‘Préparation du romanesque’ in Roland Barthes's Reading of Sarrasin

By considering S/Z (1970) as an early example of the romanesque (novelistic) in Roland Barthes's oeuvre, this article considers the generic and thematic anticipation of La Préparation du roman in Barthes's seminars of the late 1960s. It suggests that his seminar notes on Balzac's Sarrasine written in 1968 and 1969 (and on which S/Z is based) are a form of proto-essayism, albeit given as seminars in the institutional context of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. This essayism is traced through the notion of perte de soi (loss of self) evident in two aspects of the seminar notes: firstly, in the ‘drugged reading’ that Barthes proposes, and then through his ambivalence to the literary character. Working ‘retroactively’, the article concludes that La Préparation du roman can help us to explain S/Z and its genesis, that is proactively, by applying this perte de soi to the act of one about to write a novel.