The Comic World of Jacques Roubaud

The Comic World of Jacques Roubaud Susan Ireland A S A MEMBER OF THE OULIPO (the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), Jacques Rouband shares its conception of literature as a form of play and its interest in experimentation as a means of renewal. His two novels, La Belle Hortense and L ’Enlèvement d ’Hortense,1reflect this preoccupation with experimentation and por­ tray novel writing as a type of game. Their game structures take a variety of forms and are particularly apparent in the intertextual allusions, the metaliterary commentary, the relationship between author and reader, and the use of formal constraint. The storyline of both texts is based on a potential plot suggested in a novel by Raymond Queneau, Pierrot mon ami.1 In Queneau’s novel, a chapel is built on the edge of an amusement park—a suitably ludic loca­ tion—in memory of a Poldevian prince who died there. Roubaud articu­ lates his plot around these elements: in his novels, the discovery of oil under “ la place Quenleiff” (BH 85) has enriched the Poldevian dynasty; its princes are engaged in a struggle over succession to the throne, and the chapel is the scene of several key events. He playfully reveals his source, “ La Poldève-connection” (EH 61), and on several occasions urges his readers to read Pierrot mon ami. The borrowing of the basic elements of the plot indicates how Roubaud proceeds throughout the novels. Each episode is built around a mosaic of allusions to other writers and their works. Names like Boillault, Neuton and Inchtin, Jean-Yves Cousseau, Hotello, le comte de Monte-Cridzoï, and Spenser Friedman (an economist) derive from those of well-known figures in the real and fictional worlds. This use of carnivalized names parodies the postmodern practice of borrowing charac­ ters from other works and of introducing figures from the real world into the fictional universe. Many other allusions take the form of unat­ tributed quotations, which are often juxtaposed as in the combined quotation from Baudelaire and Rimbaud: “ Si ‘je’ est un autre, n’est-il pas Autre que toi, Lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère” (EH 12). The creation of such clearly recognizable composites points playfully to the text’s identity as an intertextual space. Besides the brief references to names and individual lines, entire 22 W in t e r 1991 I rela n d words appear in an irreverent new context. The Thirty-Nine Steps, for example, becomes a television program featuring popular music in which the thirty-nine steps represent positions in the weekly ratings (EH 162). Other texts play a more prominent role, particularly Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Roubaud draws attention to his rewriting of the novel when he alludes to Flaubert’s comment “ Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” He points out the obvious, that "Je Ne Suis Pas Madame Bovary,” then provides a comic explanation of the remark in the absurd syllogism: “ autrement dit, la belle Hortense n’est pas Madame Bovary, moi je ne suis pas la belle Hortense, et il s’ensuit que je ne suis pas Madame Bovary” (EH 82). Having set the tone of his new version, he subsequently portrays Hortense as a carnivalized Madame Bovary: her experience of marriage reflects that of Emma, whom she echoes when she comments “ c’était donc ça le mariage?” (EH 100); like Emma, she takes a lover, whom she meets in the sordid Flaubert Hôtel (EH 132). Once he has established the comic parallel between Hortense and Emma, Roubaud uses further references to Flaubert to give a ludic presentation of Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic and to make fun of the conventions of the realist novel. The title of Jim Wedderburn’s novel, Lady Bovary’s Lover, illustrates in a self-conscious manner the notion that a novel is formed of a dialogue with other texts. It is, comments Roubaud, an intertextual work, “ un roman-valise qui pourrait être signé D. H. Flowbert,” a work of fiction in which “ Lady Bovary n’a, avec aucune Bovary réelle, passée, présente, et peut-être future, aucune ressemblance” (EH 123). She is a purely fic­ tional character, but a Mrs. Bovary...