Jean Echenoz Research Articles

Jean Echenoz, “comme une nécessité physique”: Action and Bodies in Space

Abstract: This special issue, “Jean Echenoz, ‘comme une nécessité physique’: Action and Bodies in Space,” deals with the corporeality at work in Jean Echenoz’s narratives. It builds on the significant scholarship on space in the author’s work to examine more closely how bodies move in the narrative space, how they contribute to shape that space, and how they are affected by it as well

In the Echenozian Discomfort Zone: Desire and Creativity in the Shadow of Death

Abstract: Critics welcomed a return to richly plotted imaginative fiction in Jean Echenoz’s most recent novels ( Envoyée spéciale , 2016; Vie de Gérard Fulmard , 2020). Yet these novels are also striking for how they intensify a previously perceptible posture of narratorial fatigue, even to the point of death, as well as for their staging of self-conscious stylistic poverty. More than the seductions of plot, they foreground the seductive “grain” of the storytelling voice, its offering of jouissance through breaches of the fictional world (intertextual allusion, versificatory units etc), now in the mode of decline and failure.

Musical lives: Portraits of composers in biographical novels

The biographical novel, currently so popular among readers and authors alike, only recently acquired its status as an emerging literary genre: the process of its separation from the historical novel as more broadly conceived can be dated to the second half of the twentieth century. It is also worth remembering that the biography itself, as one of the types of scholarly text belonging to the field of history, only became the subject of more serious theoretical considerations during the first decades of the twentieth century. The biographical novel, combining – in various ways – historical reality with the author’s creativity, affords a unique opportunity to get inside the lives of its protagonists. Relatively few of the most outstanding works in the genre are devoted to composers, but a number of them open up fascinating vistas for study. In my reading of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time, Josef Škvorecký’s Scherzo capriccioso. Veselý sen o Dvořákovi and Jean Echenoz’s Ravel, I endeavour to show how the authors build a credible image of their characters. The present study forms an anacrusis to further reflection.

Pour le sport: Physical Culture in French and Francophone Literature. Edited by Roxanna Curto and Rebecca Wines

Four decades on from Richard Holt’s pioneering Sport and Society in Modern France (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981), few would dispute the assertion by Roxanna Curto and Rebecca Wines that ‘the study of sports is viewed as serious academic business’ (p. 13). More specifically, their Introduction to the present volume highlights the contention by the influential Allen Guttmann that ‘the French were probably the first moderns to make sport into a major literary theme’ (cited p. 13). The thirteen essays that follow offer ample evidence of this creative preoccupation, maintaining the editors’ distinguishing focus on aesthetically significant writing, while also underlining an admirable inclusivity as regards themes and genres. This approach enables the diverse contributions productively to juxtapose the stylistics of running and writing in the novels of Dominique Braga (Thomas Bauer) and Jean Echenoz (Curto), the aesthetics of mountaineering from the Romantics to the clubs alpins (Pierre-Olaf Schut), and some surprisingly subversive depictions of sport and gender in Le Petit Nicolas (Cynthia Laborde). The volume’s targeting of a broadly conceived ‘physical culture’ further allows the inclusion of premodern athletic practices, exemplified by the noble jeu de paume, from the medieval and early modern periods (John McClelland) to the fiction of Prosper Mérimée (Corry Cropper). This broad historical sweep notably includes the Vichy regime’s suppression of rugby league, through a thoughtful reassessment of the writings of rugby union’s most zealous advocate, Paul Voivenel (Keith Rathbone). Such production belongs to a tradition of consciously literary sports commentary, exemplified elsewhere by Henri Desgrange (Wines), Antoine Blondin, and even Roland Barthes, whose 1955 essay on ‘Le Tour de France comme épopée’ was destined to become a cornerstone of cultural studies in his celebrated Mythologies (Ruadhán Cooke). These interrogations of territorial implantation and literary representation together address the complex articulation of professional sports and modern masculinities. They thereby complement the later studies of association football in — and between — France and Algeria, as part of the volume’s broader engagement with the negotiation of sporting identities, an ongoing process in which the 1998 and 2018 FIFA World Cup competitions constitute watershed moments. So, on the one hand, Zinedine Zidane remains the ‘overdetermined’ signifier of the triumphant multiculturalism of 1998 in both literary texts and arthouse cinema (Luke Healey), his parting coup de boule in 2006 notwithstanding. While, on the other, Kylian Mbappé, as player and persona, encourages a critical examination both of the cultural significance of French victory in 2018 and of the durability of the republican model of citizenship. The centrality of football and boxing in banlieue literature (Marshall L. Smith) in turn provides a stimulating counterpoint to the analyses presented here of soccer culture in postcolonial Algerian texts (Christa Jones) and of combat sports in Senegalese novels from the 1960s to the 1980s (Christopher Hogarth). Whether or not sport has entered the mainstream of French and francophone studies remains a moot point, but this fascinating collaboration argues persuasively for taking physical culture seriously, not only as a social barometer but also as a literary field in its own right.

Экзофикшн и энактивистские нарративы в современной французской литературе

The proliferation of hybrid genres is a notable trend in contemporary French literature. Alongside autofiction, new hybrids are emerging in French literature, modelled on a mixture of fiction and factual genre. One of them is exofiction (“ex” + “fiction”), which implies a narrative about fictitious events from the life of a historical character or an attempt to introduce fiction into someone else’s biography. The neologism, belonging to the writer Philippe Vasset, is rapidly entering scholarly and critical discourse, but no systematic attempt to describe the phenomenon has been made. According to Vasset, exofiction can be defined as any narrative that “blends the reality with the phantasms that accompany its representations” (Ph. Vasset); in other words, exofictitious writing practices form the space of “enactivist literature” in the cognitive sense. Exofiction reveals itself in the search for a connection between inner narrator’s experience and the other subject’s experience — including traumatic — through the language. This article attempts to identify the main features of exofiction, according to the enactivist approach in cognitive science and narratology, and to propose an analysis of the genre characteristics of exofiction by the exаmple of the novels by Pascal Quignard, Jean Echenoz and David Foenkinos.

Narration Models Reflecting the Soul of Music: Ravel and All The Mornings in the World

Music, which is a universal media as the language of emotions and passion, has inspired many artistic and literary works. While written works occupy an important place in the cultural sphere, musical works have fed many movements of thought in the same way, maybe even more, and have been determinative in creating meaning. In this study, a representation of the strong bond formed by music, which is considered to be the greatest form of art, with Jean Echenoz’s Ravel and Pascal Quignard’s All the Mornings in the World is shown based on Schopenhauer’s philosophy noting that the effect of music is stronger than other forms of art because it expresses the essence of the events in life. After addressing the role of music on the literary creativity of the stated authors, this essay will discuss how music shows that the idea in everything is represented by literature through the musician-characters trying to attribute a meaning to their existence with the art of music. In the said narration models which develop a discourse on music, the art of music is one of the elements making up the narration rather than a simple ornament or form of narration. As Schopenhauer emphasized, just as words are the language of the mind, music is the language of emotions and love. In the studies examined; themes of pain, loneliness, sorrow, mourning, desire and longing are narrated with the help of the strength and effect inherent in music and attempts are made at communicating with the soul of the reader.

Devenirs du romanesque: les écritures aventureuses de Jean Echenoz, Jean Rolin et Patrick Deville. Par Anne Sennhauser

This study brings the much-analysed contemporary novelist Jean Echenoz together with two less fêted authors, Jean Rolin, the younger of the two writing Rolin brothers, and Patrick Deville, for a comparative analysis based around the topics of adventure and the romanesque. Anne Sennhauser defines the latter in opposition to familiar, everyday life, seeing it as the domain of the excessive, where the unlikely, the exotic, and the extreme can flourish. This links closely to the concept of adventure, which is examined not only in the literal sense of dramatic events and far-flung voyages, but also in a narratological mode, with reference to the openness and unpredictability of the unfolding storyline. The study focuses on the first decade of the twenty-first century, with the earliest novels receiving close attention dating from 2002 and the latest from 2011, although texts from before and after this period are drawn into discussion as...

Jean Echenoz and Georges Perec: Negotiating Occupied Territory

Abstract Jean Echenoz’s first four novels (1979–89) exhibit the development of a literary apprenticeship across different fictional genres and acknowledge important precursors. Among the latter, the influence on Echenoz’s work of Georges Perec has not received the same attention as that of the nouveau roman, Raymond Queneau, or crime fiction writers such as Jean-Patrick Manchette. Yet the presence of Perec the narrative jigsaw-maker is unmistakeable in Echenoz’s first novel, Le Méridien de Greenwich. By the end of Echenoz’s decade-long apprenticeship, however, it is less Perec the game-player than the critic of consumerism and above all the observer of urban life who is privileged in Lac’s allusions to the older writer’s work on the infra-ordinary and on place. A previous short novella L’Occupation des sols not only dramatizes Echenoz’s navigation of an urban and socio-critical territory already occupied by Perec; it also prepares his subsequent commemoration in Lac of both Perec’s ludism and the personal loss informing his work. Taken together, L’Occupation des sols and Lac demonstrate how a grant-aided transposition to suburbia allows Echenoz to embrace his Perecquian inheritance of everyday observation, while articulating the subjection of writers too to commercial forces Perec identified, a theme the younger writer has continued to explore.

ALTERNATING NARRATION AND THE ANTI-DETECTIVE IN I AM GONE BY JEAN ECHENOZ

Le travail cherche à analyser le roman intitulé Je m’en vais dont le héros Félix Ferrer, propriétaire d'une galerie d'art, voyage au pôle Nord et retourne à Paris avec des objets d'art disparus dans le naufrage d'un bateau, mais ces articles précieux sont volés mystérieusement. Le narrateur narre le voyage pour trouver ces objets, les processus jusqu'à ce qu'ils soient volés et retrouvés en focalisant sur les événements autour du héros. Le protagoniste dépourvu des talents nécessaires pour mener une enquête se figure comme un anti-détective qui obtient ironiquement le résultat d’une manière aléatoire et hasardeuse. En se concentrant sur la structure en alternance et sur le remaniement des conventions romanesques des genres policiers, l’article se donne pour tâche d’étudier la composition divergée de la narration, l’infidélité du narrateur, l’enquête et l’enquêteur du point de vue des théories des mondes possibles, de la narratologie et de la fiction.

Cauliflowers and Plane Trees: Cultivated Vegetal Matter in Le méridien de Greenwich (1979) by Jean Echenoz

This article studies cultivated vegetal matter in Jean Echenoz’s novel Le Méridien de Greenwich (1979), focusing on cauliflowers and plane trees and how they interrelate with other organisms, and more specifically humans. Considering the novel’s postmodern aesthetic, it examines the ability of vegetality to initiate meaning and narratives, and its subsequent semiotization by humans. It outlines the impact of vegetal matter on a literary representation that is often confined to its self-reflexive and ironical aspects, and highlights the critical perspective offered by contemporary French novels on the culturization of nature.

American Culture’s Impact on Postwar France: A Positive Report

This essay reads Jean Echenoz’s Cherokee as a novel that challenges the commonly held French belief during the Cold War that the American cultural invasion (food, movies, household appliances, clothing) along with the rampant consumerism these products encouraged, were a major threat to traditional French values. By turning his novel into a parodic form of a ciné-roman, Echenoz shows how the American Way of Life can relatively easily be absorbed into the French equivalent without doing serious harm to the latter.

Literatura, ciudad e imaginarios urbanos : el País Vasco y la literatura francesa

El presente trabajo analiza la evolución de la representación literaria del País Vasco, comparando la imagen que Pierre Loti construyó a finales del siglo XIX con la imagen del País Vasco que aparece en obras literarias del siglo XXI, en particular en las novelas de Jean Echenoz y Marie Darrieussecq. Se trata de ver cuál es el lugar y la función del País Vasco en el imaginario de escrito es franceses contemporáneos, un imaginario muy vinculado a la ciudad y a la realidad urbana, y confrontar ese imaginario con las principales herencias imaginarias del País Vasco.

Imágenes de vértigo en Les grandes blondes de Jean Echenoz

El presente trabajo, que se centra en la novela de Jean Echenoz Les grandes blondes (1995), desarrolla una triple vía de estudio anunciada ya por la polisemia del título. Por un lado, analiza el tributo que el escritor rinde a su amplia cultura literaria y cinematográfica mediante guiños intertextuales que, en este caso, reenvían directamente a la filmografía de Alfred Hitchcock. Por otro, estudia las transacciones fílmicolit rarias que sustentan un discurso novelesco de ritmo trepidante y tempo vertiginoso, regido por una voz narradora tan activa y puntillosa como irónica y mordaz. Por último, reflexiona sobre el vértigo que producen las imágenes de una sociedad deshumanizada, bajo el triple molde narrativo de la novela de aventuras, policíaca y sentimenta.

Envoyée spéciale: Revisiting Return in Jean Echenoz

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).

Sigma by Julia Deck

Reviewed by: Sigma by Julia Deck Warren Motte Deck, Julia. Sigma. Minuit, 2017. ISBN 978-2-7073-4372-7. Pp. 234. Everyone knows Konrad Kessler (1887–1955), the greatest Swiss painter of the twentieth century. But wait—he was actually a German, born into a bourgeois family in Hamburg. In fact he was trained as a naval engineer, not as a painter. After four difficult years at the front in the First World War, he was sent to Geneva to regain his health, and it was there that he began to paint seriously, registering the carnage he had witnessed in abstract color and line. Very little remains of his work: thirteen "magnifiques grands formats" (23) housed in the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, and a handful of much smaller minor works. Rumor has it that another canvas may exist, however, perhaps the most magnificent of all—and the most terribly eloquent. The possibility that it may emerge is distressing to "Sigma," a nebulous organization headquartered in New York whose business is to police international ideology in ways as subtle as they are ruthless. Sigma pairs its agents with carefully selected targets in Geneva, four people who may take a hand in bringing the lost Kessler to light, and those latter individuals are a pleasingly quirky quartet. Alexis Zante, the most saturnine among them, is an art collector by vocation, and one of thirty-five vice presidents of the Banque Berghof. Pola Stalker is a movie actress. Her career is in the ascendant, and she frets about whether to take the route of high art or low. Her sister, Elvire Elstir, runs a gallery that has seen better days. She hopes to revive its fortunes with a show whose centerpiece is the lost Kessler. Lothaire Lestir is a neurobiologist specializing in sexology, whose personal crusade focuses upon orgasmic parity for women. Julia Deck paints this novel on a canvas significantly larger than that of her first two books, Viviane Élisabeth Fauville (2012) and Le triangle d'hiver (2014). Her style here is less spare, less suavely architectonic, but her gift for crafting lapidary, pungent sentences is still very much on display, as is her dry sense of humor: "Maigrelet, surmonté d'un plumet filasse, Lestir présente un physique de tamanoir" (62). The epigraph, borrowed from John le Carré's A Perfect Spy, is clearly intended to coax us into the shadow world of espionage fiction. Yet Deck's version of that world will remind many readers more of Jean Echenoz than of John le Carré. Readers looking for something beyond a standard spy intrigue will be well served here, as Deck muses upon the myth of the artist, the status of the work of art in an advanced capitalist society, and how radical, uncompromising aesthetic statements can be appropriated, domesticated, and thus largely neutralized by that same society. In other words, if stories circulate freely here, so do those particular kinds of stories known as parables. But of course that has always been true of the best spy fiction—and indeed of the best fiction of any other kind. [End Page 205] Warren Motte University of Colorado, Boulder Copyright © 2018 American Association of Teachers of French

Revisiting the Emil Zatopek Myth: Running by Jean Echenoz

In the first half of the 1950s, the history of running was marked by the overwhelming dominance of Czechoslovakian runner Emil Zatopek. As a three-time gold medallist at the Helsinki Olympic Games, his achievements were vastly instrumentalized by the communist regime to make him a hero of the people. For over sixty years now, the life and performances of Emil Zatopek have continued to be the regular focus of an array of cultural forms (advertisements, novels, films, comic books, etc.), contributing to building the myth. With Running, the French novelist Jean Echenoz plays his part in this process and raises a decisive question of interest to the sports historian: can a myth be created from a sportsman? By adopting the principles pertaining to the social history of representations, as well as those of romantic transposition, the investigation method chosen here aims to understand how a novelist succeeds in challenging a sporting myth and turning it into a bookstore success, translated into twenty languages and with 109,000 copies published.

„Un champ de bataille on ne peut plus réel“. Zur Referentialität von Distanz und Nähe in 14 von Jean Echenoz

AbstractThis paper addresses the production of referentiality in historical fiction. It analyses Jean Echenoz’WorldWar I novel 14 (2012), by identifying textual patterns that generate effects of distance and proximity. These effects concern the metatextual dialogue the novel holds with conventional ways of representing this war, and they also relate to the actual historical past evoked by the novel. In this respect 14 performs a notable inversion. Historical fiction usually produces effects of distance in order to convey historical explanation and achieves historical concreteness by effects of proximity, whereas Echenoz endeavours to provide certain aspects of the war with explicative coherence, registering the material world with great concreteness. In many passages, on the other hand, his minimalist writing produces an ironic distance, which makes experiences of contingency aesthetically evident.

Envoyée special by Jean Echenoz

Echenoz,Jean.Envoyée spéciale.Paris: Minuit,2016.ISBN 978-2-7073-2922-6.Pp.313. 18,50 a. In his latest novel, Echenoz returns, with a great deal of brio, to the kind of genre fiction that made his reputation as a writer. It is a form less immediately concerned with genre than with fiction itself, one that wagers heavily on second-level discourse, and one wherein we readers are well advised to keep our wits about us. For the record, the genre in question here is the spy novel, and Echenoz subjects it to a variety of stresses, testing its possibilities and turning it to his own particular purposes. His experimentation is more sustained in this case than elsewhere in his work (this novel is significantly longer than any of its predecessors), and his narrative pace is a bit more dilatory, as well. I mean that latter remark in the best sense, for Envoyée spéciale is an example of what Ross Chambers has termed “loiterly literature,” that is, a text that takes its time, and invites us to take our time, too. There is a principal plotline here, to be sure, devolving upon nothing less than the security of the Free World; but it is by no means ortholinear and unwavering. To the contrary, that plotline is frequently interrupted, to strategic and ludic purpose, by digressions, excurses, and embedded narratives of different ilks. Though most of the action takes place in Paris, one is as likely to find oneself ensconced in the command cabin of a wind turbine in the Creuse; or in a Range Rover Sport V8 idling outside of a nightclub in Pyongyang (of all places); or in the mangrove flats of the Ivory Coast, fishing for “la saupe dont on se méfie car elle se nourrit d’algues hallucinogènes, l’inconsommable uranoscope, le pagre combatif ou l’aveugle beaux-yeux” (255). Throughout, Echenoz plays with his readers broadly and unabashedly.At times, he draws us into the fable, seductively deploying a narrative nous intended to make us feel that we are part of things and that we have a significant role to play.At other times however, he obliges us to step back and shake off our willing suspension of disbelief for a moment, in order better to consider the story he is telling as a carefully constructed artifact. Both kinds of gestures are unmistakable, clearly labeled for what they are; and granted that, both serve to make us reflect upon our own reading protocols and what we seek in this novel—or indeed in any other. In short, what Echenoz is really up to in this book is a meditation on fiction and its uses, a meditation cast as a fiction and availing itself of fiction’s own discursive norms, but whose critical and theoretical dimension is not diminished by virtue of that. The fun begins when we sign onto that project, reading the text in multiple ways, trying not to lose our footing as we follow the pleasingly baroque narrative peripatetics that Echenoz limns for us here, there, and pretty much everywhere. University of Colorado Warren Motte 204 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 ...

Le dédoublement réaliste-minimaliste des récits contemporains français : Le cas de Je m’en vais de Jean Echenoz et de Fuir de Jean-Philippe Toussaint

In the mid- eighties, a number of contemporary French writers tried to renew the genre of French novel by a polyvalent stylistic revival. The critics had condemned the novel to death since it was drowned in theories and did not bring something new. The new generation put the emphasis on writing and ignored all other the theory- based approaches. Clearly, the critic started identifying the new phenomena and finally came up with the “minimalist” etiquette for writers of this clan. The novels of Jean Echenoz and Jean-Philippe Toussaint are remarkable examples of this literary movement since they draw all aspects of minimalist art in I’m Off (Je m’en vais) and Running away (Fuir). In this paper we will try to study the resemblances and the differences between minimalism and the important literary movement of the 19th century, realism. We will also spotlight the traces of realism in contemporary writings to point out the maintenance or the rejection of its components in new literary texts.

Le Défi du roman: narration et engagement oblique à l'ère postmoderne

Elisa Bricco's welcome new study of the contemporary French novel explores what she sees as two significant characteristics of recent fiction: an intertextual and self-conscious ‘postmodern’ approach to narration, and a form of social critique, which she labels ‘oblique’ in comparison to the more ideologically forthright political commitment of earlier generations. The study gives its attention to nine writers, a little unequally. Sylvie Germain is explored over two chapters and part of a third, Antoine Volodine has a chapter and a half, Alain Nadaud a chapter, and a few pages each are accorded to the other six writers, who are Dominique Mainard, Marie NDiaye, Christian Oster, Marie Redonnet, Jean Rolin, and Philippe Vasset. Aside from Redonnet's Rose Mélie Rose (Paris: Minuit, 1987), all the texts examined were published in the 1990s or the first decade of this century. After an overview of the contemporary French publishing scene and the reading habits of the French population, Bricco offers a survey of academic work on the extrême contemporain. She notes that ‘roman’ now encompasses such a broad range of writing that the term ‘fiction narrative’ might be more apt. Taking postmodern narrative as her first object of enquiry, she examines self-consciousness, fragmentation, and the ‘post-exotic’ in Nadaud, Germain, and Volodine respectively, arguing that formal innovation and serious themes do not preclude a concern for well-crafted storytelling and for the reader's entertainment. Moving on to engagement oblique in the latter part of the study, Bricco examines malaise of various kinds in the representation of modern society, with particular emphasis on women's experience, and explores the use of humour and the fantastic as a writerly response. Through discussion of Germain and Volodine in both parts of the study, Bricco makes the point that postmodern narrative play and clear-eyed social critique are by no means incompatible. As Bricco states in her Conclusion, the study is very much ‘une lecture personnelle’ (p. 192) of the contemporary French novel, with no claim to be a systematic overview. The analysis ignores major literary figures who might support its thesis (Jean Echenoz for postmodern narrative; J. M. G. Le Clézio or Michel Houellebecq for engagement oblique), and excludes those who might counter it, as Bricco readily admits, such as more overtly committed writers like François Bon. Not a comprehensive état présent, then, but Bricco's study is nonetheless an engaging exploration of some important contemporary writers, several of whom have not previously received the attention they deserve.