Fuzzy Fictions (review)

This survey of contemporary novelists Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Éric Chevillard, Marie Redonnet, Antoine Volodine and François Bon rests on an analogy drawn with a concept in set theory and logic, namely ‘fuzziness’. In mathematics, the term refers to the way elements in a set can belong to it in some degree, rather than in simple binary yes/no terms. The mathematical analogy is of limited value to a study of literature, given that language use naturally allows for the articulation of gradation, in ways not accommodated in standard mathematical models. If fuzzy logic allows mathematics to incorporate shades of grey, nuance and ambiguity are fundamental to literary language. Thus, as with so many literary-critical applications of scientific concepts (the Heisenberg principle and sorite sequences are other references for Hippolyte), ‘fuzziness’ in a literary context quickly morphs in this study into something rather, well, fuzzier: a more general-purpose ‘vagueness’ that lacks hermeneutic force and so serves Hippolyte’s intelligent individual readings poorly. Contingency, ephemerality, chaos, exhaustion, epistemological uncertainty—these are the forms that contemporary narrative ‘fuzziness’ takes. The entropic tendencies of Toussaint (the best fit for Hippolyte’s project, his scien-tifically knowing work opens the survey), Redonnet’s ‘obituary of fiction’, Chevil-lard’s cultivation of the carnivalesque, Volodine’s ‘aesthetics of deception’, Bon’s polyphonic accounts of a depersonalizing post-industrial landscape—these are all mapped in detailed, thoughtful readings the impact of whose observations is inevitably compromised when they are funnelled into such a vague common denominator. (And however problematic ‘vagueness’ may be as an object of study, it is much more so as a methodology.) With this dilution of ‘fuzziness’ into uncertainty and vagueness, questions around the delimitation of the corpus arise, and the Conclusion’s whistle-stop invocation of Deville, Quignard, Oster, Desbiolles, Apperry, Reyes and Lenoir in the course of 10 pages (along with a sketch of post-Cold-War politics) seems to acknowledge the somewhat arbitrary nature of Hippolyte’s choice of fuzzy practitioners. Even the focus on the last few decades seems questionable when Hippolyte defines as the period’s common denominator the way ‘contemporary writers have made peace with the fact that there can only be some degree of truth, that truth is inherently fuzzy and that comprehensiveness (total knowledge) and nihilism (the absence of knowledge) necessarily mark the two opposite ends of the poet’s world-view’ (p. 236). Perhaps, it is in order to present such articulations of limited human understanding as a specifically contemporary phenomenon that Hippolyte hangs them on a relatively recent development in mathematics. His invocations of recent political history (the Bush ‘war on terror’; Le Pen’s second-round qualification in the 2002 French presidential elections) seem to have the same purpose. There are, no doubt, as Hippolyte claims, connections, reactions and contrasts interweaving these politicians’ simplistic narratives both with the longer political contexts from which they emerge and with the way literature has responded to those contexts, but these links are infinitely more complex—fuzzier, indeed—than his broad-brush contextual sketches allow. Tied to vague yet constraining scientific and political intertexts, Hippolyte’s readings are considerably more convincing, taken separately than as the fuzzy sum of their parts.