SOURCE: A review of Touch, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 3, Summer, 1997, pp. 661–62.

In the following review, Jaron discusses the experimental nature of the essays in Touch.

In his last years Roland Barthes became increasingly preoccupied with the desire to write a novel—a desire left unfulfilled at his death. He did speak about it, however, as in a 1978 lecture at the Collège de France. While “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure” (collected posthumously in Le bruissement de la langue) is not a direct expression of that wish—that would be presumptuous, lacking in taste—we nevertheless have the sense that he wanted to compose a “roman utopique” so as to pass to another kind of learning (“savoir”), a new learning which would require an innovative research method.

It was in Proust (thus the title of Barthes's lecture) that Barthes found not his model practitioner...