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How do contemporary French authors tackle the so-called exhaustion of fictional form, a phenomenon that dogged so much literary criticism during the last quarter of the 20th century? In this rich, fascinating study, Duffy (Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland) explores the thematic, as opposed to the purely formal, continuity between postmodern writers and their literary ancestors of the 1960s and 1970s. Combining insightful analysis and meticulous scholarship, the author draws attention to the originality of six postmodern authors--Pierre Bergounioux, Franeois Bon, Marie Darrieussecq, Helcne Lenoir, Laurent Mauvignier, and Jean Rouard--and the debt they owe writers of the previous generation. Duffy's close textual analysis of the novels and recits of these writers reveals a common thematic pattern relating to moments of passage, ritual practices, and liminal experiences. Relying on perspectives borrowed from the social sciences, Duffy explores in detail many forms and functions of initiation, transition, and transformation. She delves into the sacred and the secular, the public and the private, community sanctioned rituals, and eccentrically idiosyncratic passages. This book sheds new light on the work of six authors who deserve to be better known. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- C. B. Kerr, Vassar College Choice 20111201 Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. Choice 20111201 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 Editions 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, He'le'ne Lenoir, Laurent Mauvignier, Francois 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 y 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. French Studies, vol 66, no 1 201201 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. French Studies, vol 66, no 1 201201 In Thresholds of Meaning, Jean H. Duffy proposes an original and insightful reading of contemporary French narrative, challenging some critics' recent accusations of a "current 'crisis' or even decline of the French novel" (1). Citing the difficulty of delineating a cohesive taxonomy of twentieth-century literary groups, rather than insist on a formal continuity, she seeks to highlight the thematic affinities that exist both among contemporary French authors and between this new generation and their nouveau roman predecessors. In effect, Duffy chooses to focus on the works of Pierre Bergounioux, Francois Bon, Marie Darrieussecq, Helene Lenoir, Laurent Mauvignier, and Jean Rouaud, in which one "particular thematic nexus" appears, that of a "shared preoccupation" with the "processes of meaning-production," both in textual content and linguistic form (18). Although the focus of her study is not of a comparative nature (the attention she draws to the similarities between these works and the nouveau roman takes place largely within the notes), Duffy contends that this mise en scene of the "processes by which man extracts meaning from and imposes meaning on his experience" is of "fundamental importance" to both generations of writers (17). Furthermore, she underscores the role of passage ("those changes of place, state, occupation, social position and age" 18) and of the ritual activities associated with liminality in these operations of meaning production, for they continually pit the individual against his or her larger social group and its communicative and behavioral codes. Accordingly, Duffy frequently but perceptively turns to social theories pertaining to the negotiation of meaning inherent in ritual, liminality, and rites of passage, particularly the works of Arnold van Gannep, Victor Turner, and Ronald Grimes. In the first chapter of her study, Duffy focuses on passage and liminality during moments of life crisis in Darrieussecq's Le Mal de mer, Lenoir's Le Repit, and Mauvignier's Appendre a finir, where "illness or injury is inextricably bound up with the account of marital breakdown" (32). She posits that these three texts constitute various forms of the "illness narrative," a notion recently developed by medical research referring to the salubrious creation of "new meanings" and of a "new cohesive self" for the ill, as well as supportive networks, via the interruption of normal routines and relations and the "impairment of [the subject's] [ ... ] sense of identity" (30). In addition to illustrating the physical and marital in-between states, each text examined "engage[s] with a range of ritual activities" which structure the total experience (32). It is only from within the marginal position of illness or injury that each of the novels' protagonists is able to face and contend with their respective conjugal relationships, accomplishing the ritualistic activities (such as passing through thresholds-in both concrete and abstract terms-and partaking in or preparing festive meals) that both structure that experience and allow for eventual release from the liminal state. The second chapter of Duffy's inquiry centers on the destabilization of "traditional frames of reference" and "sense of identity" following the occurrence of suicide within the social circles that figure in Bon's L'Enterrement, Mauvignier's Loin d'eux, and Bergounioux's La Maison rose (20). Following a long history of social, religious, and legal interdictions and taboos, Duffy argues that acts of suicide continue to be "seen as a threat to social cohesion," striking at the "heart of the notion of social solidarity" (75), and, accordingly, represent for each of the novels' protagonists more an "abortion of the normal passage from youth to maturity" than a "family calamity" (76). Because these texts expose the "issue of suicide primarily through the impact it has on a given community" Duffy focalizes chiefly on the intersubjective, com municative, and ritualistic management of the transgression by each group of proches, relying notably on Erving Goffman's notion of facework and David Le Breton's development on formalized uses of silence (77). In effect, the thwarted passage to adulthood manifest in each of the novels engenders different ritualistic activities, as well as types of language and silence, in an attempt to repair or reestablish the facework governing social interactions and to make (new) sense. In chapter three, Duffy examines the diverging relationship between self and community within the realm of familial and national commemoration, as staged in Darrieussecq's Le Pays, Bergounioux's Kpelie, and Rouaud's Loire-Inferieure cycle. Drawing on recent studies of memory and commemoration, notably Pierre Nora's concept of the "lieu de memoire," Duffy understands attempts at commemoration as a means of managing liminal states, or of the "transition from old to new world orders, [ ... ] bound up with a feeling of occupying a kind of 'entre-deux'" (135). In accordance with the non-totalizing, non-normalizing methods of memory studies, each of the novels examined explores the difficulties inherent in the reconciliation of competing commemorative practices. The novels' protagonists must learn to balance opposing sources for personal identity and memorial meanings, approximating and adapting the national, familial, and personal in order to find "his/her own ways of remembering and, indeed, of forgetting the past" (136). In her fourth chapter, Duffy considers the importance of family photographs and documents in the processes of ritual and passage as presented in Rouaud's quintet, Bon's Mecanique, and Lenoir's La Folie Silaz. Capitalizing on Pierre Bourdieu's participation in Un Art moyen (1965), Duffy regards the photograph primarily as a commemorative medium documenting rites of passage, though she does admit its "constructed nature" and "ideological assumptions": "personal and family photography [...] serves essentially as an instrument of social integration, offering the group [...] a durable means of corroborating and declaring its cohesiveness" (193-94). For the novels' protagonists, family photographs thus represent and figure in both past and present moments of passage, offering (or appearing to offer) evidence of transitions and constituting a means by which they are able to produce meaning within liminal states. The photograph is seen to function not only as a concrete "point of departure for reminiscence and reflection," but also as a "puzzle to be solved or mise en abyme to be decoded," that is, less as a fact than as an investigative tool (254). Finally, in her conclusion Duffy broadens the scope of her inquiry to examine other common metafictional threads linking the oeuvres of the selected authors. Here she evokes the shared use of polyphony and multiple subjects, the mixing of literary genres, and, primarily, the importance placed on the protagonists' use of writing, which is seen to operate as a decisive tool for mediation through liminality. All in all, this thought-provoking analysis of contemporary French literature, which astutely balances theory and close reading, engages the reader in the discovery of an original thematic form of narrative, one delimited less by events than by "apparently unremarkable human behavior," that is, the polyvalence and instability inherent in the creation of meaning and of selfhood negotiated through passage and states of liminality (260). -- Rebecca Loescher MLA 2013 ... this thought-provoking analysis of contemporary French literature, which astutely balances theory and close reading, engages the reader in the discovery of an original thematic form of narrative, one delimited less by events than by "apparently unremarkable human behavior," that is, the polyvalence and instability inherent in the creation of meaning and of selfhood negotiated through passage and states of liminality. MLA 2013
