Jacques Jouet and the Literature of Exhaustion

In the last two decades, Jacques Jouet has patiently constructed one of the most astonishing bodies of work in contemporary French literature. During that time, he has published some 40 volumes in a variety of literary genres. By turn a poet, a novelist, a playwright, a short story writer, an essayist, a lexicographer, and a member of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo), Jouet never seems to rewrite himself--and such a consideration alone would serve to distinguish him from many of his peers. As diverse as they otherwise may be, one finds in each of Jouet's books a vast literary curiosity, a deep impulse toward innovation, and a will to test the possibilities of literature through the elaboration of what may appear in retrospect to be an evolving catalogue of the various forms available to a writer today. In short, Jacques Jouet is an experimentalist in the noblest sense of that word, a writer whose work comes to us fresh, each book a "new" book, all of them clearly the product of a literary imagination animated by a keen, ludic intelligence. Having followed his work closely for many years, I also believe it is legitimate to suggest that Jouet is a man of letters (as antiquated as that term may sound to our postmodern ear). He belongs thus to a species that is gravely endangered in our time and latitude; and consequently it is in an ecological spirit, conservationist but not conservative, that I shall present this account of his work.

In an influential essay first written in 1967 and much-anthologized since, John Barth offered some remarks on what he called "the literature of exhausted possibility," or "the literature of exhaustion" (Barth 64). Taking as his principal touchstones Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges, Barth examined the hypothesis, current at that time--and in ours, too, plus ça change--that the novel is coming to the end of its possibilities as a literary form:

Suppose you're a writer by vocation--a "print-oriented bastard," as the McLuhanites call us--and you feel, for example, that the novel, if not narrative literature generally, if not the printed word altogether, has by this hour of the world just about shot its bolt, as Leslie Fiedler and others maintain. I'm inclined to agree, with reservations and hedges. Literary forms certainly have histories and historical contingencies, and it may well be that the novel's time as a major art form is up, as the "times" of classical tragedy, Italian and German grand opera, or the sonnet-sequence came to be. No necessary cause for alarm in this at all, except perhaps to certain novelists, and one way to handle such a feeling might be to write a novel about it. (71-72)

Barth describes his own works, such as The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, as "novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author" (72), arguing that in a period of exhaustion the novel turns back upon itself, imitates and parodies itself, offering a funhouse-mirror image of what we imagined that literary form to be.

In Jacques Jouet's work, genre reflects upon itself in ways that are fundamentally similar to the ones Barth describes, for in each of the expressive modes that Jouet adopts, he plays boldly with generic protocol and convention, subtly but firmly putting literary tradition into question. Yet the sort of "exhaustion" that one notes in his writing is perhaps more closely akin to an idea expressed by one of Jouet's fellow Oulipians, Georges Perec. In a piece written for Le Figaro in 1978 entitled "Notes sur ce que je cherche," Perec spoke about another kind of literary exhaustion: "If I try to define what I've tried to do since I became a writer, the first idea that comes to my mind is that I've never written two similar books, that I've...