Le Nouveau Roman en questions, 3: Le Créateur et la Cité, and: Le Nouveau Roman en questions, 4: Situation diachronique (review)

These two volumes in this landmark series devoted to nouveau roman studies do not disappoint, maintaining the consistently high standards of scholarship and originality. The essays collected in Le Créateur et la Cité address the relationship between the nouveau roman and 'history' in the second half of the twentieth century, a hitherto rather neglected topic, as a result of the critical emphasis on a formalist aesthetic. The contributors examine the extent to which Simon, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Duras and Beckett (the last two fully recruited into the nouveau roman camp throughout this series, although Christiane Blot-Labarrère's 'Marguerite Duras et le "nouveau roman"' presents a more subtle analysis of the troubled relationship) were involved in diverse forms of 'political' activity, which place them as historical actors, although clearly not in an overtly engagé manner. According to Allemand, it is the decision to endorse unequivocally the Manifeste des 121 (1960) which requires the question to be re-examined, despite their (literary) repudiation of Sartrean commitment. Madeleine Borgomano's account of Duras is particularly nuanced in this respect: the non-declarative textual complexities of her writing can be considered as a fundamentally subversive manœuvre, mirroring social disintegration. For Bernard Valette, Michel Butor's linguistic freedom is a socio-ideological gesture which celebrates the autonomy and authenticity of the self. In both Christian Milat's alchemical reading of Robbe-Grillet's Djinn (1981) and Marie-Miguet Ollagnier's Christian-mythological account of Pinget's L'Apocryphe (1980), the multiplication of explicit and implicit cultural reference points function as means of self-transcendence and textual invention: these are texts which rely on quotation as a transgressive reading strategy. The essays collected in Situation diachronique offer an especially pertinent confrontation with the very notion of a 'nouveau roman' itself: Allemand's 'Débuts et fins du "Nouveau Roman"' is an impressive survey of the modalities of a supposedly collective enterprise; the ambiguous situations of Butor and Pinget within the corpus is the focus of two contributions; Christian Milat's outstandingly comprehensive analysis of Robbe-Grillet's writing concludes that he is 'le dernier écrivain' of the nouveau roman, while Johann Faerber demonstrates convincingly the degree to which the self-referentiality of these writers constitutes a baroque aesthetic. It is to be applauded that other essays in the volume are devoted to 'minor' works which have not yet received much attention (for example, Jean Ricardou's Révolutions minuscules and Claude Ollier's Marrakech Medine). In particular, the existence of a 'carnet critique' will be welcomed by all scholars, as it contains detailed reviews of some fifteen recently published critical studies, in addition to a list of theses, books, articles and internet sites of general interest.