French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century: The Return to the Story by Simon Kemp

Abstract

Gérard Wajcman’s L’interdit. Maria Muresan underscores a similar reversal of fundamental Proustian notions in Le grand incendie de Londres where Jacques Roubaud presents “l’écriture de la mémoire” (190) as a means of destruction rather than creation. Other writers strengthen the interconnections between art and life that are found in Proust’s novel. In Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien, for example, Davide Vago traces metaphors of petrification, moulage, and fragmentation to images in the Recherche, where time sculpts characters’ bodies and erodes lives and loves. Sjef Houppermans’s analysis of Renaud Camus’s body of work highlights its “mille variations de la voix de Proust,” as well as its resemblance to “la polystratification du récit proustien et son essentielle musicalit é” (229). Still other recent authors explore the play between presence and absence in the Recherche. According to Florian Pennanech, Roland Barthes seeks a means of representation “hors du fragment” (248), which he finds in Proust’s “réalisme par intermittence, un réalisme erratique, discontinu” (249). Finally, in AnneMarie Garat’s ghost story, Nous nous connaissons déjà, Isabelle Dangy concludes that Proust’s influence haunts the general shape of the novel and its rapport between involuntary memory and writing. The Société Néerlandaise Marcel Proust once again has compiled a volume of high-quality essays to keep specialists and general readers up-to-date with current research on Proust and his oeuvre. Whether the works of the contemporary writers featured here follow in the footsteps of Proust’s literary vision or develop in opposition to it, they serve to single out aspects of the Recherche that remain pertinent and engaging for readers today. Brandeis University (MA) Hollie Markland Harder KEMP, SIMON. French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century: The Return to the Story. Cardiff: UP of Wales, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7083-2273-4. Pp. 213. £75. Calling on a wide range of narrative theories, Kemp argues that contemporary French literary narration is still experimental even though it has abandoned the techniques of the nouveaux romanciers and has made what is often called a retour au récit. The five authors he discusses to illustrate his thesis all use narrative techniques that strain conventions. Kemp finds Annie Ernaux’s main innovation to be foregrounding the relationship between the time of the events narrated and the time of the narration; he says that the varying distances between the two create a “plurality [...] of experience” (35). This is particularly relevant to Ernaux’s works treating the same biographical events, such as her mother’s decline and death, which she narrates retrospectively in Une femme and contemporaneously in “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit”. Her frequent inclusion of detailed “reflections on her text” even makes Kemp question whether, in some works, her writing is primarily narrative (22). This issue of how much non-narrative writing fiction can accommodate , and how much missing information a reader should be asked to supply, is raised also by those of Pascal Quignard’s works which, along with seemingly incomplete narrative, include much description and exposition. Such mixing of genre was a major reason many found his Goncourt-winning Les ombres errantes impossible to understand. Yet Kemp finds that although Quignard does not always seem to value narrative coherence, his refusal to be constrained by literary theory distinguishes his work from that of such nouveaux romanciers as Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet. 752 FRENCH REVIEW 85.4 The fictions of Marie Darrieussecq, especially those after Truismes, focus less on relating events than on presenting a “model of mind” (77). This model and her interest in the biological basis of mental life have also led her to represent prelinguistic thought in stream of consciousness writing, as she does in White. Jean Echenoz, in contrast, plays with popular genre fiction such as polars, adventure stories, and fantasies, as if to see how much he can explode our expectations and still tell a story. He leaves out important scenes, changes plot direction, and shifts genres in mid-narrative; he uses an “intrusive narrator” (118); he does not seem to care about probability or coherence. Above all, he digresses so much that...