Thresholds of Meaning: Passage, Ritual and Liminality in Contemporary French Narrative (review)

Thresholds of Meaning has the dual merit of providing excellent analyses of specific texts while at the same time offering an informative overview of the direction in which the study of contemporary French criticism is currently moving. Jean Duffy begins her study by pointing to the malaise that for several years has afflicted the scholarly view of today’s novels. Novelists as well as critics have thundered that rampant nombrilisme afflicts the contemporary novel, that the nouveau roman has had only a pernicious influence on France’s literary imagination, and that the obsession with form has created a fiction devoid of content. In a clearly argued Introduction Duffy demolishes these assumptions. She points to the impressive diversity of novels being published in France; she recognizes in passing that, while to some extent the nouveau roman was a triumph of cultural advertising, uniting under a somewhat leaky umbrella a rather disparate crew of writers, the theory and practice associated largely with Les Éditions de Minuit had a bracing and ultimately positive effect on a variety of contemporary authors who, following in the wake of artists such as Claude Simon, Michel Butor, and Nathalie Sarraute, ‘locate at the centre of their concerns the process by which man extracts meaning from and imposes meaning on experience’ (p. 17). If, for Duffy, the search for meaning outweighs purely technical experimentation in these nouveaux romanciers, this priority is also evident in the contemporary novelists she focuses upon: Marie Darrieussecq, Hélène Lenoir, Laurent Mauvignier, François Bon, Pierre Bergounioux, and Jean Rouaud. Consequently, her approach is strongly thematic, with a broad concentration in each chapter on rituals of passage and liminality, ‘a state in which the capacity for change, for inventiveness and communion is maximized, where the polluting and dangerous properties associated with it can be productively harnessed to effect social critique’ (p. 25). Yet if rituals of passage and liminality are the overarching concerns, each chapter is informed by critical materials borrowed largely from the social sciences. Thus Chapter 1 reflects recent scholarship on illness narrative and the history of death in the Occident; Chapter 2 draws on research on the roles played by silence, small talk, and gossip in human interaction. Chapter 3 makes use of memory studies, and the fourth (final) chapter references work done on the history of the family photograph. This interdisciplinary approach results in rich and original readings that demonstrate, among other things, that the contemporary literary text is hardly an exercise in self-absorption and rarely a work of pure fiction. More often than not it combines an uneven mixture of fantasy, auto-fiction, biography, and history in order to tell a compelling story. Simply in terms of its analyses of individual texts, Thresholds of Meaning makes a valuable contribution to the study of the contemporary novel, but the non-specialist would also be interested by the Introduction, whose survey of the novel from the postwar period to the present shows that scholarly assumptions about today’s fiction are changing for the better.