From the “Original” Island as “Second Origin”: The Evolution of the Imaginary of the Island in the Writing of Jean Echenoz

Abstract

The following study analyses the representations of insular spaces in Jean Echenoz’s most prominent novels and their significations within the literary imaginary, on manifold levels of interpretation. Insularity traverses Echenoz’s literature under various forms and formulas, embedded in specific structures, symptomatic especially for two of his novels, namely Le Méridien de Greenwich (1979) and Nous trois (1992). Although perceived rather as an “impassive” author, initially assigned to postmodernism, Echenoz is no less prone to the essential solitude of the human being and, at the same time, to possible means of compensation. In his fiction, the island is not only a map-drawing reference point, but also the landmark of an inward geography, invested with ontological valences. It represents a transitive, isomorphic space, a passage and a limit beyond which everything that is immediately given becomes the object of doubt and thus the object of conscience. But the island also reveals space and acts as a reprieving place in the space-generating voyage: a sort of “transcendental space”, dimension that I endeavour to explore. This paper aims to render the turning of the space into an object of reflection in Jean Echenoz’s novels, advancing a many-sided approach: semantic, semiological, phenomenological and narrative.