L’Imaginaire spectral de la littérature narrative française contemporaine by Jutta Fortin et Jean-Bernard Vray (review)

The variety of authors, genres, and art forms studied across the nineteen essays in this volume is testament to the wide-reaching application of theories of hauntology. As with any collection, readers will find some contributions more relevant than others, but worthy of note for all are the two interviews with writer-cum-visual artists Alain Fleischer and Jean-Christophe Bailly, which not only complement the critical essays (a number of which analyse their work) but are valuable theorizations of spectrality in their own right. The essays themselves are separated into five themed sections. Two analyses of spectres of twentieth-century atrocities across a number of texts set the tone of the first, ‘Revenances de l’Histoire’, with a third contribution on the œuvre of Yves Ravey, and a fourth that compares Pierre Guyotat’s Coma, Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. This section also reproduces a beautifully written article by Ravey first published in Le Monde in 2008, ‘L’Écrivain expulsé du paysage’, about writing as an expression of memory. The second section explores how art and literature interact to create spectres, with contributions on the texts and art of Jean Le Gac, photography in literature and other art forms, cinema in Didier Daeninckx’s Les Figurants and Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder, and, finally, an essay on digital art — the 3D video Revenances by Grégory Chatonsky. The essays in ‘De la précarité des spectres’ and ‘Apparitions/disparitions’, the third and fourth sections, are individually interesting, but the groupings seem somewhat arbitrary. Contributors discuss a wide range of authors and works, including Jacques Roubaud; Emmanuel Carrère’s Un roman russe; Anne-Marie Garat; Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, and Sartre; Annie Ernaux’s Les Années and Henry Bauchau’s Le Boulevard périphérique; and Marie NDiaye’s Un temps de saison. In the final section, ‘Revenance des formes’, there is a return to the coherence of the earlier chapters, with contributions on spectral language in Pierre Michon’s œuvre, cinematic structures in the literature of Tanguy Viel, and intertextuality as a type of spectrality in Camille Laurens’s Ni toi ni moi. The number of texts covered in the volume certainly speaks to the enduring importance of spectres in French narrative literature, as the editors claim, and the essays as a whole have much to say about spectrality in the relationship between literature and other art forms, especially in light of the interviews, which draw together a number of threads within the collection in terms of this relationship. As a more general commentary on the state of spectres in French narrative literature, however, there are—maybe inevitably with so wide a field of study—noticeable gaps. In particular, the analyses of the often mentioned atrocities of the twentieth century barely touch on France’s own legacy of colonial oppression. Yet the occasional evocation of films such as Indigènes and critics such as Homi Bhabha means that it is ever present at the margins of the text, and creates of the colonial past what could, perhaps, be called the collection’s own spectre.