Qu'est-ce qu'un espace littéraire? (review)

No mere set of loosely related essays, this useful collaborative volume offers a well-balanced collection of responses to the question posed by its title. The definitions of literary space put forward cover a wide range of literary texts and cultural documents – from Classical Rome (Juvenal) or Gabon (the mvett epics), through French literature of the 17^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries, up to works by the Mexican writers Fuentes and Aguilar, or contemporary novels from South Africa, Mauritius, and Japan. The ten contributors all underscore the aptness of Blanchot's expression "literary space" for understanding the ways in which literature questions the foundations of social space, whether political or cultural. Several contributors also examine the ways in which writers engage their readers in collaborative projects whose range exceeds the rule-governed "fields" of activity studied by sociology, thus giving literary space its own cohesion. The volume is carefully structured around a set of questions, serving as sub-headings to its three sections: 1. Do individual texts give rise to a space of literature that is independent from them? 2. What links literary space to the spaces defined by geography, politics, sociology, or a people's imaginary? 3. Can literary space be conceived as a borderline between the aforementioned zones and thus as a way of bringing these into new working partnerships?

Beginning with the last question, the four essays devoted to it reply strongly in the affirmative. Valérie Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo begins her study of contemporary francophone Mauritian novels by arguing convincingly that the specificity of literary space comes in part from setting up relations between specific social groups and another realm beyond national boundaries (what Glissant terms the "Totality-World"). Because many francophone texts speak of one country but to another, by using a language whose sociolect transcends the territory in question, both this territory and the text's language are deterritorialized and become what Deleuze and Guattari have called a literature for future peoples. Such a "transnational detour" is illustrated by the works of Barlen Pyamootoo, Bertrand de Robillart, Amal Sewtohul and others that use the fantastic, Creole, or other techniques to anchor Mauritius as a place within an intertextual non-space. In his survey of Japanese novels from the 1990s that were translated into French, Marc Kober examines the ways in which the writers Ko Machida and Akasaka Mari tie their stories to a homogeneous space of globalized consumption. He notices several shared characteristics in these works: linear temporality is replaced by a series of points, each existing in the present; narratives explore the richness of certain details without hypothesizing an underlying order; space, and other details, become signs of consumerist living; mechanical sounds and bodily respiration occasionally eclipse verbal communication. As a result, recent Japanese fiction does not map out its own unique space but is instead invaded by other discourses, social practices, and the languages of cinema or animation. It affirms its specificity only through parodies of vacuous consumption. Maarten van Delden studies two Mexican novelists who have written about both the cultures of the United States (where they have lived) and of Mexico (where they settled). Van Delden shows that Ricardo Aguilar's A barlovento and Carlos Fuentes's La frontera de cristal not only examine the dual lives of frontier-crossers (by criticizing aspects of life on either side of the border), but that the frontier zone coincides with literature's ability to challenge our views of otherness. Whereas Aguilar's book stresses the differences between Northern (frontier) Mexico and the culture of Mexico City, Fuentes focuses on the tragedies that some frontier people endure because of the desire to emulate an imagined American lifestyle. Both authors, however, contest the view that frontiers are zones where national differences are diluted, and in this way they underscore the conflictual space in which their characters move.

The book's second section examines in more detail the ways in which literary space responds to political...