This chapter seeks to place/locate Boulez relative to the literary history (especially French) of his time, particularly his formative years of the 1940s, which was still the heyday of Artaud and the Surrealists. The writers important to Boulez included not only poets like Char and Mallarmé, but also novelists, Proust chief among them. Boulez was interested in structural aspects of the modern novel: open or circular (nonlinear) form, the fragment and reflexivity, all of which he found in Joyce, Proust, Kafka and Musil. The Third Piano Sonata is one of Boulez’ most literary works, modelled on the labyrinth he found in works like Kafka’s story ‘The Burrow’, or the circularity of Finnegans Wake. Recent studies of Boulez’s sketches show his work proliferating organically and in an open-ended way, as did Proust’s or Kafka’s novels. Other literary aspects might include spatial form, Joyce’s medievalism or Proust’s symbolist aesthetic.