Thresholds of Meaning: Passage, Ritual, and Liminality in Contemporary French Narrative by Jean H. Duffy (review)

Reviews 219 Duffy, Jean H. Thresholds of Meaning: Passage, Ritual, and Liminality in Contemporary French Narrative. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84631-666-1. Pp. 356. $95. As described by Arthur Van Gennep in Les rites de passage (1909), the cohesion of social groups rides on the institution of rituals through which individuals traverse a threshold or limen separating one collectively-sanctioned state or role from another. Cut off from the group, the candidate enters an in-between space associated with danger and ambiguity—but also, following Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1974), with the creativity of communitas—before reentering the group under a new guise. If the relevance of this anthropological paradigm for the study of contemporary novels is not immediately apparent, argues Duffy, it is perhaps because we continue to labor under formalist assumptions of the nouveau roman. Steering readers’ attention away from the reflexivity and distancing trumpeted by Robbe-Grillet and Ricardou, and toward motifs and themes induced by moments of life-change, Duffy ventures to uncover the means by which narratives harness the “investigation of form” to “the fictional investigation of the human aspiration to signify”(17). The six writers brought together here—Marie Darrieussecq, Hélène Lenoir, Laurent Mauvignier, François Bon, Jean Rouaud, and Pierre Bergounioux—are nonetheless every bit the children of the nouveau roman. Like their forebears Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon, whose legacy Duffy vigorously reaffirms, these contemporaries display in their writing a “compulsive regularity”(13).Witness the generational obsessions on view in Rouaud’s five-volume Loire-Inférieure cycle, the recurrence of themes of maternity, filiation, language, and loss in Darrieussecq, or the abiding concern with social class, place, and labor in Bon. Also uniting these bodies of work is a concern with the disappearance of loved ones and the concomitant failure to communicate. Sarraute’s sous-conversation lurks behind every family encounter, as we learn of Lenoir’s haunting, inconclusive La folie Silaz; in such ceremonious situations as funerals, the ideal of meaningful exchange routinely recedes into idle chatter and awkward compensatory behaviors. Ritual appears all the more central to contemporary novels for the fact that structurally , the texts hew to a “precisely delimited and constrained diegetic temporality” (16) wherein change of status propels characters to make sense of the signs, speech, and faces around them.Across four chapters focused on three novels apiece, Thresholds explores distinct thematic clusters: physical illness as an acute form of “life-course disruption” (31) that precipitates marital breakdown; bereavement, whose functioning in traditional milieus is strained to the breaking point by suicide; the role of family heritage, local and national histories in acts of commemoration; and, finally, the attempt to connect with the past through family photographs and other documents. This broad scope pushes the author to set forth with each new chapter a new paradigm and literature review, to varying effect. If Erving Goffman’s notion of ‘saving face’ is astutely brought to bear on Bon’s L’enterrement, Mauvignier’s Loin d’eux and Bergounioux’s La maison rose in chapter 2, the link in chapter 3 between Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire and the subsequent readings of Darrieussecq’s magical-realist Le pays appears less certain.Throughout,however,the author calls to attention the ways in which, through effects of focalization, polyphony, repetition, and syntax, the narratives at hand problematize and particularize the rituals they depict (discussion of Bon’s Mécanique, centered on the narrator’s technology-obsessed father, is a fine example). Further shielding Duffy from charges of social-scientific reductionism is a lengthy conclusion foregrounding the ‘passage à l’écriture’ as a ritual experience itself. Accessibly written, this book will be valued by readers who seek a vantage point on the contemporary French novel that goes beyond the shibboleths of postmodernism, minimalism, and les écritures de soi. Conceived as part of social process, writing rightly emerges as a mediating term between individual aspiration and collective constraints. Johns Hopkins University (MD) Derek Schilling Fraisse, Luc. La petite musique du style: Proust et ses sources littéraires. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-8124-0270-8. Pp. 697. 49 a. Fraisse’s book...