The French Review

Reviews 237 Ponge, “le plus farouche gibier de contemplation”. Avouons qu’il y a néanmoins beaucoup à glaner dans ces pages publiées avec le soutien d’Armande Ponge, et qu’elles méritent le détour. Bard College (NY) Éric Trudel Parent, Sabrina. Poétiques de l’événement: Claude Simon, Jean Rouaud, Eugène Savitzkaya, Jean Follain, Jacques Réda. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-81240277 -7. Pp. 493. 58 a. The author notes at the outset that the notion of event lends itself to a variety of uses and interpretations and that“chaque science, chaque discipline module le concept en fonction de ses besoins” (11). Thus, in regard to her own literary purpose, Parent formulates her approach in terms of two main sources of inspiration—the poetics of Aristotle and the writings of Paul Ricœur. Aristotle’s Poetics and Ethics allow her to identify the main issues at stake and provide her with“des outils de réflexion qui aident à cerner l’événement, tant dans le domaine de la réalité que dans le domaine littéraire” (74). Ricœur’s work has been most helpful in clarifying the status of event in philosophical terms by contrasting the interpretation offered by analytical philosophy with a phenomenological approach thus motivating Parent’s preference for the latter. In phenomenology, the event is not granted an autonomous ontological status but is made dependent on a consciousness; as a result, “l’événement se mesure à l’aune de ce qui arrive à un sujet” (12). It is a realization that gives us a new version of the Cartesian axiom, which becomes,“Je suis ce qui m’arrive”(128).Moreover, in the literary domain, the act of writing about an event becomes itself an event since it will inevitably affect the experience of the writer’s self. A second guiding principle provided by Ricœur is the understanding that“toute œuvre émerge d’un contexte socio-historique spécifique pour être reçue par un lecteur, qui appartient lui aussi à une époque donnée” (21). It is an insight motivating Parent’s selection of the five subjects of her analyses—the novelists Simon, Rouaud, and Savitskaya, and the poets Follain and Réda. These are authors published by Les Éditions de Minuit, a publishing house that has been “au cœur de la reconfiguration incessante de l’événement que fut la Seconde Guerre mondiale”(443). The war is therefore a common and recurring theme in both poetry and prose but it is recounted in ways that mark the distance separating these authors from the previous generation. While they are in certain ways the heirs of the Nouveau Roman, they reject the notion that literature can no longer claim to represent reality or express feelings in order to, as the New Novelists imagined,“se mettre‘à la recherche d’elle-même’”(138).Indeed,as Parent notes, it has become common“depuis les années quatre-vingt, de parler de‘retour au récit’”(137). This renewed narrative mode differs, however, from previous models in its rejection of ideology as a guiding or organizing theme. The authors chosen by Parent thus manifest a postmodern awareness of the “faillite des‘grands récits’”announced by Lyotard (138).As a result, the narratives turn into ‘petits récits’ by relating banal, daily occurrences, alluding to fleeting moments, evanescent memories, by granting a meaning to what is commonly regarded as meaningless or insignificant, and by giving a voice to those history has neglected or forgotten. In some cases, these texts will simply acknowledge the insurmountable difficulty of reproducing in writing the experience of living. The net effect, as Parent concludes her thoroughly researched and highly stimulating essay, is to valorize new kinds of ethics. By making le sens coincide with les sens, and by rejecting an éthique de la conviction, these authors valorize, at turns, an ethics of authenticity, humility, and compassion, themes that Parent hopes can lead us to consider “la littérature comme un objet ayant le pouvoir de transformer le monde et d’en faire un lieu plus habitable” (446).A remarkably rich bibliography—the author terms it a“tentative de...