"Outside, it is snowing": Experience and finitude in the nonrepresentational landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet

Copyright © 2008 PionRomanillos J L, 2008. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(5) 795 – 822 DOI: 10.1068/d6207This paper presents and explicates the anonymous and impersonal spatialities tentatively mapped in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Emerging from the kinds of landscapes and visualities articulated, these spatialities are at odds with the kind of anthropocentrism characteristic of phenomenological narratives of spatial experience that would start from an apparently stable human-subject position. It is argued that his body of literature dismantles the anthropocentric narratives and biographies that would produce in both the space of the world and the ‘phenomenological subject’ an unwarranted depth and naturalism. Importantly, and reflecting the theoretical turn towards the being of language, Robbe-Grillet questions the legitimacy of linguistic subjects to capture the spaces of the visible. As such, it is argued that his literature reflects an experience of the critiques of phenomenology. Importantly, this ‘critique’ goes hand in hand with the kinds of spatialities and landscapes that are rendered in the novels—the indefinite perspectives they open up, the paradoxical visualities they sustain or deny, and the disorientation they inject into the heart of spatial experience. These literary effects produce a nonanthropocentric and nonpersonal spatiality which, although contributing to an erasure of the ‘subject’, at the same time expose and open up a sociospatiality based on singularities, intensities, and finitude

Editorial craft and francophone African literature: the case of Malick Fall

This article considers Senegalese novelist Malick Fall’s 1967 novel La Plaie [The Wound] in the light of material from the archives of Parisian publishers Editions du Seuil. It explores to what extent and with what effect traces of editorial mediation revealed in publishers’ archives can be written into the history of francophone African literature. Fall’s long-neglected text is one of the earliest francophone African novels of post-independence disillusionment. Described by an early critic as the first African “existentialist” novel, its fragmented narrative draws on seams of poetic symbolism, burlesque comedy, and philosophical reflection to portray a vagrant protagonist. The complex structure and unstable narrative voice mark a departure from realist modes of African novels in the 1950s. Moreover it troubles any reductive account of a linear transition from realism to modernism. Yet Fall’s work remains much less known than the celebrated stylistic innovation of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances (1968) or Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence (1968). Readers’ reports at Le Seuil, a publisher with clear anti-colonial sympathies, show how editors sought to revise Fall’s manuscript according to normative ideas of language, genre, and literary craft, tentatively pointing to the text’s modernist leanings without fully articulating what such modernity might constitute or imply. While clearly not exclusive to African or postcolonial literature, such stylistic tempering (or tampering) arguably shaped the text’s meditations on trauma, freedom, and alienation. This evidence leads to a revised, multivalent understanding of Fall’s literary innovation