Le ‘Nouveau Roman’ en questions 7: vers une ruine de l’écriture? 2 by Johan Faerber (review)

The idea of the nouveau roman as ‘une ruine de l’écriture’ is one eminently justified by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s claim that ‘Nous écrivons désormais, joyeux, sur des ruines ’ (Les Derniers Jours de Corinthe (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1994), p. 17). It also goes a long way towards answering Nelly Wolf ’s condemnation, in Une littérature sans histoire (Geneva: Droz, 1995), of the nouveau roman for its blindness to history. The case is most fully made by the volume’s editor, Johan Faerber, who provides a Preface, an Introduction, an Avant-propos to each of its three sections, a Conclusion, and three of the eleven articles. His core argument is that the nouveau roman is ‘l’enfant des ruines’ (p. 7), a response to the date charnière of 1945 that revealed a certain idea of literature, a certain sort of humanism, and a certain set of literary conventions both as having being ruined by historical events and as requiring further ruining by literary means. If war and destruction are rarely depicted directly in the nouveau roman, its writing may be seen as a reaction to a landscape of ruins that become the ‘chantier’ (p. 15) for a new literature. Of course, the nouveau roman was not alone in this response: the work of Sartre or Jean Cayrol can be described in just such terms, but they are not mentioned here. Nevertheless, the notion of nouveau roman is expanded to include Marguerite Duras’s late Emily L. (1987) and her play Savannah Bay, which are the subject of two of the volume’s articles (by Simona Crippa and Camille Deltombe respectively). Similarly, the critical concept of ruin prompts a thematically tangential reading (by Yann Mevel) of the treatment of night in Samuel Beckett’s œuvre. W. G. Sebald and Éric Chevillard are discussed in two further articles (by Allan Diet and Marie-Odile André) as inheritors of the nouveau roman; and Sebald is illuminatingly compared with Claude Simon by Diet. Within a more strictly defined corpus of nouveaux romanciers, Aline Marchand offers a fine account of Robert Pinget, whose work identifies ‘tics de langage’ and ‘crampes de pensée’ as ‘[de] véritables stigmates d’idéologies en ruines’ (p. 47) and whose narrator is a mere ‘bafouilleur’ (p. 52). Pierre Verdrager documents the critical reception of Nathalie Sarraute, portrayed in the press as the destroyer of an authentic literature. And in a rewarding discussion of Simon (the best candidate for the topic of ruin, given his obsessive revisiting of episodes from the two world wars), Laurent Demanze reads the work as a form of ‘écriture mélancolique’ (p. 133), where, ‘avec ses hésitations et ses repentirs, son désordre et ses ratures’, writing is a perpetual ‘inscription de l’archive’ (p. 140) and the texts a symbolic enactment of funeral rites left incomplete from the past. Despite the fuzziness of the corpus, Faerber’s volume makes an entirely convincing case for asserting that ‘le “Nouveau Roman” ne doit pas se lire comme un formalisme mais au contraire comme le règne absolu de l’informe ’, figuring ruins as ‘[l’]apogée de l’informe: ce moment où la forme n’est plus, [pour devenir] un passage’ (p. 144).