Everybody is Writing a Novel
‘Will I really write a Novel?’ Barthes enquires at the outset of the course. ‘I’ll answer this and only this. I’ll proceed as if I were going to write one.’ He will prepare as if preparation were an end in itself, inhabiting the mad fantasy of a writing that falls short of its own composition, ‘pushing that fantasy as far as it will go.’ Only then will he breach or break, or get broken into, the recognition (kenshÅ) that writing is nothing but its wants and longings, that ‘the product is indistinguishable from the production, the practice from the drive.’ This is the reason why he must preserve the indeterminacy of each of the terms in his title. He speaks of a preparation that is neither ‘of’ nor ‘for’ a novel, and of a novel that is not a novel, nor a set of notes for a novel never to be written.
David Winters reviews Roland Barthes‘s The Preparation of the Novel, arguing that the celebrated critic was “too much of a writer even to begin to write”.
Botched landscapes
Owen Hatherley on where urban policy under Blair went wrong. Further: Owen Hatherley on Radical Thinkers / Hatherley interviewed by 3:AM / Karl Whitney reviews Militant Modernism / Richard Marshall on A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain / Max Dunbar on Uncommon.