The later work of Jean Ricardou

Abstract

This thesis examines the career of Jean Ricardou after 1982. The introduction indicates the obscurity in which he Ricardou’s reputation languishes currently. Chapter 1 sketches Ricardou’s career until 1982 and examines the denunciations of him by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon pronounced in that year, and how critics have subsequently portrayed him. Chapter 2 describes Ricardou’s involvement in writing workshops in France and the role he played in developing them and exercises to be used in such workshops, in particular the Bestiaire. Chapter 3 introduces the new discipline of textique which aims to provide a theoretical description of all phenomena associated with writing starting from the simplest mark. Chapter 4 suggests that textique, because of its militant materialism, might be susceptible to ultra-left tendencies. Chapters 5 and 6 examine textique as literary criticism, the former with reference to Une Maladie chronique, the latter to sonnets by Heredia and Mallarmé. Chapter 7 examines Ricardou’s later fiction, the concept of the “mixte” as developed in Le théâtre des métamorphoses and Hommage à Jean Paulhan and in these texts and La cathédrale de Sens, it explores the commonly held opinion that Ricardou’s work is “anti-referential”. The conclusion looks at factors that could influence the expansion of textique’s influence, its difficulty or reluctance to find an audience and its relation to those that Ricardou considers to be the great thinkers of the modern era, Mallarmé, Freud and Marx.