Scènes d'intérieur: Six romanciers des années 1980-1990 (review)

This volume comprises six chapters, each devoted to selected texts by one of the featured authors, together with an introduction and conclusion situating them in a socio-cultural, political and literary context. That context includes: the post-68 dismantling of old certainties; the Mitterrand years; a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic France; a post-modern, post-feminist climate privileging the plurality of genres, voices and histories; a society increasingly dominated by the image and new communication technologies. The six authors are Philippe Toussaint, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Marie Redonnet, Linda Lê and Leïla Sebbar. Fauvel's treatment seeks to celebrate the richness of the 'post-nouveau roman' novel in France, with its return to History, to individual histories and to the subject. The way in which she gives coherence to her selection of such diverse authors is to identify three 'tendances' of the period, which signify a break with the concept of classic Literature. The first relates to novels influenced by the visual media, represented here by Toussaint, whose work is seen both to reveal and to critique the influence of new communication technologies on the individual and the contemporary world, and Duras, in an analysis of the irrepresentable in L'Amant by means of the absent photograph. Ernaux and Redonnet represent the second 'tendance': novels by women. Ernaux's Une femme and Journal du dehors are brought together in a discussion of the tension between memory and forgetting, in relation to the working class and the loss of the mother. The chapter on Redonnet rests on the status of utopia in the author's work. The third grouping relates to 'romans d'auteurs de cultures croisées'. Lê is analysed here as an immigrant writer whose characters attempt to affirm their identity in relation to two cultures, while the chapter on the Algerian-French writer, Sebbar, foregrounds her representation of a contemporary multi-ethnic France through a wide range of characters from ethnically mixed backgrounds, on the one hand, and a problematizing of the French language, on the other. Fauvel ends by emphasizing how the novels analysed focus on particularities rather than the universal, forging a micropolitics rather than working at the macrolevel, and how they require the reader to be an active co-creator of the text. Although the particular writers and texts chosen to represent these three 'tendances' are entirely appropriate, no real justification is provided for why they were chosen over equally representative others, or even any sense of whom those others might be. It is interesting that five out of the six writers chosen are women, but there is no comment on this. Ultimately, the book feels rather like a series of individual analyses, on which a contextual framework has been imposed in order to justify their collection into a book, rather than a choice of texts emerging from the exploration of a particular socio-cultural, political and literary period.