Présences du passé dans le roman français contemporain (review)

This collection of articles considers the use of the historical by novelists writing between 1980 and the present. As the title suggests, these authors share a subjective approach to history in which past events are no longer seen as distant events but rather become vehicles for a dialogue between past and present. The volume is divided into five sections: an introduction providing the requisite literary background; three central sections dealing respectively with the treatment of twentieth-century events by selected authors, the use made of events from the previous century by a further group of authors and representational issues of relevance to such writers; and a short conclusion. Thus considerable ground is covered in a study which will be of interest to serious students of the modern French novel. In the excellent introduction Dugast-Portes, discussing the nouveau roman, demonstrates convincingly that attitudes to history had already started to change prior to 1975 and Viart provides a masterly summary of subsequent developments, identifying four new types of historical fiction which have emerged recently. Thereafter, although the majority of the contributions are well researched and informative, there is a considerable variation in quality and style. In the twentieth-century section, Douzou provides a perceptive account of the tension between official history and individual memory which underlies Salvayre’s Vichy-based novel La Compagnie des spectres and Rubino writes lucidly on Rolin’s original use of historical sources in his trilogy inspired by the events of May 1968, Port-Soudan, Méroé and Tigre en papier. Minucci’s comparison of two novels set in the Communist era, Salvaing’s Parti and Bouillot’s Nous arrêterons le soleil, is, however, less persuasive, being somewhat long on storytelling and short on analysis. In the next section Cordiner’s discussion of Cathala’s Le Théorème de Marmouset, ou la langue (peu) tranchante du Léviathan, highlights the work’s postmodernity in erudite but prolix terms. In contrast, Scaiola demonstrates succinctly how Rambaud, in his Napoleonic trilogy La Bataille, Il neigeait and L’Absent, combines discontinuity and genre mixing to create a new kind of historical truth and Bevilacqua’s concise article on Rouaud’s L’Imitation du bonheur concludes that this complex work, while paying tribute to tradition, questions the novel-writing process. In the section on modes of representation, which lacks the chronological coherence of its predecessors, Tamassio’s essay on Michon’s use of literary devices is illuminating but the remaining two pieces are less well conceived. Whereas Tamburini is to be commended for contributing to the neglected area of narrative tense usage, her article is limited in scope, being confined to two authors, Michon and Quignard, and two tenses, the present and the passé simple. Vray goes to the other extreme, providing a very broad overview of the role of photography in the contemporary novel, a well-worn topic on which he has little to say that is new. The study, then, while containing much of value, is somewhat uneven in character and is therefore to be dipped into rather than to be read from cover to cover.