Jean Echenoz Research Articles

Specters by Radwa Ashour, Barbara Romaine

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Q aboutMartin Buber, Shagar's battles at university, the FirstGulfWar. Shagar'sworldrushestowardnarrative disaster, butit'sunclear where Ashour'sis going.Still,thenovel insists that no moment is a careless aside.After sheisstartled byconnectionsthatcritics found inhernovel Granada, Ashourwonderswhether anyone can"follow thethreads that makeup thefabric ofhislife." The memoirnever provides an easythread to follow. It spools through someofthesameterritory thatAshour's husband wrote about inhis1999memoir, I SawRamallah. Poet MouridBargouti's memoir is the morebeautiful, but Ashour's autofiction demands, and rewards, morethought. Some sectionsof memoirfeel likeanungovernable stream ofconsciousness . We disappeardown a rabbit holeofRadwa'spersonal historyonlyto reemerge again with Shagar,on herpointedway somewhere .In the end, it seems that Shagarhasbeendefeated. Butthen Ashourputs her heroinetogether again,ifnotquitesurewheresheis headedorhow,oncethere, shewill getpasttheogre. 58 1WorldLiterature Today boundtooblivion inthis experiment oftotalitarianism and totaldestructionofthehuman spirit. Whatemergesseemsto be a connection betweenlove,survival, and salvation.ViktorFrankl,in describing his experience in Auschwitz , tellsus thattheones who somehow survived werenotnecessarily thestrong onesbutthose who hada rich internal life. Hewrites that whenthepain becameunbearable and beyondanyhellknown, one's mindwandered tothevisionofthe belovedone,fora visionoflove.A meansoftolerating theintolerable, love made survivalpossibleand, ultimately, salvation.It sustained the human being,human spirit. Franklconcludesthatpsychological reactions arenotthesoleresult oftheconditions oflife butalsothe result ofthefreedom ofchoiceone alwayshas inseveresuffering. The innerhold a prisoner has on his spiritual selfrelieson havingfaith inthefuture, andoncehelosesthat faith, he is doomed.Frankl writes that the vision ofhisbeloved seemed acutely real.As Frankl echoesPlato: "The salvationof man is through loveandinlove/' Dalia Daniel Stanford University Radwa Ashour. Specters. Barbara Romaine, tr.Northampton,Massachusetts . Interlink. 2010. 282 pages. $15. ISBN 978-1-56656-832-6 Radwa Ashour's Specters - part autobiography, partfiction - is full of echoes, tangled threads,and impossiblechoices.The entwined narratives hoveraroundthe 1948 attack onPalestinians atDeirYassin, anevent that claims theattentions of both"real"andfictional characters. Butthebookdoes notcenter here. Instead itshuttles forward andback, resisting a clear focus justasitresists easytruths. Early on,theauthor talks about herschoolyears.She reflects on a time, after theexpulsion ofPalestiniansfrom Israelandthenationalizationof Egyptianschools,of antiJewish censorship. Speaking ofthis, Ashourwrites: "Instories there are always two paths - one to safety, theother tocalamity - andblocking thewaytosafety is theogre, whom thosewhoareclevermustgetpast by meansof cunning and artifice. I don'tknowwhatit is I need,to begin with, inorder tomakea choice betweenthetwopaths.The possibilities havemultiplied, thethreads havebecometangled, and itseems that they become moreknotted each day,whileI amas yetnotevenable todistinguish safety from calamity." Intersecting calamities recur throughout.The novel moves between thestories oftwowomen's lives,thatof the fictional Shagar and the"real"Radwa:their grandfathers , their protests, British attacks on Egyptians and Israeliattacks on Palestinians, official and unofficial accounts. Bothcharacters attempt to getat and defenda smallpatchof narrative truth. Eventually, wearrive attheDeir Yassinmassacre, atwhichthebook hasbeenpointing. Here,Radwaand Shagarstepbackand givethePalestinian and Israeliparticipants an opportunity to describe whathappened ,in sometimes starkterms. Israelifighter Patchiah Zalivensky: "Eachphalanxadvancedon itstarget .We blew up thedoorsusing sticks ofgelignite. Thenwe tossed handgrenades intothehousesand bombarded them with gunfire." Butthebookdoes notremain here. Itmoves instead toa conference M. LynxQualey Cairo,Egypt Jean Echenoz. Des éclairs. Paris. Minuit .2010. 175 pages. €14.50. isbn 9782 -7073-2126-8 Jean Echenoz's latest book, Des éclairs, takesitsplacenextto Ravel (2006)andCourir (2008)as thethird andfinal text intheauthor's "three lives" cycle.AfterMauriceRavel and Emil Zatopek,Echenozturns inthisinstance tothelifeofNikola Tesla(1856-1943), whomhe sketches in the transparent disguiseof one"Gregor," an abundantly gifted ...

Mutations du roman français depuis les années quatre-vingt : le parcours de Jean Echenoz

Le parcours littéraire de Jean Echenoz coïncide avec les principales mutations du roman français depuis les années quatre-vingt. Lorsque cet auteur publie son premier roman, en 1979, les annonces de la mort du roman abondent dans la presse littéraire. L’aspect formel joue un rôle central dans ses premiers textes. Dans une deuxième étape de son travail (après Un An,1997), Echenoz construit dans ses ouvrages un équilibre solide entre le travail formel et le soin apporté à l'organisation de l'intrigue. C’est alors que la qualité de son travail commence à être signalée. Depuis Ravel (2006), une troisième étape commence: Echenoz participe à cette tendance au retour du sujet que l’on remarque chez un grand nombre de ses contemporains, écrivant des biographies fictionnelles de personnalités historiques. De nos jours, il est considéré comme l’un des plus importants auteurs français contemporains, et la vitalité du roman français est partout reconnue.

'Fin de millenaire' French Fiction: The Aesthetics of Crisis

‘Crise’ is arguably the most overused word in French intellectual parlance. Cruickshank recognizes this as she argues in ‘Fin de millénaire’ French Fiction that, while the postmodern assertion of perpetual crises is simplistic, it remains true that at the turning from the twentieth to the twenty-first century ‘France was experiencing an intersection of social, political, and economic crises’ (p. 2). In this study Cruickshank hopes to achieve two rather ambitious goals: to show how literature engages with real issues, and to explore prose fiction's capacities as a form of cultural analysis. To achieve these ends she focuses on four contemporary novelists, Jean Echenoz, Michel Houellebecq, Christine Angot, and Marie Redonnet. Obviously, some will take issue with her choices, particularly that of Angot, but Cruickshank is seeking a broad spectrum, and her selection, while somewhat arbitrary, is more than defensible. To prepare for the discussion of these writers she begins with a brilliantly informed analysis of the ‘long twentieth-century’, concentrating on the last twenty years. She engages with the major topics of recent concern: the absence of the grand écrivain, the increased sensitivity towards violence against women, l'exception française, the rise and perhaps decline of feminism, and crisis manipulation by the media and trendy intellectuals. These pages display a combination of impressive research and remarkably clear synthesis. Her findings enable her to demonstrate that ‘the defining features of the fin de millénaire French literary field are heterogeneity and competing crisis discourses’ (p. 60), thus giving the lie to recent claims that France's literary and intellectual life has been enduring a period of prolonged hibernation. This section highlights Cruickshank's considerable gifts as a cultural historian. Her literary analyses, however, are of a somewhat different order. She treats her four novelists thoroughly, concentrating in each case on the works written around the the turn of the century; and there are excellent sections, notably on intertextuality in Echenoz. Yet these chapters also reveal a weakness in Cruickshank's approach: she sometimes confuses moralizing with analysis, and tasks the novelists for not doing what she thinks they ought to do. Thus Echenoz lacks an ‘explicitly critical stance’ in his works about the society of spectacle (p. 89); Houellebecq evidences ‘unproblematized misogyny, homophobia, and racism’ (p. 166); and Angot's prose is self-promotional (p. 212). The implicit assumption that artists are required to display, or strive to display, particular forms of ethical commitment — an area currently under discussion in academic circles — is disturbing, particularly when at least two of her subjects, Houellebecq and Angot, have established their reputations in part on the basis of political incorrectness. A common thread in Cruickshank's treatment is that these novelists fail to appreciate how they are co-opted by the cultural industry they deride; yet all writers are complicit to some degree in the society they may choose occasionally to criticize. This is as true of creative artists as it is of those who decide to comment on them. ‘Fin de millénaire’ French Fiction, albeit debatable at times, has much to recommend it.

Marc Augé’s Theoretical Fictions

Among social-scientific analyses of how individuals interact with the spreading topographies of the contemporary built environment, ethnologist Marc Auge's writings on present-day architectural and technological spaces and networks have been taken up enthusiastically in areas of the humanities well beyond his field of l'anthropologie du proche. He is associated especially with the term non-lieu, adopted to describe the spread of certain kinds of construction in peri- and interurban spaces and the forms of interaction they invite, although he has also increasingly applied the term to the image-based technologies of the mass media that replace firsthand experience of reality with pastiches or fictions. These spaces and technologies, designed to be passed through or consumed rather than appropriated, characterize the contemporary period Auge calls supermodernity (la surmodernite), an age, as the prefix implies, marked by excess: the individual is simultaneously exposed to a surfeit of locations and information (through advances in transport and telecommunications) and made the reference and focus of political and commercial discourses in place of the collectivity. (1) Auge's diagnosis of a contemporary spatial condition, a social malaise rooted in uncontrolled urbanization and technological advancement, is informed by his observations on home ground in the Paris area or in French holiday resorts like La Baule, Center Parcs, or Disneyland Europe. It chimes with a certain vision, in contemporary French fiction, of the physical and social (and, to different degrees, emotional) landscapes of present-day urban and especially Parisian life (as represented, for example, in the works of Jean Echenoz, Michel Houellebecq, or Marie Darrieussecq). (2) But it is the place of within rather than alongside Auge's ceuvre that will be the focus of this essay. In common with the poetician Gerard Genette, I conceive fiction here not as a strictly delimited genre defined by particular formal or stylistic qualities (although some, such as point of view, may be closely associated with it; see note 5 below), but as a moment that occurs when narrative discourse concerns itself with objects, however intertwined these may be with real-world referents that themselves become derealized in this context: Est litterature de celle qui s'impose essentiellement par le caractere imaginaire de ses objets [...]. Le texte de [...] est donc intransitif a sa maniere [...] parce que les etres auxquels [ses enonces] s'appliquent n'ont pas d'existence en dehors d'eux et nous y renvoient dans circularite infinie (Fiction et diction 31, 37). (3) Fiction as the creation of has been widely considered by possible worlds theorists like Thomas Pavel: Fictions speak of that, without belonging to the real cosmos, use it as their foundation (Fictional Worlds 132). (4) Both Genette and Pavel are keen to emphasize that in realist texts, fictionality is not logically or semantically obvious, but, according to Genette, une probabilite culturelle, induite par un certain nombre de donnees conventionnelles d'ordres textuel, contextuel et paratextuel (57). Thus narrative oscillates easily between and nonfiction: hypotheses about the world are not forever confined within a given fictional genre. Since their circulation involves the entire cultural space, theory of cannot be isolated from the general economy of the imaginary (Pavel, Fictional Worlds 135). Hence the permeability of theoretical discourse to moments of fiction, of engagement with objects, as we shall see with Auge. The concept of the non-lieu itself has evolved over the years for Auge from its original empirical status to give greater place to what Genette acknowledges (after Kate Hamburger) as providing one of the most prominent (though not prerequisite) textual markers of realist fiction, namely point of view (76-77). …

Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (review)

Reviewed by: Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century Gerald Prince Warren Motte . Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century. Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. 237 pp. In this splendidly well-informed, thought-provoking, and readable book, Warren Motte continues the exploration of the (post)modern French novel that he undertook in such exemplary works as Play-texts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature, Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature, and Fables of the Novel: French Fiction Since 1990. Focusing on "extremely contemporary" texts, on fiction produced "now" (in the past five or ten years), and, in particular, on eight writers who ask themselves and their readers to rethink the possibilities of the novel, Motte not only illuminates their work but also demonstrates the vitality of French fiction in the twenty-first century. After an introduction in which he argues convincingly that, far from being dead or moribund, the French novel can boast remarkable vigor and constitutes a significant mode of cultural expression, Motte devotes a chapter to each of the writers selected and—except in the case of Lydie Salvayre, most of whose fiction he discusses—concentrates on one of their twenty-first century texts. Some of the writers (e.g. Jean Echenoz or Marie Redonnet) are already well known. Others are less established (I don't think that Patrick Lapeyre is mentioned in the 2008 edition of Dominique Viart and Bruno Vercier's La Littérature française au présent, for example). They are all productive: Marie Redonnet and Lydie Salvayre each have more than a dozen books to their credit; Jean Echenoz, Christian Gailly, and Christine Montalbetti a dozen; Gérard Gavarry, Hélène Lenoir, and Patrick Lapeyre at least half a dozen. They are also remarkably diverse, like the novels examined by Motte. Redonnet's Diego, for instance, chooses as protagonist an illegal immigrant trying to navigate a hostile contemporary [End Page 120] France. Gavarry's Hop là! un deux trois transports the story of Judith and Holofernes to the banlieue and rewrites it in three different ways. Montalbetti's Western presents a most taciturn cowboy and tells a paradoxically actionless story. In Le Répit, Lenoir examines a pathologically tortured consciousness. As for Salvayre, much of her production (e.g. La Médaille, Les Belles Ames, La Compagnie des spectres) is engagé and denounces social or political crimes and abuses. Regardless of their visibility, productivity, thematic predilections (marginality and hospitality in Redonnet's Diego, say, differences between the real and the ideal in Gailly's Un Soir au club, the plight of the banlieue in Hop là! un deux trois), or technical preferences (the use of misdirection in Echenoz's Au piano, the iterations of Lapeyre's L'Homme-soeur, the jazzy temporality of Un Soir au club), all the writers studied produce reflective as well as reflexive fiction and ponder its metafictional or metaliterary dimension. Just as he excels at characterizing the thematic thrust of the novels considered and at uncovering correspondences between theme and technique, content and form, the what and the way (the internal focalization and free indirect discourse of Le Répit conforming to the claustrophobic subjectivity analyzed in the novel, for example, and the repetitions in L'Hommesoeur doubling the compulsiveness of the protagonist's behavior), Motte excels at showing how his corpus constitutes a primer on the novel, its governing processes, and its potential. With his customary lucidity and critical tact, he demonstrates how Au piano, for instance, is a fiction of fiction, how Western studies the conflicting aspirations of story and discourse, how L'Homme-sœur represents a questioning of narrative logic, and, more generally, how the novels discussed offer portraits of the artist, foreground interactions with readers, multiply mirroring effects, and meditate upon the nature of literature. It is the expert conjugation of this contemplative literariness and undeniable sociocultural concerns that, according to Motte, perhaps best characterizes the twenty-first century French novel. Fiction Now is expert too. Indeed, it is outstanding. [End Page 121] Gerald Prince University of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2009 French Forum, Inc.

Courir by Jean Echenoz

novel is one of interwoven secrets and searching: for identities, miss ing loved ones, self-esteem, and the solution to mysteries. Kathleen McNerney West Virgnia University Fatou Diome. Inassouvies, nos vies. Paris. Flammarion. 2008. 271 pages. 19. isbn978-2-0812-1353-1 The latest novel by the author of Le Venire de l'Atlantique (2003; see WLT, September 2004, 83) and Ketala (2006) is set in Strasbourg, where Fatou Diome has been living since she left Senegal in 1994. The narra tive is based on a plot device that has both literary and cinematic ante cedents: the narrator, Betty, is fasci nated by the lives she surreptitiously observes through the windows of the apartment building situated across the street from where she lives. In fact, this apparently solitary young woman refers to herself as "Betty la Loupe" (magnifyingglass), describ ing in detail the results of her daily periods of scrutiny to her readers. A mixture of voyeurism and soci ological observation, her curiosity leads her to focus on an old woman who lives by herself, who seems to lead an active, independent life, and whom Betty decides to name Felicite. The two women sometimes cross paths in the street, on the way to neighborhood shops, but Betty's attempts tomake contactwith the object ofher inquisitive gaze remain ineffectual. It is when Felicite is shipped off to a nursing home by insensitive relatives thatBettydecides to call on the now-embittered senior citizen. The initially awkward encounter between the younger African narra tor and the older French retiree soon becomes an unusual but real friend ship,which allows both women to reveal something about their back grounds and to share stories about Felicitas former neighbors. Predict ably, their cross-cultural connec tionwill eventually be cut shortby Felicitas death. Shocked by theway inwhich the old woman had been abandoned by her relatives, Betty recalls the loss of those who were important in her own life. Increas ingly depressed, she "disappears," leaving onlywords andmusic inher empty apartment. The narration is frequently punctuated by exclamations similar to the title ("our lives are unsatisfied, unappeased") with the narrator/ magnifying glass emphasizing that there is always some type of empti ness at theheart of every individual existence. This form of literary rep etition functions as amusical refrain, intensifiedby the references to the kora, a twenty-one-string instrument used byWest African griots.Diome's authorial voice is often heard com menting on the storylineor provid ing asides on various social or politi cal issues. Some of these tangents degenerate into ranting sessions that detract from the novel's exception ally high stylistic level and should have been removed at the editing stage. A central theme is the differ ence between African and European attitudes toward elders. Diome, who was raised by her grandmother, con trasts their traditionally respected place inAfrican communities with the European practice of isolating old people within specialized insti tutions. For Diome, this form of internal banishment not only pun ishes thosewho deserve dignitydur ing their finalyears, itdeprives the following generations of theknowl edge and stories accumulated by elders.Whether or not this lack of generational division is still char acteristic of increasingly urbanized African societies, Fatou Diome's keenly perceptive novel resonates with a strong, clear voice. EdwardOusselin WesternWashington University Jean Echenoz. Courir. Paris. Minuit. 2008. 142 pages. 13.50. isbn978-2 7073-2048-3 The long-distance runner, we are often told, is a lonely figure. Yet "Emile," the protagonist of Jean Echenoz's latest novel, does not seem to fitthat mold. Though by no means a backslapper, he nonetheless functions well enough among oth ers, becoming, eventually, not only a productive but also a revered mem ber ofhis society.By thesame token, Echenoz's book does not quite fitthe mold thatwe usually imagine for the novel. Like Ravel (2006),which immediately precedes it in Eche noz's oeuvre, it is slightly askew with regard to theconventions of the genre, leaning distinctly once again toward biography. For Echenoz's "Emile" turns out to be the Czech athlete Emil Z?topek (1922-2000), who famously came to dominate long-distance running during the mid-twentieth century. His preemi nence was such that he...

Inassouvies, nos vies by Fatou Diome

novel is one of interwoven secrets and searching: for identities, miss ing loved ones, self-esteem, and the solution to mysteries. Kathleen McNerney West Virgnia University Fatou Diome. Inassouvies, nos vies. Paris. Flammarion. 2008. 271 pages. 19. isbn978-2-0812-1353-1 The latest novel by the author of Le Venire de l'Atlantique (2003; see WLT, September 2004, 83) and Ketala (2006) is set in Strasbourg, where Fatou Diome has been living since she left Senegal in 1994. The narra tive is based on a plot device that has both literary and cinematic ante cedents: the narrator, Betty, is fasci nated by the lives she surreptitiously observes through the windows of the apartment building situated across the street from where she lives. In fact, this apparently solitary young woman refers to herself as "Betty la Loupe" (magnifyingglass), describ ing in detail the results of her daily periods of scrutiny to her readers. A mixture of voyeurism and soci ological observation, her curiosity leads her to focus on an old woman who lives by herself, who seems to lead an active, independent life, and whom Betty decides to name Felicite. The two women sometimes cross paths in the street, on the way to neighborhood shops, but Betty's attempts tomake contactwith the object ofher inquisitive gaze remain ineffectual. It is when Felicite is shipped off to a nursing home by insensitive relatives thatBettydecides to call on the now-embittered senior citizen. The initially awkward encounter between the younger African narra tor and the older French retiree soon becomes an unusual but real friend ship,which allows both women to reveal something about their back grounds and to share stories about Felicitas former neighbors. Predict ably, their cross-cultural connec tionwill eventually be cut shortby Felicitas death. Shocked by theway inwhich the old woman had been abandoned by her relatives, Betty recalls the loss of those who were important in her own life. Increas ingly depressed, she "disappears," leaving onlywords andmusic inher empty apartment. The narration is frequently punctuated by exclamations similar to the title ("our lives are unsatisfied, unappeased") with the narrator/ magnifying glass emphasizing that there is always some type of empti ness at theheart of every individual existence. This form of literary rep etition functions as amusical refrain, intensifiedby the references to the kora, a twenty-one-string instrument used byWest African griots.Diome's authorial voice is often heard com menting on the storylineor provid ing asides on various social or politi cal issues. Some of these tangents degenerate into ranting sessions that detract from the novel's exception ally high stylistic level and should have been removed at the editing stage. A central theme is the differ ence between African and European attitudes toward elders. Diome, who was raised by her grandmother, con trasts their traditionally respected place inAfrican communities with the European practice of isolating old people within specialized insti tutions. For Diome, this form of internal banishment not only pun ishes thosewho deserve dignitydur ing their finalyears, itdeprives the following generations of theknowl edge and stories accumulated by elders.Whether or not this lack of generational division is still char acteristic of increasingly urbanized African societies, Fatou Diome's keenly perceptive novel resonates with a strong, clear voice. EdwardOusselin WesternWashington University Jean Echenoz. Courir. Paris. Minuit. 2008. 142 pages. 13.50. isbn978-2 7073-2048-3 The long-distance runner, we are often told, is a lonely figure. Yet "Emile," the protagonist of Jean Echenoz's latest novel, does not seem to fitthat mold. Though by no means a backslapper, he nonetheless functions well enough among oth ers, becoming, eventually, not only a productive but also a revered mem ber ofhis society.By thesame token, Echenoz's book does not quite fitthe mold thatwe usually imagine for the novel. Like Ravel (2006),which immediately precedes it in Eche noz's oeuvre, it is slightly askew with regard to theconventions of the genre, leaning distinctly once again toward biography. For Echenoz's "Emile" turns out to be the Czech athlete Emil Z?topek (1922-2000), who famously came to dominate long-distance running during the mid-twentieth century. His preemi nence was such that he...

A Novel Afterlife: Play and Performance in Jean Echenoz's "Au piano"

A Novel Afterlife: Play and Performance in Jean Echenoz's "Au piano"

Real Estate and Stating the Real in Jean Echenoz's L'Occupation des sols

Real Estate and Stating the Real in Jean Echenoz's L'Occupation des sols

Echenoz's Modern-Day Mystics

Back in 1988, in an article on Echenoz published in a special issue of Yale French Studies devoted to contemporary French novelists, I wrote: Although the Medicis prize awarded to him for his second novel, Cherokee, has begun to familiarize the public with his work, Jean Echenoz is still a new name in contemporary French fiction. No critical studies are available on him yet, but a number of short articles can be found in different periodicals.1 In 2005, Jean Echenoz is no longer a new name in contemporary French fiction. With a dozen novels published (all by Editions de Minuit), numerous literary prizes (including the Prix Medicis for Cherokee in 1988, the Grand prix du roman de la Societe des gens de lettres for Lac in 1989, the prix Novembre for Les Grandes Blondes in 1995, and the prestigious prix Goncourt for Je m'en vais in 1999), and a well-developed and growing critical bibliography, Jean Echenoz is now a familiar figure in the literary landscape. Articles appear regularly in the press, and an entire program of France-Culture devoted to his work aired recently (December 2003). On the scholarly side, the first international colloquium on Echenoz's fiction was organized by the Universit6 de St-Etienne in 2004. His latest novel, Ravel, a fictionalized narrative of Ravel's last ten years of life, came out in January 2006, and the impatient fan could read excerpts and reviews on the official Echenoz website even before its publication. Jean Echenoz is beginning to establish himself on the English-speaking literary scene as well, where five of his novels have already been translated by Mark Polizzotti. Equally familiar to readers is what has come to define Echenoz's trademark manner: his novels are playful, ironic reworkings of popular genres, particularly detective novels, spy novels, and corresponding thriller movies. Lac, his award-winning 1989 novel, a sophisticated and clever spoof of spy fiction, is an exemplary case of a narrative that plays on generic cliches and readers' expectations. Two stories, however, are somewhat atypical in his oeuvre and seem to me to handle the usual Echenoz themes of disappearance, death and grief in a more melancholy and serious tone. The short story, L'Occupation des sols (1988) and the 2003

A Novel Afterlife: Play and Performance in Jean Echenoz's "Au piano"

In "Au piano" (2003) Jean Echenoz considers the conventions of novelistic narration and the ways in which literary meaning may be constructed. In particular, he focuses upon the articulation of writer and reader, anticipating the latter's expectations and reconfiguring them in unexpected ways. It is useful to view the manner in which he stages that interaction as a kind of game, organized around the principle of performance, in a cannily doubled and doubly ironic portrait of the writer and the reader at work. The wager in that game is the life--and the afterlife--of the novel itself.

Chaîne et Chaîne: Representation as Corrosion in François Bon's Daewoo

Despite early efforts to fold it into various conceptions of a Nouveau Roman, Francois Bon's work has come to occupy a distinct territory within contemporary French literature.1 In retrospect, even the first novels he published at Les Editions de Minuit seem difficult to assimilate with those of his colleagues. During the 1980s, Minuit writers began attracting attention for their investigations into the nature of storytelling (Jean Echenoz's Cherokee), the passing of time (Jean-Philippe Toussaint's La salle de bain) and the mechanics of narrative development (Marie Redonnet's Splendid H6tel). While Bon explored these issues in books such as Sortie d'usine and Decor ciment, he complicated the recursive investigations of works like Cherokee with an increasingly deep investment in a second concern: referentiality. In his writing, the question how does the novel work? was closely shadowed by another: how does the text relate to the world?

Crime Fiction Pastiche in the Novels of Jean Echenoz

Echenoz's crime-fiction-related novels occupy an equivocal position with regard to their source material, being neither crime fiction themselves nor outright parodies of the genre. The article explores this relationship as one of pastiche, and in doing so considers the various, often negative critical views of pastiche as a literary form. Fredric Jameson's pessimistic opinions are of particular interest, and the article sets out to discover how his views are justified or refuted by Echenoz's work. Closely examining some of the novels' incorporations and distortions of the tropes of crime fiction, and looking especially at Echenoz's handling of the crime fiction denouement, the study seeks out the aspects of textual play and implicit critique inherent in the pastiche. The picture that emerges is of an intertextual relationship that is both celebratory and deconstructive, a necessarily complex attitude towards a genre which can be at the same time formulaic and intensely self-conscious.

Crime Fiction Pastiche in the Novels of Jean Echenoz

Echenoz's crime-fiction-related novels occupy an equivocal position with regard to their source material, being neither crime fiction themselves nor outright parodies of the genre. The article explores this relationship as one of pastiche, and in doing so considers the various, often negative critical views of pastiche as a literary form. Fredric Jameson's pessimistic opinions are of particular interest, and the article sets out to discover how his views are justified or refuted by Echenoz's work. Closely examining some of the novels' incorporations and distortions of the tropes of crime fiction, and looking especially at Echenoz's handling of the crime fiction denouement, the study seeks out the aspects of textual play and implicit critique inherent in the pastiche. The picture that emerges is of an intertextual relationship that is both celebratory and deconstructive, a necessarily complex attitude towards a genre which can be at the same time formulaic and intensely self-conscious.

Architectes et architecture dans la littérature française . Travaux de littérature publiés par ADIREL, XII (Actes du colloque international d'octobre 1997, en Sorbonne) (review)

Book Reviews In contrast, Small Worlds proposes anodier world or two, which are related. One concerning aesthetic considerations, which are, of course, not new to literary criticism, but which have been quite forgotten in the current theoretical stream. The odier presents a delightful body of works still quite unknown on this side of die Atlantic. Inspired by similar phenomena in music and the plastic arts, die book brings out what could only be called a tendency in contemporary French literature : minimalism. This is clearly not a new literature, the way the new novel or modem poetry were "new," but a general aspect, a general effort, on the part of the writer, characterized by "smallness and simplicity, a reduction of means (and the resulting amplification of effect), immediacy , directness, clarity, repetition, symmetry and playfulness" (Jacket, 2). It is sparse, detached, sometimes deadpan, oblique, elliptical, relatively plotless and deptiiless. That is to say diat the literature in question is very much at die edge of the non-literary and that it would take a very small thing indeed, an imperceptible wrong dosage of one factor or another, a slight exaggeration here or a too strong understatement there, to transform the work from minimalist to trivial. But what firmly grounds all die works Motte presents (he has chapters on Edmond Jabès, Hervé Guibert, Annie Emaux, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Marie Redonnet, Jean Echenoz, Olivier Targowla, Patrick Roegiers, Jacques Jouet and Emmanuele Bernheim) on die side of the literary is a kind of knotting of die formal aspect widi die actual story being told. For each of diese texts tells a story which at the same time tells die story of its own writing and/or reading. A small example : in Emmanuele Bernheim's Sa Femme, Claire falls in love with her patient, Thomas, a married man. She discovers diat he was pretending to be married and immediately loses interest, turning her attention to another of her patients, after verifying that he is, in fact, married. Keeping with die minimalist principle, die plot is banal. But die novel isn't. As Motte reads it, it becomes clear diat it is also a fable of storytelling and a fable of reading. The supposed wife ("sa femme") is die motor of die fiction (and, perhaps, symbolically of all fiction): as Claire discovers that she doesn't exist, she disposes of Thomas to find another motor, real this time, to allow Bernheim to continue her fiction. Just as readers read and use a book to satisfy tiieir own need for fiction, and then dispose of it to move on to die next. In a word (small), this book, just like the books it treats, should have an increasingly amplified effect. At least, that's what mis reviewer hopes. Sydney Levy University of California, Santa Barbara Architectes et architecture dans la littérature française. Travaux de littérature publiés par ADIREL, XII (Actes du colloque international d'octobre 1997, en Sorbonne). Directrice scientifique , Madeleine Bertaud. Paris: Klincksieck, 1999. Pp. 462. 330FF. The 33 articles in this rewarding interdisciplinary dialogue range from the Middle Ages to the twentiedi century. Rather dian give a cursory notice of each contribution, it seems prudent to make a subjective choice in an attempt to communicate the flavor of what must have been an exceedingly stimulating colloquium. But it will be important for any reader to begin with the Conclusions of Madeleine Bertaud (441-46) where she judiciously outlines what could have been and what was actually realized. Clearly, the attention to space and place, to die city, and to die public and private spheres diat has preoccupied die humanities and die social sciences—especially geography—in die 1990s explains die timeliness of this volume. I would also urge the reader to stop next at Phillipe Hamon's text, "Littérature et architecture: divisions et distinctions" (313-21), which offers die tiieoretical basis for die rest of die volume. Section I ("Le Crayon et Ia plume") begins with an elucidation of the oft-mentioned but little-analyzed relationship between die architect Philibert De L'Orme and François Rabelais. Yves Pauwels shows that the two share a common status as founders of...

Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature

Small Worlds examines the minimalist trend in French writing, from the early 1980s to the present. Warren Motte first considers the practice of minimalism in other media, such as the plastic arts and music, and then proposes a theoretical model of minimalist literature. Subsequent chapters are devoted to the work of a variety of contemporary French writers and a diversity of literary genres. In his discussion of minimalism, Motte considers smallness and simplicity, a reduction of means (and the resulting amplification of effect), immediacy, directness, clarity, repetition, symmetry, and playfulness. He argues that economy of expression offers writers a way of renovating traditional literary forms and allows them to represent human experience more directly. Motte provides close readings of novels by distinguished contemporary French writers, including Edmond Jabes, Annie Ernaux, Herve Guibert, Marie Redonnet, Jean Echenoz, Olivier Targowla, and Emmanuele Bernheim, demonstrating that however diverse their work may otherwise be, they have all exploited the principle of formal economy in their writing. Warren Motte is a professor of French at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His most recent book is Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature (Nebraska 1995).

Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot and Chatterton's Poet

This essay explores the problematic nature of selfhood in the detective genre as established by Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) and most recently reformulated in two metaphysical detective novels, Jean Echenoz's Cherokee (1983) and Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987). Poe's detective Auguste Dupin is described as having a Bi-Part Soul, which permits him to vacate himself in order to construct the narrative solution to a crime. This duality, in the postmodern detective novel, is transformed into an irrevocable dislocation of the subject. Cherokee's onomastic devalorization of the story's characters and simulation of the human subject in the figure of the parrot Morgan create an indeterminacy that renders traditional conceptions of the self obsolete or irrelevant. Chatterton, whose point of departure is the infamous eighteenth-century forger Thomas Chatterton, uses the issue and example of pastiche to problematize the notion of the constitution of a subject in language and time. Both Cherokee and Chatterton take advantage of the subjective presuppositions of the detective genre in order to delineate the intricate problems of selfhood as a postmodern concern. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol23/iss2/7 Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot and Chatterton's Poet Leonard R. Koos Mary Washington College Lonnrot thought of himself as a pure thinker, an Auguste Dupin, but there was something of an adventurer in him, and even a gamester. -Jorge Luis Borges Death and the Compass I will now play the Oedipus to the Rattleborough enigma. -Edgar Allan Poe

Presentations/Selections

Presentations/Selections

Playing It by the Book

AMONG THE MANY EMBATTLED CONSTRUCTS IN OUR CULTURE, the book has been particularly beset in recent years. Assailed from all sides by other forms of expression-television, film, electronic media, and so forth, the book competes more and more unequally in the cultural marketplace. A stroll through any bookstore will confirm that the traditional notion of the book as a vehicle for literature has been challenged from within as well, for even in good bookstores the shelf space accorded to fiction, poetry, drama, and essay has shrunk dramatically in the last two decades. After swatting aside calendars, greeting cards, and personalized agenda books, one finds that new kinds of books-books on video, books on audiotapehave prospered, and are displayed prominently. Non-literary genres abound: cookbooks, diet books, and exercise books of dazzling variety tell us how to nourish and sculpt our bodies. Moral guidance from Colin Powell, Rush Limbaugh, and Pope John Paul II is easily found, but should you wish to consult Dostoyevsky, you have to hunt. The imposition of taxes on publishers' inventories has occasioned a stark reduction in the half-life of books: they must be consumed now or go out of print. We are told that reading and writing skills are in decline, that readerly attention spans are dwindling vertiginously (Barth 2); yet-perhaps symptomatically-we don't know whether to read that phenomenon as cause or effect. Among the many manifestations of the book's embattlement, I am especially intrigued by the way writers of literature frame that issue and attempt to come to terms with it in their own work. One can undoubtedly identify in any book a discourse, more or less muted, that engages the status of the book itself. Recently however, many writers, responding to the crisis of the book, have amplified that discourse critically and staged it at the center of their work, questioning the theoretical foundations of the construct and proposing new practical models of the book. I would like to discuss three figures in contemporary French literature who seem to me exemplary in this regard. Edmond Jabbs and Jean Echenoz focus on the notion of the book's dimensions, each in his own distinctive fashion, and from different ends of the book's spectrum of possibility. Marcel B~nabou,