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, 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. 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 Bayard's Wormholes Published by New Prairie Press