"J'entendais l'abîme": Sound, Space, and Signification in Marie Darrieussecq's Tom est mort

Abstract

Marie Darrieussecq is part of a generation of contemporary writers in France faced with the task of formulating the possibilities of literary expression in the wake of various strands of twentieth-century French and Francophone literary experimentalism and in response to increasingly vociferous complaints about the decline of French literature.1 In an interview with John Lambeth, Darrieussecq retorts: “ça pèse beaucoup sur l’Europe cette idée que la littérature est fi nie, qu’il n’y a plus rien à dire etc. Et moi, je suis complètement dans la sensation inverse, tout reste à découvrir, faire entendre, faire voir” (809). Shirley Jordan has suggested that the emergence of this “so- called ‘new generation’” of French writers was largely shaped by the advertising and promotional strategies of French publishers over the course of the 1990s (52). While literary history has certainly taught us that the coherence of movements and generations is often imposed externally or retrospectively, and while the relative lack of the ideologically driven manifestoes of previous generations makes it more difficult to generalize about contemporary literary production, there are nevertheless a few trends to note. Th ese include the rise of autofiction and minimalism, as well as the general “retour au récit.”2 Darrieussecq’s novels, like those of many of her contemporaries—Camille Laurens, Linda Lê, and Marie NDiaye, for example—blend tradition with formal experimentation.3 And like Lê’s in particular, her novels are especially attuned to the relationship between the traumatic event and its problematic rendering in linguistic form Show more