Chapter 5 - Lyrical Recovery and Return to the Ordinary

Summary

Ch 5: The fifth chapter is situated in contemporary times, centered on two recent novels that involve detailed description of the battlegrounds of the First World War. Jean Rouaud’s Les champs d’honneur and Jean Echenoz’s 14 feature two lyrical or quasi-lyrical passages relating the experience of trench warfare. I read these on the background of the tradition of lamentation, exemplified by a late medieval allegory on the English-French wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Rouaud allows a – once again ironic – lyric recovery to his protagonist who is transported back from the front to spend his last days in Tours. His writing recovers, also, a connection to layers of cultural tradition, allowing a rhetoric of praise independent of nationalist heroism. Echenoz touches at the end of these functions of the lyric, in a turn to a perspective entirely determined by ordinary life, here and now.