Living Alone Together: Barthes, Zola, and the Work of Letters

Abstract

In Comment vivre ensemble: Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens , the first series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France, Barthes explores individual life lived in a variety of collective situations. At the heart of Barthes's exploration is idiorrhythmia, the affective experience of supple, enabling rhythm. 1 Conceived as a median term between aversive forms of loneliness and hyper-integrative forms of collective living (CVE 47), idiorrythmia represents an optimal weigh(t)ing of elements of solitariness and of association. In these lectures, Barthes invites his audience to explore idiorrhythmia and its related figures (traits) in non-prescriptive and pliant ways and in contexts of their choosing, alert to the fantasmatic potential of everyday situations. 2 Across his fourteen lectures, Barthes engages, intermittently or more insistently with individual narrative works by Proust, Mann, Gide, Zola, and Defoe.Whilst he cites numerous texts of a historical, philosophical or documentary nature, Barthes privileges novels because they reveal "un matériel épars concernant le VivreEnsemble (ou le Vivre-Seul)" (CVE 44). 3 Barthes's eclectic choice of primary texts -his "anarchisme des sources" (CVE 44) -offers a model for how researchers might explore idiorrhythmia through the work of other creative writers and literary authors, and across a range of genres and media. This article aims to develop such a reading by putting Barthes to work on a corpus that is rarely exploited for its discursive and fantasmatic values -a The conceptual and fantasmatic co-existence of two writers writing a century apart offers the potential for a dialogue to develop across differences of historiography (c20th/c19th), medium (published lectures/published letters), and reception. Tracing a set of working affinities between Zola's writing practice and Barthes's cours around "living alone together" will provide a reasoned base from which to explore the anticipation of key Barthesian traits in the discourse of Zola's early letters, and demonstrate the extendibility of Barthes to other periods and to our reading of genres beyond literary narrative.First, critical and cultural affinities link the twentieth-century poststructuralist critic and a canonical nineteenth-century novelist who is also a journalist, an art essayist, and an ethnographer, attuned to the discourse and the cultural practices of diverse social groups, both real and fantasized. 6 The scope of the topical interests of Barthes and of Zola within and beyond literature reveals a strong congruence: painting, photography, architecture, desire and intimacy, language, authority, food, politics, subversion, habits

Living with illness

“…The concept of idiorrhythmia, however, has grown popular due to its resilience and the diverse well-known novels Barthes alludes to: "Barthes´s eclectic choice of primary texts […] offers a model for how researchers might explore idiorrhythmia through the work of other creative writers and literary authors, and across a range of genres and media" (Harrow, 2015:21). Not surprisingly, then, idiorrhythmia is applied in a variety of fields; such as literary theory, biographical letter writing, pedagogy and philosophy (Knight, 2008;Harrow, 2015;O´Meara, 2012;Stan, 2014). 3 I will transport the concept into yet another discipline, namely medical humanities, using it as a means to reflect upon being a patient in one's family home, living together and/or living alone in the presence of severe illness.…”