Of Words and the World: Referential Anxiety in Contemporary French Fiction.

Embedded in Samuel Beckett's 1938 novel Murphy is an unusual game of chess in which one of the players seemingly ignoring his opponent maneuvers his pieces into self-reflexive patterns, the Black King's side mirroring throughout the Black Queen's. The game's ultimate object is to circle back to the beginning to cancel itself. Functioning as a mirror in the text, Beckett's endgame with nothingness announces the abysmal structure of his and the new novelists' later experimental works.

David Ellison's collection of essays on French experimental fiction from 1956 to 1984 interrogates the status of such self-reflexive artifacts within the purview of the late deconstructionist/poststructuralist turn to questions of the referential, performative, and ethical dimensions of texts. Ellison proceeds within the de Manian tradition of linking deconstructive theorization with close reading in order to arrive at an "ethics of fiction." In the first of two parts, he examines the "Metamorphoses of the Referential Function, 1956-1984" by attentive readings of Camus's La Chute, Robbe-Grillet's Topologie d'une cite fantome, Claude Simon's Les Georgiques, and three post-modern autobiographies of the eighties by Robbe-Grillet, Duras, and Sarraute. The book's second part, which is entitled more boldly "'Pure Fiction' and the Inevitability of Reference," concentrates on Blanchot and Beckett. Obligingly nestled between the two parts is Ellison's own synopsis of his book's progression emphasizing the need of moving between word and world and concluding that, "The text in its praxis is not a linguistic structure that contains all else, but rather a created form that points to itself and to the world outside from …