The concept of nonfiction literature has become so alien in the English-speaking world that it is always amusing to watch a critic tussling with an example of it, as happens in Three Percent's favorable review of Pascal Quignard's "Les Ombres Errants," now available in translation as "The Roving Shadows."
The reviewer, hilariously, spends much of his piece simply trying, and failing, to classify the work, getting into it with the very first sentence: "Les Ombres Errantes won the Prix Goncourt—possibly the most prestigious award a French literary work can receive—despite the fact that it is not a novel.[Bold emphasis ours.]" Really, despite the fact that it is not a novel? Scandalous!
Then, in the second paragraph, comes this gem: "Indeed, it is difficult to say which genre of writing it actually fits. On the one hand the book contains many examples of sensuous description and personal memoir—you know, the type of thing one expects to find in a literary work." And by "literary work" the reviewer obviously means fiction. It is highly irregular, in the reviewer's view, that one should encounter such writing in a work of nonfiction.
And the reviewer goes on, confessing perplexity: "The uniqueness of this work’s style presents a problem to the reader and the critic. Against which body of works should one judge The Roving Shadows, then, literature or critical theory?"
Not that the reviewer is seriously interested in judging it against any body of work (though it does sound impressive that he should wish to.) And in the end he resolves his literature-or-critical theory classification quandary with this hilarious compromise: "the work is best classified as a distillation of critical theory into literary form."
So, has the reviewer decided that the book is, after all, literature despite not being a novel? Not so fast. "For this reason," he writes, "it is an important work, an interesting work, and a landmark in French literary/philosophical thought."
No comments:
Post a Comment