End of the Line: Jean Echenoz and the Afterlife of Fiction

Jean Echenoz's early fiction presented itself as a journey of apprenticeship. His first four novels (1979-89) flaunt his debt to literary masters from Flaubert to Beckett and the nouveau roma n. That notion of working one's writerly passage to literary recognition within the western canon is staged explicitly in L'Équipée malaise (1986), through a ship that plies the Indian Ocean between France and Malaysia, its name, the Boustrophédon, that of a form of script, and its passengers and cargo paying homage to Joseph Conrad and, less obviously, Eric Ambler. Echenoz's journeyman years thus show him working under two types of master – on one hand, those of literary modernism; on the other, accomplished genre-fiction writers like Ambler or Jean-Patrick Manchette. Conrad is a bridge between both registers, a model for interweaving a Flaubertian stylistic sensibility into adventure plots. More importantly, that combination lets Echenoz the apprentice both shadow the narrative sceptics who stage fictional representation as an impasse (Flaubert, Beckett) and sustain or at least simulate the forward movement of plot, à la Robbe-Grillet or Perec. That effect of movement draws on another language of passage, that of music: first jazz, later classical, most recently pop. As Echenoz grapples knowingly with the condition of the late-modern literary producer, inheriting and passing on a particular European and specifically mainland French current of reflection on fictional representation and its limits, musical references and motifs carry his prose beyond those heralds of the genre's impasse and into something like a playful afterlife of the novel.