Christine Montalbetti’s Road Trip

Abstract

An accomplished literary theorist, Christine Montalbetti has published critical works on topics such as travel literature, narrative digression, the status of readers and characters, and the relationships between fiction and the world. Her fiction writing, however, calls our scholarly certainties into question, blurring narratological categories and exploding the boundaries between fiction and reality on a road trip through the American West in Journée américaine (2009). In Journéeamericaine Montalbetti appropriates two iconic cinematic and literary models, namely, the road movie and the road novel. In both cases, those models open onto wide vistas, providing foundations from which to engage and call into question genre conventions and readers’ horizons of expectation. Subverting the genre conventions of her models, Montalbetti’s narrator seems to abandon herself to the pleasures of narrative digression. In lieu of an adventure story “on the road,” the narrator proposes a multitude of narratives encompassing an astonishing variety of subjects. Breaking boundaries, Montalbetti inserts herself into the narrative as well, and the novel becomes a virtual laboratory from which to explore the possibilities of fiction, opening onto a tentative utopian space of communication between author and reader, pushing ever further the frontiers of the genre.