Paris or the Beginning of Fiction in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Novels
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2022.38340Keywords:
Jean-Philippe Toussaint, narrator, Paris, displacement, loiterature, islandAbstract
Paris serves as the starting point in several novels by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Toussaint’s characters eventually leave the city and return to it. These trips structure the notion of time and space in the fictional narrative. Characters, in particular the narrator-character, often seem at odd with the far-away countries they visit. Toussaint, who started publishing in the mid-1980s, plays on this back and forth between a Paris of everyday urban life and destinations such as Tokyo, Shanghai. It is in this displacement that the instability and the loss of power of the characters flourish. Playing with the representations of Paris bequeathed by the history and literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Toussaint thus places Paris as a point of reference in the narrative for the apparently aimless wandering of his characters as well as for complex and tormented love relationships.
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