Anna Maziarczyk

The idea of return in its multiple forms and manifestations is central to Tanguy Viel’s oeuvre. His novels explore this phenomenon in terms of literary aesthetics as well as thematic, narrative and discursive concerns by forging peculiar analogies between form and content. Drawing on selected aesthetic, philosophical and stylistic theories of return, the present paper seeks to discuss its forms in Viel’s texts and analyses how he uses them to create a literary reflection on the sense of returns in human life.

Unreliable narration by definition involves deformation of the represented world. The narrator tells the story in the manner that makes the reader suspect that he / she is perverting the facts, manipulating the data, omitting details or simply lying. The narrative situation of this type can be observed in Tanguy Viel’s debut novel Le Black Note, published by the prestigious Minuit publishing house. The aim of this essay is to analyse unreliable narration as a modality of deformed representation of reality and to assess its impact on the reading process. This typically destabilising narrative technique reflects the condition of the deranged mind and thus depicts the distorted view of reality filtered through diseased consciousness. Subverting the traditional author–reader pact as well as the narrator’s authority, it constitutes one of the narrative paradigms typical of contemporary fiction.

Literature of Minuit, saturated with multiple intertextual references to the literary canon, explores the problem of filiation primarily on the level of novelistic aesthetics. And yet, apart from texts which in different ways refer to literary heritage and use its elements to create fictional discourse it includes works that take the form of filiative narrative. À la fin by Éric Laurrent is a case in point, as it is devoted to the author’s grandmother and his family’s response to her death. Drawing on theories of filiative narrative, this paper analyses the literary strategies whereby Laurrent presents family ties and their influence on the identity of an individual.

Characteristic of broadly understood culture, dialogism often takes critical forms: the function of references to earlier literary practice is to highlight the originality of works created on its basis and to emphasise the distance separating them from the tradition. In the case of Minuit literature we can observe an opposite situation, which involves valorisation of cultural heritage and its creative employment to construct untypical, intertextual fiction. Relying on key theories of intertextuality and intermediality, this paper analyses the major forms of literary dialogue with the past in Le Méridien de Greenwich by Jean Echenoz and Les Atomiques by Éric Laurrent and its impact on the form of the novel and the reading process.