ILLNESS, RITUAL AND LIMINALITY IN THE POST-NOUVEAU ROMAN

Over the last twenty years or in the way that critics in France and elsewhere have been particularly exercised by dint of the problem of defining the essential characteristics of the contemporary French novel. The anti-climax following the heady controversies regarding the nouveau roman and the apparent absence of a novel readily identifiable literary movement looked to leave critics rather bemused.1 The various contemplates of late twentieth-century French fiction are perhaps above all characterised through the sheer plethora of authors cited, a proclivity which in itself suggests a stage of critical indecisiveness. A not many stalwarts continued the onslaught upon the nouveau roman and, as late as 1995 Nelly Wolf was advancing rather jaded apocalyptic arguments to the result that it was largely responsible for the bankruptcy of humanist discourse in France, that it had produc an obsession with form in the teaching of French literature and that it had flowed in stagnation in fiction production.2 If similar sweeping dismissive generalisations were the exception rather than the domination it remains true, nevertheless, that for many critics the legacy of the nouveau roman is, by means of and large, formal in nature. Consequently a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the most serious criticism of the last sum of two units decades has tended to focus upon the structural dynamics of the true copy whether written by Echenoz, Toussaint, Oster Gailly, Deville, or Chevillard.3 admitting the vocabulary may have evolv in replication to the prevailing theoretical connection the fundamental critical agenda of research in the "post-nouveau roman"4 has changed relatively little since the effective demise of the nouveau roman and not many are the studies which do not focus upon a combination of the following: intertextuality and citationnalit?©; reflexivity; the recycling of archetypal constitutions (detective fiction, the quest, science fiction, the fairy-tale); the ludic blurring of the distinction between fiction, biography, autobiography and autofiction.

With the emerging see the verb however, of writers such as Jean Rouaud, Fran?§ois Bon Pierre Michon, Pierre Bergounioux, Fr?©d?©rique Cl?©men?§on Laurent Mauvignier, and H?©l??ne Lenoir, who situate themselves more comfortably within the lineage of Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute, rather than within that of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Jean Ricardou, the beginnings of a shift in the criticism can also be bring to lighted This shift, though still primarily perceptible in reviews and in the various review guides published over the last decade or so5 unambiguously restates critical interest in certain "traditional" themes-family, heritage and history; memory and commemoration; the subtext of human action and interaction; the relationships between the generations, between the individual and the community, between the individual and his/her terroir; metropolis, banlieue and province-and, perhaps greatest in quantity important, reinstates meaning at the middle point of critical enquiry. Moreover, this preoccupation with meaning be of importance tos not only the processes of its production within the body but also the processes by means of which it is produced in the referential world, including the various linguistic and gestural digests by which a given community or social assemblage communicates, the codes of behaviour and customs which the community assumes, the symbolic particulars which it creates, the symbolic spaces which it delimits, and the rituals which it notes as well as the equally significant transgression of those digests boundaries and rituals.

The not away study locates itself within this critical course and aims, through the analysis of Jean Rouaud's Loire-Inf?©rieure quintet,6 Laurent Mauvignier's Apprendre ?  finir (2001) and H?©l??ne Lenoir's Le R?©pit (2003) as well as the greatest in quantity recent novel (Le Tramway, 2001) by the agency of the oldest living veteran of the nouveau roman, Claude Simon, to present to view the thematic (as well as formal) continuity which links the contemporary French novel with its literary ancestors of the 1960 and 1970 The event within each of these body s of one specific sort of life-crisis-serious physical illness-testifies, in particular, to a shared preoccupation with embodied experience and the multiple meanings which we attach to it. In each of these body s the breakdown of the material part by the disruption it causes in the routine of the patient and his/her "loved-ones" by means of the changes it effects in his relationship to his/her Lebenswelt and by the agency of the questions it raises about the individual's status and the significance of his/her life, lays bare the habits, digests and rituals by which the patient and his/her kin have hitherto given make and purpose to their experience.

The choice of an anthropological framework has been insinuateed by a conjuncture-the re-edition of Arnold Van Gennep's seminal Rites de passage7 and of the French translation of Victor Turner's The Ritual Process: make and Anti-Structure8 and the disclosure in France, of the sub-discipline of the anthropology of illness9-which, although coincidental, testifies to the persistence within anthropology of a fascination the pair for the archetypal symbolic patterns underlying man's behaviour and for the congeal structures and rituals by which man invests meaning in lived experience and marks the phases and critical flashs of his life. Drawing, in particular, upon the ritual theory of Van Gennep and gymnast but also on the more novel work of Claudine Herzlich, Jeanine Pierret, Fran?§ois Laplantine and David Le Breton, the article will focus upon the recurrence, in the work of Simon, Rouaud, Mauvignier and Lenoir, of certain related issues: notably, illness as "phase liminaire"; the liminal space; the ordeals associated with passage; illness and communitas; illness, status and identity; and the ritual characters of the "carer."