On Listening and Failure: Roger Laporte with Marcel Proust

Abstract: This essay reads Roger Laporte’s Une voix de fin silence (A voice of fine silence), the second volume of his idiosyncratic work Une vie (A life), in dialogue with the early volumes of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu ( In Search of Lost Time ). A constellation emerges from the analysis that allows us to consider the interrelations and interdependence of Laporte’s text, his work as a critic on Proust, and the Recherche itself. The essay argues that Laporte’s textual engagement with Proust allows us to re-evaluate notions of literary failure so as to redefine what counts as the success of a literary project conceived as a writing about writing and becoming a writer. Both Proust and Laporte practice a literary writing that evokes mental experience while never being synonymous with it because, as their texts demonstrate, mental and literary experience can never coincide perfectly. Laporte labels the writer’s search a “listening,” a precarious activity which, like failure, is impossible to summon on command and which can only be recognized as such in retrospect as a motor of literary creation.