Navigating non-lieux in contemporary fiction: Houellebecq, Darrieussecq, Echenoz, and Augé

Modern Language Review

Volumn 101, Issue 2, 2006, Pages

  O'Beirne, Emer ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN   (Ireland)

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Indexed keywords

EID: 34347290152     PISSN: 00267937     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20466790     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. Michel Houellebecq, Plateforme (Paris: Flammarion, 2001) [henceforth P], p. 34
2. In 'Plateforme pour l'échange des misères mondiales', Esprit, 279 (November 2001), 96-117 (p. 98). Houellebecq's first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), spells out this thesis of the extension of the struggle for satisfaction from the economic to the sexual market place
3. Michel Houellebecq, Les Particules élémentaires (Paris: Flammarion, 1998) [henceforth PÉ], Based on a naturist campsite near Royan, the resort in the novel is devoted to facilitating sexual encounters, its clients lonely and desperate ex-soixante-huitards. The campsite owner sued Houellebecq for his representation of the resort. In Plateforme the sexual Utopia sought vainly in Les Particules élémentaires is briefly attained before being destroyed by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. Once again Houellebecq found himself in court, this time for defamation of Islam, a charge of which he was acquitted
4. L'Équipée malaise (1986)
5. Nous trois (1992) [henceforth NT]
6. Les Grandes Blondes (1995)
7. Marc Augé, La Mère d'Arthur (Paris: Fayard, 2005) [henceforth MA]. This is not Augé's first attempt at writing fiction: 'J'ai déjà écrit des romans qui sont restés dans mes tiroirs' (Le Monde, 7 January 2005, p. 27); indeed, his theoretical writings are sprinkled with elements of narrative
8. Similarly, in Jean-Philippe Toussaint's La Télévision (Paris: Minuit, 1997) the narrator, torn from his research project on Titian Veccellio by the temptation to watch television (an inferior 'TV'), finally turns on the set to find his upstairs neighbour on the screen
9. See Emer O'Beirne, 'From Traffic to Jamming: Cars, Music, and Improvisation in Jean Echenoz's Cherokee', in Crime Scenes: Detective Narratives in European Culture since 1945, ed. by Anne Mullen and Emer O'Beirne (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 183-94
10. This impression of seriousness is reinforced by the short text 'Ciel, terre, soleil' in Lanzarote et autres textes (Paris: Librio, 2002), pp. 91-94, in which Houellebecq reflects on the importance, for him, of living by the sea in Ireland: 'Pour la première fois aujourd'hui je vis dans un endroit d'ou je peux, par la fenêtre, contempler la mer; et je me demande comment j'ai pu vivre jusqu'à present' (p. 93)
11. See O'Beirne, 'From Traffic to Jamming'