Pascal Quignard as Sinophile: Recreating Chinese Antiquity in Contemporary France

This article examines the question of reinventing Chinese antiquity in the works of the contemporary French writer Pascal Quignard. It focuses on three aspects of Quignard’s Chinese-inspired works: his rewriting of ancient Chinese texts, his views on the idea of language via classical Chinese language and thought, and his recreation of Chinese antiquity via a radical contemporization of the past. This examination demonstrates that Quignard poses important questions about cultural reception and appropriation, especially as regards the problematic relation between sinophilia, Orientalism, and the reception of antiquity. Finally, the article proposes a nuanced view of Quignard’s sinophilia that recognizes both its merits and drawbacks. It concludes by arguing that despite the pitfalls of cultural misunderstanding and misrepresentation, Quignard spells out the conceptual death of French Orientalism in his refusal to fetishize Chinese antiquity and attests to a tendency in contemporary French literature and thought to creatively recycle foreign cultures and revise one’s understanding through the other.

Orphaned Fathers in Contemporary French Literature: Writing Child Loss from a Paternal Perspective

In light of a growing number of trauma narratives about child death authored from a paternal perspective within the scope of contemporary French literature, this article explores the récits de deuil of four lesser-studied orphaned fathers: Alain Thiesse's Elle s'appelait Emma (2014), Philippe Delaroche's La Gloire d'Inès (2016), Michel Rostain's Le Fils (2011), and Bernard Chambaz's À tombeau ouvert (2016). This article considers the insight these texts provide into a father's experience of surviving his child and what this means for his altered identity, for his new role in life, and for the ways in which he turns to literature to voice grief. As we reflect on this changed paternal identity as articulated in these examples, we focus on each author's objective(s) in giving sorrow words as well as the choice of literary modalities of these works. A common thread running throughout these varied examples is the topos of voice: an angry scream and a cry for justice, a belated address, and imagined conversations which traverse the present and the afterlife. We discuss the discursive strategies in these grief narratives and three separate aspects of narrative construction with which they engage. First, we consider the father's cry and the strategies of citation in the témoignage Elle s'appelait Emma. Second, we survey the implications of life writing and the ethical imperative with which they coincide in a father's belated address to his deceased daughter in La Gloire d'Inès. Finally, we investigate how modes of fiction restructure and reconceptualize father-son transmission and filiation in Le Fils and À tombeau ouvert. For mothers and fathers alike, the récit de deuil confronts the paradoxical bind of mourning testimony. The crisis of meaning that losing a child sets in motion impels these fathers to make sense of the unthinkable in the process of writing.

Beyond Return

Beyond Return examines how popular literary forms have been politicized or could be productively repoliticized in the literary period that we have called the contemporary (roughly: since 1980). In the aftermath of the efflorescence of experimental literature and theory that characterized the Trente Glorieuses (1945-75), ‘contemporary’ French literature is often said to embrace more traditional or readable novelistic forms. This rejection of the radical aesthetics of mid-century French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the ‘return to the story.’ Beyond Return proposes new perspectives on the cultural politics of such fictions. Examining adventure novels, radical noir, postmodernist mysteries, war novels, and dystopian fictions, this book shows how authors like Jean Echenoz, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine develop radically dissimilar notions of the aesthetics of ‘return,’ and thus redraw in different manners the boundaries of the contemporary, the French, and the literary. In the process, Beyond Return argues for the need to move beyond the nostalgic, anti-modernist rhetoric of the ‘return to the story’ in order to appreciate the potentialities of innovative contemporary genre fictions.

Introduction

This introduction begins with a detailed overview of what has been called the ‘return to the story’ in contemporary French literature. This overview pays particular attention to how this ‘discourse of return’ defines the boundaries of an era (the contemporary), of a cultural or linguistic space (French), and of an aesthetic territory (the literary). Examining contentious postmodernist and declinological accounts of the contemporary, I then offer an overview of some of the ways that popular literary forms have been politicized or could be productively repoliticized in the period that we have called the contemporary. After a short discussion of Jean Echenoz’s The Greenwich Meridian (1979), which problematizes the borders of the conceptual constitution of the contemporary as a literary period, I discuss the methodology and corpus of Beyond Return, with a particular emphasis on how this book reads the politics of popular story forms. In addition to providing an overview of the chapters on Jean Rouaud, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Echenoz, and Antoine Volodine, this introduction thus makes a case for revising and rethinking the literary historical metaphor of return.