Reader-Investigators in the Post-Nouveau Roman: Lahougue, Peeters, and Perec
1997; Columbia University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2688-5220
Autores Tópico(s)Renaissance Literature and Culture
ResumoIt is not impossible to imagine ... a novel whose fiction would be exciting enough so that the reader intensely felt the desire to know its last word which precisely, at the last minute, would be denied to him, the text pointing to itself and towards a rereading. The book would be thus, a second time, given to the reader who could then while rereading it, discover everything in it which in his first mad fever he had been unable to find. Benoit Peeters, Agatha Christie: Une ecriture de la lecture (177). I. Toward a post-Nouveau Roman detective novel A trend that I will characterize as the post-Nouveau Roman detective novel may be distinguished in the current French scene.(1) A new narrative hybrid form is being developed which partakes of both the mystery story and the early Nouveau Roman.(2) Novels of the first phase of the Nouveau Roman, particularly Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes, Butor's L'Emploi du temps and Ollier's La Mise en scene, as well as a Nouveau Nouveau Roman like Ricardou's Les Lieux-dits, used detective-story structures. Although they played with some traits of mystery fiction, they did not fully belong to the detective genre. They were parodies, metafictions, or anti-detective novels, but not proper detective stories. Likewise, thirty years later, a significant number of novels by authors as different as Modiano, Echenoz, Belleto, or Roubaud, draw from the detective model without entirely following the rules of the game.(3) As opposed to current representatives of the genre,(4) the Nouveau Roman policier and the post-Nouveau roman policier recycle generic characteristics by means of innovative textual strategies.(5) Perec calls his > a literary thriller (Bellos 710) and, to use an expression from the text, La Doublure de Magrite can be defined as a feuilleton avant-gardiste (186). It is well known that the Nouveau Roman calls into question most of our expectations of what a narrative should be--in terms of plot, psychology, characters, logical and chronological series of sequences. However, its anti-representational or auto-representational effects, as Ricardou analyzed them at the time, are now fairly familiar to the postmodern reader : what used to be `writable' (scriptible) has since become a little more lisible.(6) Today, whether such narrative strategies are called self-reflexive, metatextual, metafictional or, preferably, metarepresentational,(7) post-Nouveau Roman detective novels use Nouveau Roman textual devices while returning to what might appear to be a more conventional way of story telling.(8) They offer the pleasures of reading (it is a clear return to the romanesque) and do not overtly subvert our expectations. Beneath their innocent surface, however, what supports these puzzles may be a very sophisticated network of infratextual as well as intertextual correspondences. Briefly, in these novels metarepresentational strategies are no longer deliberately anti-representational. Contemporary with the Nouveau Roman but distinct from it, Georges Perec's versatile work--shifting constantly from playful Oulipian mechanical exercises (along with Italo Calvino and Jacques Roubaud among others) to autobiographical and extraordinarily imaginative, often humorous, novels--has certainly anticipated this significant evolution, one that blends intricate specific textual constraints with a more representational narrative format. Although I would not agree with Tani that any interesting contemporary fiction takes more or less advantage of detective-novel techniques (149, 151), I don't deny that there may be a fundamental mystery or suspense in any nondetective novel per se (une forme fondamentale: see Boyer 74). …
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