Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names (review)

This is a thorough and well-executed study of the works of Pierre Michon, and the first monograph in English devoted exclusively to his works. It is both a good introduction to Michon and a valuable contribution to the existing scholarship. Crowley rightly underlines that although the existing studies are alive to Michon’s continual questioning of literature’s past and, in particular, of the literary and theoretical avantgarde of the 1960s and 1970s, they only go as far as positioning the author’s works as a response to this legacy. Rather than just establishing parallels or oppositions between Michon’s writing and the avant-garde, Crowley proposes to track the author’s consistent incorporation of avant-garde thought into his works. Particular attention is paid to the tail-end of the movement and to the emergence in French literature and criticism — involving figures such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault — of new, hybrid forms of text and a return to referentiality. Crowley focuses especially on Michon’s engagement with Barthes’s concern with notions of authorship, referent and intertextuality. Putting such notions at play, Michon’s work is shown not to be a simple, unproblematized return to referentiality and to life-writing, but a complex poetical project in which Barthes’s question ‘qui parle?’ remains ever present. Particularly insightful is Crowley’s study of the narrator’s voice as a composite and unstable ‘je’ in a fundamentally intertextual rhetoric that is reminiscent of Barthes’s autobiography in terms of its combination of theory, the imaginary and the referential. A crucial part of Crowley’s focus is devoted to the referential horizon of Michon’s texts, which proliferate with names of people and places, and traces vouchsafing for their reality. Crowley deals very neatly with the abstruse quality of Michon’s treatment of the referent by elucidating the vital tension between his commitment to the reality of the referent and his endless pursuit of that same referent within language and narrative. More specifically, Crowley examines Michon’s transformation of a trace into a textual trace whose inscription in the rhetoric of literature renders it unstable, undermining its referentiality and leading to further uncertainty. Like traces, names are also the object of transformation in Michon’s works: Michon’s project, as considered by Crowley and as the title of his book suggests, is an interrogation of how names, whether those of obscure individuals from the author’s provincial past or of great artists, can be resurrected, transformed or simply allowed to live on independently in the written word. Crowley’s study is most compelling when examining Michon’s frequent loans from other writers and his reworking of their texts; these are not only well documented but contribute substantially to Crowley’s contention that Michon’s invocation of great writers and artists is also an interrogation of his own relationship with literature and of the possibility for a transformation of his own name into that of an Author.