Robert Pinget: matériau, marges, écriture (review)

Based on a 2009 Paris colloquium devoted to the continuing contemporary significance of Robert Pinget's writing, this valuable collection of critical essays opens with three lengthy extracts from a fascinating abandoned Pinget novel entitled Psychophonie, the first posthumous publication since the author's death in 1997. The Pinget archive in the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet is thus beginning to bear fruit, and it is envisaged that the existence of this indispensable treasure trove of manuscripts will provoke a reappraisal of the extensive Pinget oeuvre for new generations of scholars of this most Beckettian and humorous of the nouveaux romanciers. Clothilde Roullier's chapter in particular presents a concerted analysis of the archive by clarifying both the biographical data and by charting the links between fiction and reality that can be detected across his work. In addition to revisiting many of the 'classic' Pinget texts and exploring his relationship with both Beckett and the wider nouveau roman, this volume contains refreshing insights into the whole range of his activities: Pinget's work for the stage is convincingly shown to be an outstanding example of 'postmodern theatre' in the innovative use of voice and place; and his poetic writing conveys the problematics of self and lyricism. The theme of marginality attracts the attention of several contributors: David Ruffel's 'Pinget queer', for instance, examines his work through the prism of his sexuality and the critical apparatus of queer studies (a hitherto neglected approach in nouveau roman criticism), and singles out L'Inquisitoire (1962) as a somewhat neglected politically and culturally subversive work that transgresses the existing orthodoxies in a prescient and 'revolutionary' manner. This volume should therefore be welcomed as a successful attempt to encourage a reassessment of Robert Pinget's importance in contemporary French writing.