Jean Ricardou - Place Names
Jean Ricardou was a "member" (the writers grouped under this heading never considered themselves as part of a "movement") of the nouveau roman. This is his only work to be translated into English as yet. It was first published in 1969.
Anyone familiar with the nouveau roman will recognise a number of tropes used by Ricardou. Repetition, "cinematic" collage. Peculiar turns of phrase, whole sentences, entire paragraphs (apparently) appear a number of times. One sentence ends and we "cut" to another, this time about something else. But if at first the reader feels as if she could be reading a work by Alain Robbe-Grillet or Claude Simon, the various strands that Ricardou is playing with weave together to form something singular (as it is polymorphous) in an increasingly thrilling way.
I've always had contempt for idea that a work can be "spoiled" by plot details being revealed before it is consumed. But now I find myself loath to describe the clever games Ricardou plays with narrative, metaphor and structure in case the surprise and enjoyment I felt while reading this book is lessened with prior knowledge.
Perhaps one way to describe Place Names is to call it a hall of mirrors. But that would only be accurate if a hall of mirrors was intricately designed to explore symmetry, the relationship of structuralism to humanism, metaphor, post-modernist reference to authorship, realism, allegory, the place of the novel regarding the above, and the place of literature and language in general regarding the above.
This book is about "something" (an enigmatic artist, the topology of an area of the countryside, a young couple uncovering a mystery, sado-masochistic sex) and about "nothing" (the structure of language and literature, material representation versus abstraction). One reads it with the thrill of adventure found in some rubbish like the Da Vinci Code (a book and film I never bothered to consume) and the thrill of uncovering hidden structures.
I mentioned Robbe-Grillet and Simon above, along with the use of repetition in the nouveau roman. There is a certain amount of repetition used as a structural metaphor for sex in Place Names that one finds in works by those authors. But the similarities between Ricardou and other members of the nouveau roman are not as strong as those between him and another French writer, Georges Perec. Like Perec, he uses a Carrollian grid for the form of his novel and is concerned with numbers. Like Perec and Carroll, his work has to be read both as inventive formalism and as materialist narrative. We are never encouraged to believe that the characters in the works of these authors actually exist (even though Alice Liddell was a real person). They are always ciphers moving through a theoretical world, like playing pieces on a chess board. Nevertheless, the theoretical world is, like in chess, described in the style of material representation. David Alan Fowler calls Ricardou a "materio-formalist". This description I think provides a useful entry point to the work of Ricardou and enables me to avoid "ruining" it for the reader by detailing the plot/structure twists.
Furthur:
The later work of Jean Ricardou [pdf]
Author site at Dalkey Archive
Anyone familiar with the nouveau roman will recognise a number of tropes used by Ricardou. Repetition, "cinematic" collage. Peculiar turns of phrase, whole sentences, entire paragraphs (apparently) appear a number of times. One sentence ends and we "cut" to another, this time about something else. But if at first the reader feels as if she could be reading a work by Alain Robbe-Grillet or Claude Simon, the various strands that Ricardou is playing with weave together to form something singular (as it is polymorphous) in an increasingly thrilling way.
I've always had contempt for idea that a work can be "spoiled" by plot details being revealed before it is consumed. But now I find myself loath to describe the clever games Ricardou plays with narrative, metaphor and structure in case the surprise and enjoyment I felt while reading this book is lessened with prior knowledge.
Perhaps one way to describe Place Names is to call it a hall of mirrors. But that would only be accurate if a hall of mirrors was intricately designed to explore symmetry, the relationship of structuralism to humanism, metaphor, post-modernist reference to authorship, realism, allegory, the place of the novel regarding the above, and the place of literature and language in general regarding the above.
This book is about "something" (an enigmatic artist, the topology of an area of the countryside, a young couple uncovering a mystery, sado-masochistic sex) and about "nothing" (the structure of language and literature, material representation versus abstraction). One reads it with the thrill of adventure found in some rubbish like the Da Vinci Code (a book and film I never bothered to consume) and the thrill of uncovering hidden structures.
I mentioned Robbe-Grillet and Simon above, along with the use of repetition in the nouveau roman. There is a certain amount of repetition used as a structural metaphor for sex in Place Names that one finds in works by those authors. But the similarities between Ricardou and other members of the nouveau roman are not as strong as those between him and another French writer, Georges Perec. Like Perec, he uses a Carrollian grid for the form of his novel and is concerned with numbers. Like Perec and Carroll, his work has to be read both as inventive formalism and as materialist narrative. We are never encouraged to believe that the characters in the works of these authors actually exist (even though Alice Liddell was a real person). They are always ciphers moving through a theoretical world, like playing pieces on a chess board. Nevertheless, the theoretical world is, like in chess, described in the style of material representation. David Alan Fowler calls Ricardou a "materio-formalist". This description I think provides a useful entry point to the work of Ricardou and enables me to avoid "ruining" it for the reader by detailing the plot/structure twists.
Furthur:
The later work of Jean Ricardou [pdf]
Author site at Dalkey Archive