Pierre Bergounioux ed. by Guy Larroux, Yves Reboul (review)

“Le silence des pères au principe du ‘récit de filiation’” by Dominique Viart, who coined the term récit de filiation in 1996 and who has addressed other aspects of this question in other venues. He argues for a significant mutation in French literature between 1975 and 1984 during which texts focused more intently on realities beyond themselves, including the subject and his attempt to cope with issues of filiation, heritage, and flawed transmission. In this contribution he reflects on how some of these narratives marked by paternal silence can be viewed as attempts to reestablish frayed communal bonds. Although his is the final essay in the dossier, it might profitably be read first, to be followed by Laurent Demanze’s article investigating how the valuation of autonomy in modern and post-modern culture has led to the creation of characters who choose fragments of their inherited past to establish their identity. In these narratives, family memory is selectively appropriated and assumed individually rather than collectively. These two essays, broad in their reach, reflect on such writers as Pierre Michon, Annie Ernaux, Sylvie Germain, Jean Rouaud, Gérard Macé, Pierre Bergounioux, Michel Séonnet, Leïla Sebbar, Martine Sonnet, and Virginie Linhart, while the remaining articles focus on individual authors. Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge addresses the links between past and present, the disappearance of traces, and the attempt to liquidate heritage in Richard Millet’s La gloire des Pythre. Her discussion is equally attentive to the question of intertextual legacies and particularly to the Faulknerian resonances of the novel. Mathilde Barraband analyzes the narratives of Christian Prigent, particularly Demain je meurs. Prigent’s writing melds fiction with autobiographical content, extending the reflection to a broader family configuration that includes father, mother, but also grandmother. Avoiding a linear, unidirectional representation of individual human stories, Prigent explores the need to denounce the father as a means of achieving identity. Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe treats Réjean Ducharme’s Va savoir as a “récit de recyclage” in which the reconstruction of a house becomes part of the reconstruction of a family heritage . The novel emerges as a reflection on “les économies de l’héritage” that can help to explain the narrator’s relationship to both past and future. At a time when young writers in Quebec associated with La barre du jour and Les herbes rouges were forcefully rejecting their ancestors, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu was insisting on reclaiming legacies, although of his own choosing and on his own terms. Michel Biron reflects on this peculiar stance that underlies a series of books Beaulieu wrote on literary giants, in particular those on Melville and Joyce, in which Beaulieu projects himself into the life of Melville, especially his drive to write in spite of failure, and becomes equally absorbed by Joyce who emerges as the author whose linguistic creativity most fascinates him. Biron’s insight is that the most revealing pages in Beaulieu’s literary essays are those in which he denounces the faults and failures of these writers only to identify more closely with them. The volume provides insights into a noteworthy development in contemporary writing in France and Quebec. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Émile J. Talbot LARROUX, GUY, et YVES REBOUL, éd. Pierre Bergounioux. Toulouse: PU du Mirail, 2009. ISBN 978-2-8107-0066-0. Pp. 196. 22 a. By all accounts, Bergounioux, who began publishing in 1984, has until recently been more heard about and respected than actually read. As little as ten years 558 FRENCH REVIEW 85.3 ago, Reboul and Larroux note in their excellent avant-propos, Bergounioux was accorded scant attention by the scholarly community. Consider the following reference to him in a literary dictionary: “normalien, agrégé de lettres,” followed by a brief, perfunctory remark (6). The reason for this neglect may be as simple as Bergounioux’s work failing to fall into a convenient category. His writing is often an uneasy amalgam of fiction and essay, of storytelling and philosophizing. Yet while this mixture would appear to hearken back to the Enlightenment tradition of the conte philosophique and Bergounioux is certainly an admirer of this tradition, the philosophique aspect of Bergounioux’s contes...