Reengagement with the world
towards an aesthetics of dialogical intertextuality
pp. 121-144
in: , The narrative turn in fiction and theory, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
The gradual shift from the antinarrative thinking that dominated the 1950s and 1960s towards the rehabilitation of storytelling in French fiction was coupled with reengagement with the world outside the text, with history and with the subject's experience of being in the world. When Tournier began to publish his novels in the late 1960s, their context of reception differed drastically from the time when the nouveau roman's avant-garde experimentation with non-narrative novelistic forms had stirred up the postwar literary scene. In the 1960s a flood of fragmented narratives had transformed the literary horizon of expectation. Throughout the decade, the centre of critical debate had been the Tel Quel journal, in which authors such as Sollers, Ricardou, Foucault and Kristeva elaborated an antirepresentational aesthetic that radicalized that of the nouveau roman, seeking to replace the "literature of signification' by something "almost resistant to meaning', by "language itself' (Foucault 1964: 38). By 1968, the journal's aesthetic programme had been politicized, and it took part in actively promoting the Communist revolution: according to its dogma, crudely put, realist narratives problematically reproduce bourgeois ideology, whereas the "symbolic revolution' driven by antinarrative, antirepresentational literature leads the way to social revolution.1