benveniste, have a certain ideological glamor.
But when the usefulness of distinctions meant to deliver the death–
blow to realism turns out to be that they help us to classify certain
sentences from
GoLdfinger
as personal ( " ... thus," Barthes writes in
the
Communications
issu'O: on narrative forms, "the sentence: 'he saw
a man of about fifty, but who still looked young, etc.', is unquestion–
ably personal ...") and others as a-personal (" 'the clinking of the
ice against the glass seemed to give Bond a sudden inspiration' ' '–
"seemed " is the key to the a-personal here ), we are certainly justified
in having some second thoughts. Such information is boring and
frivolous, and when the assault on psychological person yields so little,
one is tempted to turn the analysis away from Fleming's prose and
onto Barthes' elegantly ruthless campaign against the self and per–
sonality. Of course, the campaign is not his alone, and the rejection
of subjectivity in contemporary French thought runs the gamut from
the intellectually impressive version of it we find in Levi-Strauss to
