Envoyée spéciale: Revisiting Return in Jean Echenoz

Abstract

This article proposes a reevaluation of Jean Echenoz’s fiction, with a particular emphasis on the “return to the story” that Echenoz is often taken to exemplify. After carefully tracing the numerous allusions to Jean-Patrick Manchette’s romans noirs in Echenoz’s Envoyée spéciale (2016), I argue that Echenoz’s prototypically postmodernist metafictional strategies (or micropractices of “return”) suggest the need to revise our (literary) historical narratives about the “contemporary” period. Revisiting “return” today thus sheds new light on how Echenoz’s novels position themselves in relation to paraliterary genres (the roman noir, the espionage novel) and aesthetic categories (realism, modernism, postmodernism).