Quêtes littéraires

Preface

Edyta Kociubińska, Judyta Niedokos — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The Mid-Field Play of Agôn-Alea and the Place of Chance in the Construction of the Tragic Element in Racine

Chandniée C. Tushar Iyengar — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

According to Roger Caillois’s social epistemology, agôn and alea are the first two principles of games which unfold between the arbitrary polarity of the play tendencies of paidia and ludus. The traditional view on tragedies strongly supported by Aristotelian authors is that, in its particular tragic universe, the stakes are determined by an implacable fatality directed by the probable and the necessary. However, in most of Racine’s plays, the course of events seems to revolve around fortune which ends up creating a sort of middle field of tragic action between agôn and alea. The article maintains that chance takes center stage in Racine’s theater, of which the tragic plot must be explored from a stochastic perspective. It uses the notion of “mid-field” borrowed from ball games meaning the mid-fielder position, a position which maximizes the potential for chance in these games.

The Weighting of the Bets of des Grieux and Manon Lescaut

Servanne Woodward — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Spinoza considers how to even out wagers in a game of chance when the players have uneven means, compared to one another. It has already been observed by critics, that in the novel by Prévost, Manon Lescaut (1731, 1753), the hero and his lover do not play their games in the same manner, either in society or at the gambling house. They also do not weather the same losses. In fact, des Grieux wins even when he no longer cheats. Instead of following the logic of punishments, such as the Christian condemnation of gambling and promiscuity, or Prévost ’s own perspective of the abbot over his tale, it seems more relevant to consider that des Grieux attempts to pursue his case and correct chance to arrive at his desired outcome of earthly pleasure and fulfilment, by legal or illegal means. No matter the exhaustive efforts of des Grieux, their gamble to remain a couple backfires miserably. Manon dies; and he is left to follow the path devised by his family, and a role securing a suitable, comfortable happiness instead of blissful love.

Diderot and Rameau’s Nephew: The Uncertain Outcome of a Role-Playing Game

Aude Lecimbre — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

By requiring us to think the notion of play in his dramaturgical aspect, the main purpose of this paper is to shed light on the question of the individuality of the character of the Nephew in Rameau’s Nephew. The field of the theatre and performing arts is of great importance in Diderot’s texts. Therefore, in Rameau’s Nephew, through the dialogue between Him and Me, the question of the theatrical space and the structure of the text are coupled with a questioning of the “I” of the characters. We want to observe, in this paper, the way in which the theme of play in Rameau’s Nephew illuminates the theatrical space and the structure. The character of the Nephew is only an actor. He laughs at the Philosopher and subverts the materialist point of view, as much as philosophical practice.

The Bilboquet: a Dangerous Game? A Study on Marivaux’s “Le Bilboquet”

Jingxuan Pan — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The “Le Bilboquet” of Marivaux illustrates the social frenzy incited by this game at that time. Driven by resentment against the bilboquet, which distracts his mistress, the narrator elaborates on how Madness has conquered the people of Europe through this frivolity. Through the depiction of the contagion of the game, we could observe how the pleasure it brings and the mimetic desire of men contribute to the success of the bilboquet. The social disorder resulting from this ludic frenzy leads us to question the nature of the game: is it merely an entertainment or does it actually represent a danger? Such a trifle could have grave consequences, in line with the logic of reevaluating the “nothingness” that we can find in most of Marivaux’s works.

Getting Out of the Game: The Life of Marianne or the Story that Belonged to No One

Zeina Hakim — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This paper examines the way in which Marivaux, in The Life of Marianne, plays at “making it true” by deploying a set of rhetorical and narrative devices: from the old trick of themanuscript found by chance to the call of prestigious witnesses ready to guarantee the authenticity of the episode, all means are good to produce the effect of veracity expected by the reader. However, in an opposite movement, Marivaux constantly violates the reading pact which he instituted: the reader ends up wondering about the composition of what he reads and realizes that the text exhibits too much negligence for the story to be true. Fiction is thus staged, and Marivaux underlines the processes which force the reader to question his own credulity. This paper examines the consequences of this double movement and offers a few theoretical hypotheses to account for this paradoxical poetics of play.

Children’s Games in Les Rougon-Macquart

Shoshana-Rose Marzel — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article examines children’s games in Les Rougon-Macquart while relying on a typology that includes toys, symbolic plays, and a children’s ball. In addition to their educational and recreational functions, childhood games play various narrative roles, such as constructing a referential universe, creating key moments in the plot, exploring the complexity of child and parental psychology, parent/child relationships and much more. Furthermore, the author, Émile Zola, employs toys and children’s games to inform his reflections on the joint influence of heredity and environment on the fates of characters, in alignment with the principles of the naturalist movement. This approach offers valuable insights into how Zola utilizes children’s games as narrative and symbolic elements within his grand literary tapestry.

“Une impression posthume des sensations d’autrefois”: Games of Nostalgia and Mysticism in Joséphin Péladan's La Décadence latine

Ryan Atticus Doherty — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

For the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, playing constitutes a “positive value of illusion” which, for the adult as well as the child, allows access to reality in a way that is gradual and bearable. Although better known for his concept of the transitional object for children, Winnicott makes the claim for an essential role played by transitional phenomena at all stages of life, particularly in artistic creation. This article seeks to read together the psychology of Winnicott, especially Playing and Reality (1971) and Joséphin Péladan’s La Décadence latine (1884 & seq.), a little-known and poorly studied work of decadent literature. Through his use of a nostalgic gaze on history, Péladan transforms it into a counter-cultural fantasy, an act of resistance to the present. He creates for himself an alternative to history which acts as an “illusory experience” – a half game, half remaking of reality – allowing him to overcome the moral decadence that he laments. Thus, Péladan opposes his new arc of history to the fears he has about the end of the Latin race, effectively rewriting the world à rebours.

The Deregulated Game of Burlesque: from The Comic Novel (1651) to Molloy (1951)

Joël Loehr — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

There is no fiction in narrative prose that testifies to a playful intentionality more manifest than a “comic story”: this article illustrates it by first analyzing the strategies of Scarron, master of the game, in the burlesque incipit of The Comic Novel. Spanning the three centuries that separate the publication of Scarron’s novel (1651) from that of Molloy (1951), not without underlining the impact that silent cinema has had on the means and effects of burlesque in a fiction in narrative prose, we then question Beckett’s strategies, more complex or more equivocal, not only because the author seems to hide his game, sheltered from a narrating voice, but also because fiction, understood as “shared playful pretense”, then opens up to the registral interference of pathos.

Games and Stakes in Crommelynck’s The Magnificent Cuckoo

Françoise Bombard — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Without any reason or clue, the main character, Bruno, is convinced that he is cuckolded to the point where he actually wants it to be true, to remove any doubts. This delusion results in words and deeds which come to involve his reason and his relationship to others. But in Le Cocu magnifique, the status of the game is multivocal. It is present in diegesis, but it also related to dramaturgy. We will see how Crommelynck plays with mimesis, with regard to the very notion of the character, through games of masks and double-dealing. Moreover, at the aesthetic level, language games meet with the research into modern poetry. Intertextual games with poetic and theatrical references subvert them through pastiche, and the playwright, playing with registers, upsets aesthetic categories.

Role-Playing: Fictional Biography in Prose Works by Jean Genet

Paweł Kamiński — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article seeks to analyze three novels by Jean Genet: Our Lady of the Flowers (1943), Miracle of the Rose (1946) and The Thief’s Journal (1949). Its main goal is to verify how the game with discursive techniques applied by Genet allows him to create a diegetic universe inspired by his private life and, therefore, to conduct a role-playing game, undertaken for ideological and ontological purposes. In order to carry out his plan, the author takes into account not only tools related to the poetics of a literary work but also selected aspects of an autobiographical pact aiming at persuading the reader of an “apparent truth” of the literary text. The study of these elements shows that the universe in Genet’s novels is, on the one hand, inspired to a certain degree by the reality, on the other hand, used to construct a narrative space where a continuous game with the truth and falsehood is located in the foreground.

The Game of “I”: Poetic Writing in Michel Leiris’ L’âge d’homme

Wenjing Zhao — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

In this article we propose to explore the poetic features of Michel Leiris’ L’âge d’homme on the basis of a series of specific examples and attempt to inquire how the “I” is recorded in his autobiographical experimentation. Rejecting the classical model of autobiography, the author places the history of his personality within a framework formed by recurring images in which the games on lexicon, analogical connections and seemingly arbitrary associations intermingle. Aiming to erase himself, he pushes back the limits of conventional language and exploits a lyrical dimension within his narrative work, and in this process constitutes his genesis.

The Game of Semiosis. Humor as a Playful Semiotic Operation in Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes

Aristide James — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

What is the value of play for a reader when the literary text itself is radically conceived as a ludic device? The Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle’s flagship product, Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a collection of combinatory poems, is an exemplary interrogation of reading, in view of the double problematic it raises: auctorial effacement and lectorial activity. The aim of this article is to pave the way for an epistemological re-qualification of the notion of humour, by approaching it as a (playful) practice of making sense, and more specifically here as an interpretative practice. Based on a dialectical conception of play, inherited from Kant’s “free play of the faculties”, it is intended as an opportunity for an unusual rapprochement between humour and literary reading. With the author’s ambivalent complicity, the reader’s own staging merges with the work’s semiosis.

Is the Tutelage of Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual in Ruth Zylberman’s 209 Saint-Maur Street Ludic or Existential?

Shuichiro Shiotsuka — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

In this paper, we examine the relationship between the Oulipian aspect of G. Perec’s Life A User’s Manual (1978) and R. Zylberman’s investigation in her book 209 Saint-Maur Street (2020). If we dwell on this comparison, it is because there is a twist between them: on the one hand, this reportage is certainly a fine example of ‘investigative literature’, but it is not, unlike Perecquian reportages, under the domination of ‘existential constraints’; on the other, it is set in collective housing, as is the case with Perec’s novel, but without resorting to linguistic constraints. In the end, we show that the tutelage of Life A User’s Manual in the book of Zylberman is existential in nature, but with a hint of Oulipian playfulness.

The Game in the Novel Hors d’Atteinte? by Emmanuel Carrère: An Answer to Existential Angst?

Paméla Baës — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

At the casino, Frédérique abandons herself to the roulette wheel, which gives her a protective “out of reach” place. A moment of oblivion, gambling gives her intense vertigo and appears to be a form of abandonment, an act of revolt against the diktats of society. It is also defined as an ordalic practice, meaning that the character relies on chance. As a kind of pharmakon, the game provides a feeling of omnipotence, curbing the heroine’s anguish but also proving to be mortifying. Frédérique, the specular double of an author in the grip of ontological anguish, quickly slips into gambling madness. Is the game really beneficial? Does it have a cathartic effect on the character? Or, on the contrary, is it pure fantasy, an illusion incapable of fulfilling the heroine’s fantasies, except for a brief interlude outside reality?

Forms of Game and Playing, and the Thematization of Ludic Reading Practices in Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Short Stories

Antoaneta Robova — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Play, in its many forms and categories, is a connecting thread running through Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s poetics. The aim of this article is to study the ludic modalities of reading practices represented in the writer-philosopher’s short stories. Analyses of the thematization of playing, game and reading experiences are conducted through the prism of theories of reception and play. The significant cases of readers with psychotic or (post)bovarian tendencies, experienced or beginners, reveal various effects and uses of ludic reading and its possible drifts. The practices of different types of readers in fabula, whether pathological or beneficial, are studied with the aim of identifying ludic and game devices of this novelistic art with a singular childhood spirit.

Games and Chance in Patrick Modiano’s Writing

France Grenaudier-Klijn — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Many of Patrick Modiano’s novels involve the motif of the game – predicate and space – in the narration, at characterization, thematic and structural levels. The introduction of this minor element – it never reaches the level of a trope – nonetheless informs us both about the novelistic techniques employed by Modiano and about the metaphysical considerations underpinning his writing. As such, a close reading of various episodes articulated around the motif of the game allows us to better understand the methods adopted by the novelist in the development of his characters and in the architecture of his texts. Furthermore, the insertion of the motif of the game allows us to identify and analyse the value given to chance and indeterminacy in all its forms in the Modianian novel, from which a true metaphysics, if not an ethics, of indeterminacy, can in turn be deployed.

Game of Senses, Game of Forms, or the Intertextual Games/Goals of Sophie Divry’s Writing

Anna Opiela-Mrozik — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This paper analyzes various aspects of game in the novels of Sophie Divry, a contemporary novelist as well as a social activist. Her protean work develops the idea of literary ludicity which ensures pleasure for an author and engages a reader but, at the same time, transmits a message about society. In the essay Rouvrir le roman the writer proposes to reinvent the novel genre by means of the spirit of unseriousness which plays a role as a stimulant for literature. Founded on intertextuality, Divry’s writing renews in an original way well-known models such as
that of Madame Bovary (La condition pavillonnaire) or Robinson Crusoe (Trois fois la fin du monde). Narrative games lead the novelist to develop polyphonic writing.
The study of the novel Quand le diable sortit de la salle de bain demonstrates the link between game and self-reflexivity and highlights the potential of ludicity at the linguistic, typographical and formal level.

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