Warren Motte

Playing in Earnest

The relationship of the playful and the earnest is an intriguing question in the history of thought from antiquity to the present. Most of the time, those terms are taken to designate dispositions of spirit that are mutually exclusive ones, defining the two poles of a spectrum of attitudes, which may color our ways of being and doing but must never commingle. Symptomatically enough, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “earnest” (in its nominative form) as “Seriousness, serious intention, as opposed to jest or play,” clearly excluding it from any ludic vocation. Two features of that distinction might be noted in a preliminary manner. First, like many binary oppositions, it is characteristically advanced as being isotopical and balanced, yet closer inspection often reveals it to be hierarchical and top-heavy, insofar as the “earnest” is invested with meaning, importance, and value, while the “playful” is relegated to the domain of the trivial, the otiose, the supplementary. Second, many meditations on what might be called the “play concept” founder on the shoals of the earnest; that is, while they take considerable pains to persuade us of their own seriousness of purpose, the radical character of that opposition leads them to logical obstacles that prove very difficult to negotiate. Some of those meditations evince moreover a longing for another kind of thought, one in which play and seriousness converse more fluently. In short, the relationship of the playful and the earnest is a significantly vexed question, and like many vexed questions, it testifies to a persistent cultural malaise. In this essay I reflect upon that question, approaching it from three angles in an effort to determine what shapes it might assume. First, I examine the way it animates—and, at certain key points, distresses—the arguments of three powerful, influential, contemporary thinkers who have turned their attention toward the play concept. Second, I invoke three recent examples of literary practice wherein play and earnestness engage each other in productive, mutually illuminative ways. Finally, I offer some addenda, drawing upon my own experience as a critic, a teacher, and a reader.

Pierre Bayard's Wormholes

The recent work of Pierre Bayard is trenchant, original, and deeply engaging. From Qui a tue Roger Ackroyd? (1998) Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (2001) onward, Bayards books have piqued the interest of readers well beyond the limited circle of those who habitually consume French criticism and literary theory, and have served thus to expand the horizon of possibility of critical writing in significant ways. Bayard writes in a conditional, hypothetical mode, rather than a declarative one, keenly aware of how very mobile literary objects are. Bayard is not afraid to take risks, and he searches for new forms through a process of bold experimentation. He seeks moreover to enlist his reader in that quest, proposing a contract to him or her, one whose principal clauses are articulative and ludic. Fictional worlds are incomplete, he argues, and we readers must intervene in them in order to palliate that incompletion, through our interpretations. We accede to fictional worlds through wormholes, passages joining places that are thought to be unconnected. With this interventionist model, Bayard encourages us to reconsider the way that we read fiction, and also the way that we read critical writing. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol35/iss2/7 Pierre Bayard’s Wormholes Warren Motte University of Colorado Pierre Bayard, a professor of literature at the University of ParisVIII and a practicing psychoanalyst, occupies a rare position as a critic and a theorist, because he speaks to specialists and general readers alike. His recent work is trenchant, original, and deeply engaging. From Qui a tue Roger Ackroyd? (1998) Who Killed Roger Ackroyd (2001) onward, Bayard’s books have piqued the interest of readers well beyond the limited circle of those who habitually consume French criticism and literary theory and have served thus to expand the horizon of possibility of critical writing in significant ways. One might attempt to explain that phenomenon in a variety of manners, focusing upon issues of style, of subject, of interpretive strategy, or of legibility and accessibility. Chief among the many things that may keep one coming back to Bayard, the stance that he takes with regard to his own work is particularly refreshing. He writes in a conditional, hypothetical mode rather than a declarative one, keenly aware of how very mobile literary objects are, at their best. Bayard is not afraid to take risks, and he searches for new forms through a process of bold experimentation. He seeks moreover to enlist his reader in that quest, proposing a contract to him or her, one whose principal clauses are articulative and ludic. In short, in terms of mood and general approach, Bayard’s books display clear affinities with a certain strain of contemporary fiction. For practical purposes, one might call the latter the critical novel, that is, a novel that puts its own principles of construction on display; a novel that is aware of its own literary heritage; a novel that thematizes its own structure; a novel that invites its readers to take a critical position with regard to the material that it presents. 1 Motte: Pierre Bayards Wormholes Published by New Prairie Press

Naming and Negotiating

Abstract Throughout his career, J.M.G. Le Clézio has wagered upon the theme of cultural plurality, placing it on stage in his fiction in a variety of guises and causing it to perform in different ways. More than anything else, what that performance puts in evidence is the play of culture, that is, the manner in which cultures collide and put each other into question, each one emerging from that collision with reconfigured terms. That is the fundamental gesture of Le Clézios intercultural strategy, the deliberate, productive confrontation of different communities, different traditions, different worlds.

Nobody's Novel

In the novel, fictional characters may be thought of as the richest of signifiers. Traditionally, it is the character who mediates fictional worlds for our benefit, who calls out to us, engages our attention, and encourages us to inhabit those worlds, either briefly or in a more enduring manner. Yet character has become a very embattled and precarious topos in contemporary fiction. Marie Cosnays writing offers representations of humans that are especially thin, most particularly in Villa Chagrin (2006), which puts conventional notions of character on trial in strategic fashions.

Cela me regarde

Abstract In this article I shall trace the psychological and communicational circuit constituted by mirror scenes in contemporary literature, or more specifically scenes in which the subject confronts his or her own image in the mirror. I shall consider three types of mirror scenes: first, those scenes in which the subject sees and recognizes himself without any difficulty; second, those in which such recognition is arrived at with some difficulty; and finally, those in which the subject fails to recognize herself at all. There are many forces at play in these scenes, but all three types share one primary element: the manner in which literature reflects upon itself, continually posing the fundamental question “Who am I?”

On Interspecies Love and Canine Tauromachy: A Prolegomenon

My purpose in this paper is modest in dimension. I shall invoke Marie Nimiers novel, La Girafe, the story of a young zookeeper who falls deeply in love with one of his charges, a giraffe named “Hedwige.” I shall then turn toward a couple of texts by Jacques Roubaud, a sonnet and a novel, in which he invokes—with a great deal of affection—a German shepherd by the name of “Lucy.” Finally, I shall speak briefly about two recent Christine Montalbetti pieces, wherein she speaks about that very same “Lucy,” and introduces yet another dog, a young Welsh corgi named “Oscar.” Along the way, I shall offer some remarks about the little-known art of canine tauromachy, tailored especially for non-aficionados.

Antoine Volodine's Crossings

Antoine Volodines writing distinguishes itself by virtue of its ambitious scope, the originality of its vision, and the way that it resists conventional strategies of reading. Volodine imagines canny fictional worlds whose internal coherence is never in doubt, as strange as those worlds may seem when compared with our own. Characters in his novels are peripatetic, constantly in motion, as if mobility itself provided them with the surest guarantor of an otherwise dubious existence. They are always crossing frontiers, changing from one state to another, or migrating into new territories. No less important are the boundaries that loom on literatures horizon of possibility. For there, too, it is largely a question of crossings: from the real to the fictional, from the name to the heteronym, from the exotic to the postexotic, from a passive mode of reading to one that is necessarily far more critical.

L'Éternel et l'éphémère: Temporalités dans l'oeuvre de Georges Perec

Christelle Reggiani borrows her title from a remark that Georges Perec made in his lipogrammatic novel Les Revenentes (1972): ‘Je cherche en même temps l’éternel et l’éphémère’, and the kind of creative tension that Perec invokes animates her own study, as well. Pondering the ways that Perec attempts to account for time in his work, Reggiani often finds that the construct mutates, becoming something other than what one might expect. Upon occasion, Perec’s meditations propose that we step outside of time; elsewhere, there is the suggestion of a suspended time; elsewhere still, Perec reconfigures time as space. In other terms, this most slippery of notions serves Perec both as a category through which to organise meaning and as a point of weakness through which meaning necessarily escapes. Reggiani’s discussion of the proper name in Je me souviens discovers a referential opacity in Perec’s onomastics, and an intriguing oscillation between openness and hermeticism in that text. She brings to light another pressure point in Perec’s use of parentheses, one that puts into play both rupture and suture. In a reading of La Vie mode d’emploi, she argues that Perec’s use of formal constraint testifies not only to a theoretical interrogation, but also to one that is patently historical. In such a perspective, moreover, she urges us to understand constraint as something that promotes the return of the romanesque, and to see in Perec’s text a response to the so-called ‘crisis of the novel’ that afflicted French literature in the 1960s. Reggiani has interesting things to say about Perec’s relationship to photography, which he viewed with a great deal of scepticism, and which is always linked to a lack or an ontological uncertainty in his work, and to film, which he approached in a far more amateur spirit. Her assertion that Perec was always conscious of the theoretical, intellectual and political context in which he wrote is buttressed by an intriguing examination of the ‘fictionalisation de la théorie’ (p. 160) that characterises his work. That phenomenon can of course be read through a historical lens, and it may help to persuade us that Georges Perec was not only a great deal more nimble than most of his contemporaries, but also a lot quicker to understand and exploit the zeitgeist. It should be pointed out that not all of Perec’s writings evince an equal degree of attention to the idea of time; one might also note that some chapters of Reggiani’s study focus on that topos more closely than others. Nevertheless, her contention that Perec’s oeuvre as a whole testifies strongly to an ‘ascèse temporelle’ (p. 185) is a point well taken, and her reading of that oeuvre as an object that is fundamentally diachronic enriches our understanding of it in important ways, and thus is very timely indeed.

Six Narratives in Search of a Novel

Surveying the horizon of the contemporary French novel, one is necessarily struck by the multiplicity of that form. Such a phenomenon is most apparent in the domain of what might be termed the “critical novel,” that is, a text devised with considerable deliberation, and which demands reflection on the readers part; a text that is aware of the tradition it has inherited, and which positions itself with regard to that tradition in a variety of manners; a text that puts its own “literariness” into play for the benefit of readers who are attuned to that discursive gesture; a text that questions (either implicitly or more explicitly) prevailing literary norms; that puts commonplaces on trial through irony or parody; that asks us to rethink what the novel may be as a cultural form. Amid that multiplicity, however, there runs a common thread: the search for a new kind of novel, one more closely suited to our expressive needs than the forms that are currently being practiced. Most characteristically, that new form is sketched out in a hypothetical, conditional mode; typically, the critical novel adumbrates that new form, but does not exemplify it. My intention—here at least—is not to analyze that phenomenon in detail, but rather to suggest the degree of its amplitude. In that perspective, I shall speak briefly about six recent novels which put it on display in interesting ways.

Quelques questions pour Christine Montalbetti

Christine Montalbetti est universitaire et romancière. Son premier roman, Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine, a paru aux Editions P.O.L. en 2001, suivi par L’Origine de l’homme en 2002. Expérience de la campagne et Western sont tous les deux sortis en 2005. Nouvelles sur le sentiment amoureux a paru au début de 2007. Un texte plus nettement autobiographique, Petits déjeuners avec quelques écrivains célèbres, est sorti début 2008, également chez P.O.L.