On the Uses and Abuses of “Return”: Reflections on Jean Rouaud’s L’Imitation du bonheur and Its “Histoire critique de la fiction“

Rien de plus militaire qu'un [critique] plaidant pour l'ineffable poetique. --Roland Barthes (1) It has become a critical commonplace to speak of a "contemporary" period in French literature, which is usually said to begin sometime around 1980 and to continue to the present day. Every year, scholarly works and journalistic criticism perpetuate the notion of a contemporary literary period that is distinct in some important way from the period that preceded it. The justifications for this distinction range from the salvational (liberation from elitist or terroristic aesthetic strictures in favor of a new "openness") to the apocalyptic (the death of French culture, literature, thought; the decline of the modernist literary ethos; the victory of the late-capitalist culture industry); but whether adopting a celebratory or an elegiac tone, such proclamations almost always define contemporary literature in opposition to the nouveau roman or to the theoretical currents of the 1950s-1970s. (2) This definitional gesture underpins the proliferation of affirmations of "return" in contemporary literature--return to the story, return to narration, return to novelistic norms, return to the world or to the signified, return to the subject, return to fiction, return to imagination, return to the popular novelistic or "roman romanesque." (3) In addition to journalistic proclamations and scholarly definitions of French literature, there is also a robust strain of fictional works that elaborate some theorization of contemporary literature's relationships to aesthetic postulates and literary projects of the past and present. (4) Indeed, many influential accounts of the specificity of the contemporary period emerge from novelists engaging literary history both in "fictions d'histoire litteraire" (Jeannelle) and in interviews, essays, and critical or scholarly work. It is in this context that critics have situated Jean Rouaud's Limitation du bonheur (2006), a novel that tells a story of star-crossed lovers while engaging in a sustained reflection on the historical development of the French novel. Limitation du bonheur is thus at once an adventure novel, a love story, and, in the author's own words, "[une] histoire critique de la fiction" ("Interview" 305). The present analysis explores the tensions and contradictions that arise from what we might call Rouaud's doctrinal or dogmatic enlistment of the notion of a return to the popular novelistic. For if "return" has, for many scholars and novelists, often represented above all a problematic or a paradox, an effort to name the way that the popular novelistic at once fascinates and repulses, liberates and constrains contemporary novelistic production, there is another way to write with return, which would, beneath the rhetoric of openness or populist antimodernism, treat the popular novelistic as an ahistorical "essence of the novel" that need only be retrieved and reinvested with its proper sacrality. This is, I ultimately argue, the problematic core of the Roualdian notion of return: that, against the bad "deposition du roman" (its death or "decheance"), one can undertake a salutary "deposition du roman" (Rouaud, Un peu la guerre 237), allowing the novel to account for itself, reveal its adventurous essence, provide us with an antidote for modern disenchantment. (5) The "retour du romanesque" and Its Other L'lmitation du bonheur is in many ways a prototypical "fiction d'histoire litteraire," in the sense of a work that mixes "en des proportions differentes le plaisir de la fiction et celui de la reflexion sur le passe des lettres" (Jeannelle 27). In the course of L'lmitation du bonheur's nearly six hundred digressive and playful pages, Rouaud recounts an impassioned romance between an escaped communard and an unhappily married bourgeois woman while providing abundant commentary on a variety of subjects: Emile Zola and the "roman experimental," the nouveau roman and structuralism, Robert Louis Stevenson and Michel Le Bris, Isabella Bird and Jeremiah Johnson, photography and cinema, nature and industrial modernity. …