Sylvie Germain devant le mystère, le fantastique, le merveilleux: actes du colloque de l’IMEC en partenariat avec l’université de Caen (18–19 octobre 2012) ed. by Alain Goulet (review)

Sylvie Germain’s haunting narrative voice informs her prodigious literary output with a powerful and elusive spirit of the otherworldly. Author of novels, essays, meditations, biography, and reflections on art and artists, she is a major force in contemporary French studies, as is confirmed by the growing number of monographs, collections, and articles on her works. Germain also actively participates in critical discussions of her writings through interviews and attendance at colloquia. This collection of twelve essays from a conference celebrating the establishment of her archives at the Abbaye de l’Ardenne illustrates her generous engagement in that its postface contains an illuminating in-depth interview with the author. Alain Goulet’s Introduction offers a succinct overview of the contributors’ explorations of the ‘inexplicable’ in Germain’s work, adumbrated as the mysterious, the fantastic, and the marvellous. The fact that no systematic attempts are made to circumscribe the three major themes is both positive and negative. On the one hand, the volume avoids narrow categorizations that would be counter-productive in assessing Germain’s poetically rich style and philosophical questions foregrounding the unsaid, the invisible, and the mysterious. On the other hand, the collection suffers at times from a lack of focus, an overlapping of themes, and a tendency to concentrate primarily on the novels. This quibble aside, many of the essays introduce new vistas in Germain scholarship. Several contributors seek to situate Germain’s unique concerns intertextually: in dialogue with Barbey d’Aurevilly and Georges Bernanos (Marie-Hélène Boblet) and also with Victor Hugo’s ‘Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre’ (1855) (Goulet). Laurent Demanze probes the spectrality of Germain’s writing through the lens of Foucault’s ‘fantastic library’, thereby establishing a literary genealogy for her works from Flaubert to Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, Pascal Quignard, and others. Points of tangency, flow, and fulguration are recurring terms in Germain’s fiction as noted by Toby Garfitt, who links her work to Simone Weil’s and Vladimir Jankélevitch’s singular attempts to make contact with the transcendent. In other areas of study, the novel Hors-champ (Paris: Michel, 2009) is analysed by Milène Moris-Stefkovic for its cinematographic techniques that stage the meeting point between the visible and the invisible. Valérie Michelet Jacquod examines the notion of ‘off-camera’, both in the novel of the same title (Hors-champ) and Magnus (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), to reference Germain’s use of spatiality as voids in the texts; these voids serve as markers of literature’s attempt to re-problematize lived experience as a series of potential meanings to be made by the reader. In a parallel consideration of the notion of ‘hors-temps’ in several texts, Évelyne Thoizet studies Germain’s representations of extra-temporality as fantasy. In the concluding interview, Germain addresses the fascinating yet appropriate paradox of her lack of archives (she does not save successive versions of her texts) in her gift to IMEC, leading to a reconsideration of the archival as memory traces within the final versions of her published works. An impressive bibliography as well as abstracts in English and in French of each of the essays complete the volume, making it an indispensable addition to Germain scholarship.