In La Prisonnière, volume vi of A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust famously depicts the death of Bergotte, a writer for whom the narrator has a great deal of admiration and whose work constitutes a step on the way to his own vocation as novelist. The narrator muses on the posthumous fate of the deceased author, and concludes his meditation as follows:

Significantly, Bergotte's afterlife is portrayed through the evocation of his books on display in a shop window. The imagery of a chapel of repose watched over by angels with open wings is redolent of spirituality, but the underlying implication is that Bergotte will live on because his books have become marketable commodities.

At the other end of the twentieth century, Pascal Lainé, winner of the Goncourt prize for his novel La Dentellière (1974), bemoaned the fact that the commodification of the entire culture was all but complete. In his 1997 essay Le Commerce des Apparences he declares: ‘La logique de la marchandise achève, en ce moment même et sous nos yeux, de coloniser tout l'espace de ce qui aurait pu être “l'humain”.’ Another writer, Frédéric Beigbeder, took this commercial logic to a kind of conclusion by publishing a novel bearing the title 99 francs ; and in 2002 when the European Monetary Union adopted the euro, Beigbeder changed his novel's title to 14.99 €. In both cases the title corresponds to the cover price of the volume, so that in one sense the buyer gets perfect and precise value for money in the purchase. The title signals the book as an item of merchandise and foregrounds the analogies between the consumer transaction and cultural exchanges. The very figures of which it consists embody a classic device of customer interpellation through pricing policy: setting the price one integer below a round number enjoins the prospective purchaser mentally to read the gap between this and the larger sum and conclude that here is a bargain, in an operation typical of the phenomenology of reading.