“The World, More or Less” by Jean Rouaud: between novel and autofiction

This article discusses theoretical approaches to autofiction - a new form of self-writing which spread in French literature from the 80s. The analysis of the autofictional device implemented in the novel “The World, More or Less” by Jean Rouaud produces evidence of the fact that the interlocking of fictionality and reality can express a subjective truth, the complexity and the unescapable dimension of the subject as I and translate an experience of life better than a factual narrative. J. Rouaud defines autofiction through an intertextual dialogue with J.-J. Rousseau’s “Confessions”, a text implicitly included within the novel’s text.

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French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the ‘return to the story.’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.

Conclusion: Beyond Return

This conclusion shows how the different positions staked out by the writers in Beyond Return trace a trajectory that leads from anti-modernist resumption or rehabilitation (a willful regression that positions itself as a post-critical progression) through ‘bathmological’ meta-discursive gestures (a critical repetition that changes the meaning of conventions and forms) and finally to spectral poetics which blur the very possibility of defining a clear discursive position or literary self-identity. I thus suggest that Jean Rouaud, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Echenoz, and Antoine Volodine are authors that exemplify different approaches to the metaphor of return, ranging from narrow historical readings of literary aesthetics to more oppositional uses of form and radically decontextualized conceptions of literarity. Against the contextual reductionism of closed national histories of the contemporary, this study concludes by suggesting how different engagements with popular fictional forms allow us to imagine alternative literary historical narratives and new political readings of French literature.

The Story and the World (Jean Rouaud)

This chapter examines how the ‘return to the story’ has been used to further an anti-modernist agenda and to delegitimize avant-garde or experimental mid-century novelistic aesthetics. Specifically, it examines the work of Jean Rouaud, a writer whose investment in the ‘story’ is exemplary of a wholehearted adoption of an anti-modernist conception of literary return. Putting Rouaud’s sprawling and digressive essayistic adventure novel The Imitation of Happiness (2006) into dialogue with Rouaud’s fictional and essayistic production since the early 2000s, this chapter problematizes the literary historical narrative that underpins Rouaud’s ‘rehabilitation’ of the adventure novel. It then zooms out to consider how this anti-modernist emphasis on adventurous fiction is echoed in the rhetoric of the famous littérature-monde manifesto. A short analysis of littérature-monde then demonstrates how the return to the story functions not only as a literary history but also as a cultural map. This chapter concludes with a critique of the anti-modernist literary historical narrative of the ‘return to the story.’

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.