Marie Nimier

DAVID GASCOIGNE AND ANA DE MEDEIROS

Introduction: Marie Nimier: The Self in the Web of Language/ Le Sujet et ses écritures

Marie Nimier’s entry into fiction, with the appearance of her first novel Sirène in 1985, came at a period of significant development in French literary critical thought. The structuralist model of ‘the text as a closed, self-contained system, sufficient unto itself’,¹ which had dominated debate since the 1960s, was giving way to ‘the confirmation, diversification and elaboration of the trend popularly known as the “return of the subject”’.² This shift involved a ‘refiguration and revalidation of the subject […] as the site of various capacities worthy of our attention and respect’, even if the subject in question was now to be seen as more attenuated, more provisional than before.³ In fictional writing this revalidation of the subject characteristically involved a movement towards ‘a high degree of reference to the recognizable “real world”’, still pursuing ‘explorations of literary expression and authority’ but ‘within the framework of a broader social and cultural critique’.⁴ Nimier’s fiction has an abiding preoccupation with human identity as shaped in its constant evolution by many factors – heritage, memory, gender, relationships, desire, social milieu and physical environment, and not least ←1 | 2→ by language itself – and through this wide focus it perfectly exemplifies this return towards an attention to and respect for individual experience embedded within that broader social and cultural critique.

The fourteen critical essays presented in this collection all offer insights into Nimier’s explorations in writing of the concepts and experiences of self and subject. Theories of the subject in narrative fiction are many and diverse, but one conceptual formulation which seems particularly useful in exploring the worlds of Nimier’s fiction is that provided by Paul Ricœur, notably in his Soi-même comme un autre. Narrative identity, he suggests, operates within a dialectic between the two poles which define identity more generally, that is sameness (‘mêmeté’), which permits reliable recognizability of the individual, thanks to the unchanging nature of their appearance and characteristics, and selfhood (‘ipséité’), which is the sense of a continuity of the self despite the mutations which it undergoes, which may be recalled in memory or anticipated in a projected future:

Dans la fiction littéraire, l’espace de variations ouvert aux rapports entre les deux modalités d’identité est immense. À une extrémité, le personnage est un caractère identifiable et réidentifiable comme même : c’est à peu près le statut du personnage des contes de fée ou du folklore. Quant au roman classique – de la Princesse de Clèves ou du roman anglais du 18^e siècle à Dostoïevski et Tolstoï –, on peut dire qu’il a exploré l’espace intermédiaire de variations où, à travers les transformations du personnage, l’identification du même décroît sans disparaître. On se rapproche du pôle inverse avec le roman dit d’apprentissage et, plus encore, le roman du courant de conscience.⁵

Nimier’s narratives brilliantly illustrate this ‘espace de variations’ between the two modalities of identity posited by Ricœur. They exemplify this model of narrative identity in fiction as a mediation between, on the one hand, a fixity which offers the self a sense of stability but which may inhibit or preclude change, and on the other hand, a capacity for transformation which carries with it the threat of alarming discontinuity and throws the stability of identity into question. As Ricœur further observes: ‘L’identité narrative se tient dans l’entre-deux ; en narrativisant le caractère, le récit lui rend son mouvement, aboli dans les dispositions ←2 | 3→ acquises, dans les identifications-avec sédimentées.’⁶ In Sirène (1985), in La Plage (2016) and in many of the intervening novels, the narrative concerns the shift within the experience of a central character from an inhibiting, even distressing, fixity towards the narrativized realization of, or at least the potential for, transformative change. Nimier’s work exploits ‘l’entre-deux’ in this and in many other respects, as contributions to this volume will amply testify.