Romans à contraintes (review)

Roman à contraintes is essentially an anthology of critical pieces of varying length published originally between 1991 and 2002. The range of coverage is wide: eleven mostly late twentieth- or early twenty-first-century writers discussed in a 190-page volume. Part 1 comprises an introduction to Jean-Benoît Puech's work situating it briefly in relation to that of his literary and theoretical mentors, Louis-René des Forêts and Gérard Genette, and three subsections considering the relationship between text and peritext, the paradoxical play between narrative voice and pronominal use, and the topos of the found manuscript. Part 2 examines the use of analogy as constraining principle: in Jean Paulhan's Le Guerrier appliqué the banality of the analogies expresses the astonishment of the protagonist and the comparatist reflex that his disorientation triggers; in Claude Ollier's La Mise en scène, analogy is a stage on the way to the 'mot juste'; close reading of an extract from José Lezama Lima's Paradiso reveals the dynamic interaction between intergenerational conflict and the structural exploitation of metaphor. Part 3 investigates the tension between subject and 'constraint', focusing on the presence of a 'narrateur maniaquement anonyme' in Robert Pinget's Le Libéra (p. 119), the play between overstated pastiche and literary hoax in Jean Lahougue's Comptine des Height and La Doublure de Magrite, and grammatextuality and typography in Raymond Federman's Amer Eldorado. Part 4 claims that what Baetens calls the 'prose prosaïque' of Bernard Colin and Ernst Junger (p. 147) calls into question the distinction between constraint and non-constraint. Part 5 explores the compatibility of the 'hors-sujet' (here, digression and citation) and constraint in Jacques Roubaud's Poésie and Renaud Camus's Vaisseaux brûlés, and examines the impact of electronic media on writing practice. Among the volume's qualities, I would cite the following: the analysis of Puech brings into focus a body of work that has been overshadowed by the author's relationship with des Forêts; the sections on Paulhan, Ollier and Lezama Lima complement each other and offer suggestive insights into their work; Baetens revives usefully the question of the heritage of the nouveau roman; the topic of the 'roman à contrainte' is potentially very rich. However, despite the efforts to establish overarching thematic links, the essays remain autonomous units within an anthology and the principles underlying the inclusion of authors are not always clear: in particular, the presence of Colin's Perpétuel voyez Physique and Junger's Jardins et Routes is surprising. The introduction is brief and, though it promises 'de nouveaux éléments à une théorie générale de la contrainte' (p. 12), I would have welcomed fuller argument to support some of the book's assertions. Ricardou, Magné, Lejeune, Barthes and Genette are mentioned, but the implications of this contextualization are not pursued. This is especially regrettable in the case of Genette, given Puech's collaboration with him and Baetens's — fully justified — insistence on the latter's status as an author who is theoretically 'averti'. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, Baetens can be commended for tackling a difficult subject and a number of under-researched authors.