Jacques Roubaud and the Ethics of Artifice

Jacques Roubaud’s multivolume prose cycle ‘Le grand incendie de Londres’ (1989–) has variously been termed a novel, a self-portrait, an autobiography, and a work of autofiction. Several factors contribute to this generic uncertainty: a long-standing suspicion, shared by critics and writers, of autobiography; Roubaud’s status as a member of the Oulipo, a group associated with formal artifice rather than referential writing; and Roubaud’s own equivocating or cryptic statements about ‘Le grand incendie de Londres’. Nevertheless, to label this complex work a fiction is to obscure its deep concern with the relationship between form and authenticity. This article argues that Roubaud’s explicitly stated principle of truth-telling (véridicité) generates a complex and paradoxical strategy, based on a form of sincerity that foregrounds itself as artifice and constraint. Framed in mathematical, philosophical and rhetorical terms, Roubaud’s theoretical pronouncements do not necessarily amount to a coherent conception of truth. However, they successfully provide the basis for a new type of autobiographical contract and for the creation of original narrative forms. Rhetorical artifice and Oulipian constraints provide the conditions for Roubaud’s investigation of memory and his ethical engagement with the reader.