Yves Navarre. About a postmodern epistolary writing

Abstract

Yves Navarre's literary work is one of the greatest materializations of epistolary writing in postmodern literature. This article aims to analyze the different elements and procedures through which the epistolary matter becomes a practice of postmodern writing that continues to evolve throughout his prolix literary œuvre. First, the epistolary writing of fictional characters becomes an element of the renarrativization that participates in processes of discontinuity: a progressive fragmental writing—from his first novel Lady Black (1971) to the last Dernier dimanche avant la fin du siècle (1994)—and the hybridization with diaristic writing and literary metadiscourse—Le Petit Galopin de nos corps (1977), Kurwenal ou la Part des êtres (1977), Le Temps voulu (1979), Romances sans paroles (1982). Besides, these same practices are brought into the autofictional space, where the possibilities of hypertextuality are further deepened by quotation, intertext and metadiscourse—Biographie (1981), Romans, un roman (1988). Finally, the two spaces converge in an auto/alter-fiction in which postmodern diversel materializes through experimentation with alterity, giving rise to récits indécidables—L’Espérance de beaux voyages (1984), La terrasse des audiences au moment de l’adieu (1990). Throughout his entire literary work, and in all the aforementioned spaces, the abundant metadiscourse about epistolarity enables a postmodern phenomenology of epistolary activity.