Mid-way through his four-year tenure at the Collège de France, Barthes seeks a new form for his writing. As we have seen, his sense that a transformation of his writing is required is crystallised in a moment occurring on 15 April 1978, which he characterises as a ‘sorte de Satori’ (PR, 32). The new form of writing fantasised by Barthes involves a productive tension between the aesthetic minimalism of the haiku and the maxi-malism of the ‘grande œuvre’ as exemplified by À la Recherche du temps perdu: ‘Proust et le haïku se croisent’ (PR, 99). As Kuki points out, though the haiku is extremely condensed, ‘a very small thing contains the infinite just as much as does a thing of great dimensions’. Thus the focus in La Préparation du roman I on the haiku as the propaedeutic to the writing of a ‘roman’ is in Barthes's view entirely logical. He hopes that the fantasised ‘roman’ would achieve the notational intensity of the haiku, at greater length.