A Circle of Circles (Jean-Patrick Manchette)

This chapter examines Jean-Patrick Manchette, ‘father of the néo-polar,’ who is widely credited with bringing French crime fiction into step with the radical left politics of the 1970s. This chapter argues that an attention to questions of generic conventions and narrative shape allows us to reconsider the politics of noir as a literary form. This reconsideration of Manchette’s fictional politics begins with a close reading of Manchette’s essays on what he called the forme-polar or noir form. I then analyze two of Manchette’s late novels, Three to Kill (1976) and The Prone Gunman (1981), showing how issues of masculinity, gendered violence, and (post-)colonial violence are embedded in these fictions. Moving to questions of narrative shape and meta-aesthetic rhetoric, I show how Manchette’s work offers a radical and challenging view of the implications of working with and in cliché. Ultimately, this chapter lays out the case for a more expansive reading of Manchette’s work, one which goes beyond populist narratives about the noir novel in France, and which reads Manchette’s work as a politicized challenge to the ‘noir form’ itself.

Ghosts (Jean Echenoz)

In this chapter, I examine how Jean Echenoz transforms and repurposes popular genres—specifically crime fiction and the war novel--in subtly political manners. Through readings of Echenoz’s (anti-)mystery novel A Year (1997) and his short war novel 1914 (2012), I show how Echenoz smuggles biopolitical and spectral problematics into his works, enlarging the conceptual scope of popular story forms and genre fictions. My reading of Echenoz positions him not as a writer that brings us back to the pleasures of story, but rather as a writer who demonstrates how we can alter the generic conventions and narrative strategies of popular violent fiction in order to account for biopolitical exclusion and mediated phantom pain. Echenoz is thus a writer who shows us some ingenious strategies for rethinking the uses of forms and genres.

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.

Apocalypse and Post-History (Antoine Volodine)

This chapter examines the work of Antoine Volodine, which represents one of the most radical attempts to situate a literary project outside of any inscription in literary history, national or linguistic belonging, and authorial ownership. The chapter begins with a close reading of the historical, political, and aesthetic rhetoric of Volodine’s dystopian ‘romånce’ View of the Boneyard (1998). This analysis provides a precise textual reference to ground a broader reflection on the strategies of encryption and deployment of temporal paradoxes in Volodine’s invented aesthetic movement, ‘post-exoticism.’ The conclusion of this chapter argues that Volodine’s work represents less a post-formalist repoliticization of literature than an expression of radical intransitivity, a concept that has become synonymous with formalist excess, with that mid-century French theory that the ‘return to the story’ was supposed to supplant, but which I read as a direct challenge to reductive literary histories and cultural geographies. I thus argue that Volodine is a writer who uses the dreamscapes of dystopian political fiction to perform paradoxes and explore a radically open conception of literary voice and meaning.

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.