7 - French Edgeland Poetics: Topography and Ecology in Jean Rolin's Les Événements

Summary

Les djihadistes avaient tenté de franchir la RN 568 en plusieurs points, mais leur assaut […] s’était enlisé presque aussitôt dans le fossé, ou la tranchée, qui courait à mi-hauteur du remblai de la route nationale, parallèlement à celle-ci, et pratiquement invisible, masqué comme il l’était par les pins, les chênes verts et les genêts en fleur, aussi longtemps que l’on n’était pas tombé dedans.

Jean Rolin, Les Événements

How is the countryside experienced in the literature of post-industrial, twenty-first-century France? Does la campagne remain a place where the ‘saveur profonde du pays’ (Proust 1988: 155) (‘intimate savour of the country’ [Proust 1981: 172]) remains to be experienced, as it was a century ago for the young Marcel in Proust's Combray? The countryside aesthetic in more recent French novels departs from such plenitude. We must turn from Proust's Marcel to Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. According to Beckett's tongue-in-cheek reprise of Proust, countryside vegetation is nothing beautiful. Molloy does not care for the smell of ‘aubépines’ (hawthorn) (1959: 34). He prefers the savage vegetation found in ditches. Communion with nature occurs in a less noble, almost bestial, but perhaps no less profound way, as Molloy lies sprawled like so much roadkill in a ditch full of tall field grass:

Je ramenai les longues tiges feuillues tout autour de mon visage. Alors je sentais la terre, l’odeur de la terre était dans l’herbe, que mes mains tressaient sur mon visage, de sorte que j’en fus aveuglé. J’en mangeais un peu. (1959: 34)

One does not find the protagonists of today's French novels rolling around in ditches, munching field grass. What is preserved, however, from the countryside aesthetic of a work like Molloy, is finding existential refuge from the world in the most unassuming of natural retreats, such as the embankments or ‘fossés’ overgrown with ‘genêts en fleur’ found along highways, or even, for Jean Rolin, in La Clôture (2002), just the precarious quietude of some forgotten ‘bout de terrain, si possible herbu’ (111) (‘bit of land, grassy if possible’) amidst the concrete and asphalt décor of Paris's boulevard périphérique. Depicted thus, the contemporary French novelistic countryside is never an ample realm unto itself, but rather a place of momentary respite from civilisation that still bears the marks of and is fairly well hemmed in on all sides by urbanisation itself.