Proposal for What is the Contemporary?
Circumscribing the Contemporary: Reflections on Method
In a recent study about the ‘contemporary novel’ (Le Roman contemporain et la
problematicité du monde, 2010), influential French comparatist Jean Bessière identifies a
distinction between what he calls ‘the novel of the tradition of the novel’ of the 19th and 20th
centuries, including the postmodern, and the contemporary novel, taken in a global sense.
While he mentions dating the latter from 1980, he ultimately defines it through certain
characteristics of the narratives, rather than in chronological terms. By realizing an
‘anthropoïesis of transindividuality’ and offering a pluralist ontology, Bessière argues, the
contemporary novel opens a horizon for questioning without closing it with answers —
either in the realist manner (‘this is how it is’) or in the postmodern manner (‘there is
nothing outside the text’) — and fulfils a function of mediation between the reader and the
world. As a result, the novel achieves an epistemological and pragmatic pertinence which
distinguishes it from the former paradigms of unquestioned confidence in, or full rejection
of, representation.
In the process of elaborating these criteria, however, the study quickly turns from
description into an almost prescriptive argument as to how the novel ‘should be’. Under the
chronological label of the ‘contemporary’, Bessière lists features which characterize only a
rather small portion of the existing variety of novels in this period and suggests these books
to be not just representative of what is, but also exemplary of the ideal of the novel. In so
doing, he leaves entire clusters of post-1980 fiction out of consideration — such as a massive
production of autofiction in France — and refuses admittance to major authors and works
into the ‘contemporary’ — so we see for instance Jean Echenoz relegated to a nameless
limbo on the borderlands of the postmodern.
Bessière’s work illustrates two major pitfalls of any historical approach to literature, the
combined effect of which, in his case, is the strongly prescriptive flavour: (1) the vicious
circle of circumscribing a canon and identifying a trend or a period; and (2) the confusion
between the concepts of ‘period’ and ‘trend’. While there is no easy one-step solution to the
methodological dilemmas these raise, the bad circle can nevertheless be avoided and turned
into a productive spiral, minimizing the reductive or prescriptive effects. Based on the
analysis of Bessière’s approach, this paper proposes to outline such a viable method for
addressing the ‘in-progress’ category of the contemporary.
Erika Fülöp
Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow
Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology
University of Hamburg
fuloperika@hotmail.com