Pierre Bayard\u27s Wormholes

The recent work of Pierre Bayard is trenchant, original, and deeply engaging. From Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? (1998) Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (2001) onward, Bayard\u27s books have piqued the interest of readers well beyond the limited circle of those who habitually consume French criticism and literary theory, and have served thus to expand the horizon of possibility of critical writing in significant ways. Bayard writes in a conditional, hypothetical mode, rather than a declarative one, keenly aware of how very mobile literary objects are. Bayard is not afraid to take risks, and he searches for new forms through a process of bold experimentation. He seeks moreover to enlist his reader in that quest, proposing a contract to him or her, one whose principal clauses are articulative and ludic. Fictional worlds are incomplete, he argues, and we readers must intervene in them in order to palliate that incompletion, through our interpretations. We accede to fictional worlds through wormholes, passages joining places that are thought to be unconnected. With this interventionist model, Bayard encourages us to reconsider the way that we read fiction, and also the way that we read critical writing

Really

The contemporary French novel is striking in its diversity, its complexity, and its resistance to easy classification. This is not an utterly new phenomenon (one recalls both Gide and Queneau, in the 1920s and 1930s respectively, describing the novel as a fundamentally lawless genre), but it is legitimate to say that the novel\u27s horizon of possibility has broadened during our time, allowing for new kinds of expression. Those latter may be based in formalist experimentation (I\u27m thinking of writers like Jacques Roubaud, or Paul Fournel, or Stéphane Vanderhaeghe), or personal confession (Édouard Louis, Camille Laurens, Philippe Forest, for instance), or an insistence upon narrativity (Jean Rouaud, Christian Gailly, Christian Oster), or autofiction (Christine Angot, Annie Ernaux, Chloé Delaume), or social and political concerns (Gérard Gavarry, François Bon, Laurent Mauvignier), or hyperfiction (Manuela Draeger, Lutz Bassmann, Elli Kronauer), or indeed in a conscious hybridization of any of the foregoing directions. Among all of those various possibilities, I am interested in the way that certain French novelists in recent years have turned toward the real, toward history and biography. I am thinking of books like Jean Echenoz\u27s Ravel (2006), Courir (2008), and Des éclairs (2010), for example; or Lydie Salvayre\u27 Hymne (2011), Annie Ernaux\u27s Les Années (2008), Jean Rolin\u27s Crac (2019), Olivier Rolin\u27s Le Météorologue (2014), and Marie Cosnay\u27s Villa Chagrin (2006), to name just a few. Most especially perhaps, Patrick Deville comes to mind. His example is a very remarkable one, insofar as he chose to retool his writerly skills exhaustively in mid-career. After five relatively conventional, brief, fabulist novels published from 1987 to 2000 at the Éditions de Minuit, he brought out his equatorial trilogy : Pura Vida: Vie et mort de William Walker (2004), Équatoria (2009), and Kampuchéa (2011), collected in an omnibus edition entitled Sic transit (2014). Focusing upon Central America, the Congo, and Cambodia, respectively, these texts may be best imagined as biographies of place. Deville relies upon history, testimony, and personal observation in order to tell the stories of those places, animating them in a mode which is indisputably novelistic—if by novelistic one means a narrative form in prose that can reconcile and accommodate a multiplicity of expressive purposes

Christian Oster\u27s Picnic

With eight novels published by the Editions de Minuit in the last decade, Christian Oster has established himself as one of the most interesting figures in a cohort of new French writers who are gradually redefining the novel as literary form

Experimental Writing, Experimental Reading

The notion of experimental writing is difficult to define with any kind of precision. Most of the time it is invoked in a largely offhanded manner, as if its meaning were immediately clear to everyone, obviating the need for further discussion. That assumption is a matter of expediency rather than anything else, for even a cursory glance at the way people use the term quickly reveals that the way we understand it varies considerably, changing over both time and cultural space. This essay seeks to examine how the idea of the experimental expresses itself in the tradition of the twentieth-century French avant-garde

Reading Contemporary French Literature

This book focuses upon a dozen French writers who have helped to set the terms for contemporary French literature and its horizon of possibility. Though they have pursued significantly different paths, each one of them is committed to the principle of literary innovation, to making French literature new. They work in full cognizance of literary history and of the tradition that they inherit, even as they reshape that tradition in each of their books. They invite their readers to take a critical stance with regard to those books, and to participate actively in the construction of literary meaning. Both bold and mobile in their own practice, they encourage us to be just as agile in our own readerly practice, offering us a rare degree of franchise in a literary dynamic founded on the notion of articulation. Writers discussed include Raymond Queneau, Edmond Jabès, Georges Perec, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Jouet, Marie NDiaye, Marie Cosnay, Bernard Noël, Jean Rolin, Jacques Serena, Julia Deck, and Christine Montalbetti. Warren Motte is Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with particular emphasis on experimentalist works that put accepted ideas of literary form into question. In 2015, the French Republic named him a Knight in the Order of Academic Palms for career service to French culture. His most recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (2008), Mirror Gazing (2014), French Fiction Today (2017), and Pour une littérature critique (2021).https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/1126/thumbnail.jp

Jeux mortels

Le formalisme ludique de la Disparition , de Perec, roman de trois cents pages composé sans la lettre E , cache un jeu mortel. Car le livre encrypte un discours d'urgence, dont les termes principaux sont la privation, le manque et la mort. Au terme d'une telle lecture, le littéraire en vient à figurer iconiquement le littéral : ce que transcrit le roman, finalement, c'est l'itinéraire écrit d'une survie.Behind and beyond the formalist games of Georges Perec's la Disparition, a three hundred-page novel written without the letter E, a far more deadly game becomes apparent. For la Disparition encodes an urgent discourse on privation, loss, and death. In the course of such a reading, the literary comes iconically to subsume the literal: what the novel transcribes, in the final analysis, is a written itinerary of survival

Jeux mortels

Le formalisme ludique de la Disparition , de Perec, roman de trois cents pages composé sans la lettre E , cache un jeu mortel. Car le livre encrypte un discours d'urgence, dont les termes principaux sont la privation, le manque et la mort. Au terme d'une telle lecture, le littéraire en vient à figurer iconiquement le littéral : ce que transcrit le roman, finalement, c'est l'itinéraire écrit d'une survie.Behind and beyond the formalist games of Georges Perec's la Disparition, a three hundred-page novel written without the letter E, a far more deadly game becomes apparent. For la Disparition encodes an urgent discourse on privation, loss, and death. In the course of such a reading, the literary comes iconically to subsume the literal: what the novel transcribes, in the final analysis, is a written itinerary of survival

Patrick Deville’s Novelty

L’écrivain français contemporain Patrick Deville produit actuellement un œuvre des plus intrigants que l’on puisse espérer trouver. C’est un ensemble varié et en continuelle évolution qui pose avec insistance la question de ce qu’est le roman au milieu des conflits de notre présent culturel, et de ce qu’il peut devenir dans un avenir que nous ne pouvons que vaguement deviner. Parmi ses œuvres les plus récentes m’intéressent plus particulièrement Pura Vida, Equatoria et Kampuchéa, parce qu’elles semblent constituer (du moins jusqu’ici) une trilogie qui fait le tour du monde sur l’équateur, et dont les héros semblent à chaque fois être des lieux, plutôt que des personnes. D’un autre point de vue, on pourrait soutenir que le protagoniste de ces textes est le roman lui-même, parce que chacun d’entre eux – quel que soit son sujet – montre le roman de maintenant à la recherche d’une forme nouvelle. Cette façon de faire est convaincante, car elle témoigne de la manière dont la culture est en train de se métamorphoser, là, sous nos yeux. Dans cet article je voudrais me concentrer sur Kampuchéa, parce que je crois qu’il s’appuie sur les textes qui le précèdent, et y apporte une réponse essentielle. En outre, c’est dans Kampuchéa que Deville confirme sa nouvelle compétence d’écrivain, en esquissant un nouvel horizon de possibilité pour le roman comme forme littéraire vivante et dynamique

Une conversation avec Lydie Salvayre

WM : Tout d’abord, puisqu’il s’agit ici d’une conversation, j’aimerais vous demander ce que vous pensez du principe. Beaucoup de vos livres, surtout au début de votre carrière (je pense par exemple à La Déclaration, à La Vie commune, à La Puissance des mouches, à La Compagnie des spectres) sont monologiques. Dans La Conférence de Cintegabelle, livre strictement monologique, le conférencier prône les vertus de la conversation— et cependant il fait tout pour tuer dans l’oeuf toute possibilité de dialogue. Comment voyez-vous la chose ? LS : Aussi loin que remontent mes souvenirs, j’ai toujours eu des difficultés à prendre la parole. Comme vous le savez, mes parents qui étaient arrivés en France en 1939 pour fuir le franquisme parlaient une langue mixte et transpyrénéenne où le français était régulièrement piétiné, bousculé, estropié, bref mis à très rude épreuve. Le problème c’est que je reproduisais, enfant, leurs fantaisies et écarts langagiers, et que j’éprouvais une honte affreuse chaque fois que j’étais prise en défaut de mal dire. Ce n’est que plus tard, bien plus tard, que j’ai trouvé à ce mal dire transmis par mes parents, une puissance poétique, une drôlerie, une forme d’impertinence et une façon joyeuse de résister à la langue majoritaire dont j’ai tenté de rendre compte dans mon roman Pas pleurer

Ices in the edge-on disk CRBR 2422.8-3423: Spitzer spectroscopy and Monte Carlo radiative transfer modeling

We present 5.2-37.2 micron spectroscopy of the edge-on circumstellar disk CRBR 2422.8-3423 obtained using the InfraRed Spectrograph (IRS) of the Spitzer Space Telescope. The IRS spectrum is combined with ground-based 3-5 micron spectroscopy to obtain a complete inventory of solid state material present along the line of sight toward the source. We model the object with a 2D axisymmetric (effectively 3D) Monte Carlo radiative transfer code. It is found that the model disk, assuming a standard flaring structure, is too warm to contain the very large observed column density of pure CO ice, but is possibly responsible for up to 50% of the water, CO2 and minor ice species. In particular the 6.85 micron band, tentatively due to NH4+, exhibits a prominent red wing, indicating a significant contribution from warm ice in the disk. It is argued that the pure CO ice is located in the dense core Oph-F in front of the source seen in the submillimeter imaging, with the CO gas in the core highly depleted. The model is used to predict which circumstances are most favourable for direct observations of ices in edge-on circumstellar disks. Ice bands will in general be deepest for inclinations similar to the disk opening angle, i.e. ~70 degrees. Due to the high optical depths of typical disk mid-planes, ice absorption bands will often probe warmer ice located in the upper layers of nearly edge-on disks. The ratios between different ice bands are found to vary by up to an order of magnitude depending on disk inclination due to radiative transfer effects caused by the 2D structure of the disk. Ratios between ice bands of the same species can therefore be used to constrain the location of the ices in a circumstellar disk. [Abstract abridged]Comment: 49 pages, accepted for publication in Ap