Concerning Christine Montalbetti

Abstract

Christine Montalbetti has published twenty-odd texts at the Éditions P.O.L over the years, beginning with Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine, which appeared in 2001. While she has practiced short forms and theater (with several plays produced at the Comédie-Française), her central literary concern has been the novel. Her novels are innovative, engaging, and exceptionally canny constructions. Each of them testifies to a smart, sustained reflection on narrative art, upon its possibilities and its limits, upon its articulative power. Those novels are moreover “critical” in character. That is, they display a broad recognition of the tradition out of which they arise. They invite their reader to share that recognition, and to exercise his or her critical faculties in a very conscious manner. These are generous texts, granted the way in which Christine Montalbetti welcomes her reader into the fictional world, and encourages her or him to participate in a shared meditation on literature and its uses. Her books constitute one of the key sites where contemporary French literature takes full account of its potential and seeks new expressive avenues.

Keywords:

• Montalbetti
• novel
• theater
• critical
• specular
• play

Notes

1 A video recording of that event can be found at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ffsic2021/6/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2022.

2 Christine Montalbetti, Mon ancêtre Poisson, Paris, P.O.L, 2019.

3 Christine Montalbetti, Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine, Paris, P.O.L, 2001. A list of Christine Montalbetti’s principal works is included at the end of this dossier.

4 It was first performed on November 28, 2019, in the Studio-Théâtre of the Comédie-Française, directed by Montalbetti herself.

5 See Chambers, Loiterature: “A reason I’m interested in loiterly literature, then, is that it has this characteristic of the trivial: It blurs categories, and in particular it blurs those of innocent pleasure taking and harmless relaxation and not-so-innocent ‘intent’—a certain recalcitrance to the laws that maintain ‘good order.’ […] Loiterature distracts attention from what it’s up to, and in that it’s a bit like a street conjuror whose patter diverts us from what’s really going on” (8–9).

6 See Genette, Figures III: “Une conclusion s’impose donc: c’est que la description, chez Proust, se résorbe en narration, et que le second type canonique de mouvement—celui de la pause descriptive—n’y existe pas, pour cette évidente raison que la description y est tout sauf une pause du récit” (138).

7 See for example her study entitled “Narrataire et lecteur: Deux instances autonomes” (Cahiers de Narratologie 11 (2005). https://doi.org/10.4000/narratologie.13).

8 See Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, pp. 47-53, and especially: “What model reader did I want as I was writing? An accomplice, to be sure, one who would play my game” (50).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Warren Motte

Warren Motte is Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. In 2015, the French Republic named him a Knight in the Order of Academic Palms for career service to French culture. His most recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (2008), Mirror Gazing (2014), French Fiction Today (2017), and Pour une littérature critique (2021).