Jean Ricardou (17 June 1932, Cannes — 23 July 2016, Cannes)See the official Jean Ricardou Foundation web site: https://jeanricardou.org/ was a French writer and theorist.Childhood in Cannes during the Occupation: see https://jeanricardou.org/edifications-minuscules-en-guise-de-colloque-a-la-gloire-de-leon-noel/un-ricardou-fabuliste-prologue/ He joined the Tel Quel editorial board in 1962, writing for the review until 1971. Between 1961 and 1984 he published three novels, a collection of short stories, four books of critical theory and a "mix" of fiction and theory, whilst being the main theorist of the French New Novel literary movement before devoting his work, as of 1985, almost exclusively to the invention and development of a new science of writing: textics.« Textique » [archive], jeanricardou.org/. See the Introduction by Daniel Bilous, in Jean Ricardou, Du Nouveau Roman à la Textique, Hermann, 2018, p. 7-14.
Jean Ricardou's complete works (L'Intégrale) are posthumously published by the Belgian publisher Les Impressions nouvelles.
From teaching to writing Ricardou always took a radical stand against a biographical approach to writing. As he states in a short biographic note at the beginning of the “Postface” to his radio play, “Communications”, in Le Théâtre des Métamorphoses:It must be said: however accurate, however factual such details might be, and despite their compliance with accepted autobiographical practice, they offer the reader strictly nothing of interest.“Il faut le reconnaître: si exactes soient-elles, si conformes à celles dont les autobiographies ouvertement se contentent, telles indications, prises en elles-mêmes, ne présentent, pour le lecteur, strictement aucun intérêt.” Le Théâtre des métamorphoses, Le Seuil, Paris 1982, p. 186. After graduating from the Paris École Normale d'Instituteurs (teachers' college) in 1953, he taught reading and writing in a boys' primary school until 1961, then at a boys' high school in Paris where he also taught literature, history, science, and geography until 1977,See: https://jeanricardou.org/edifications-minuscules-en-guise-de-colloque-a-la-gloire-de-leon-noel/un-hussard-de-la-republique-prologue/ and finally as visiting professor where he gave courses and conferences on his theory of the French New Novel in universities worldwide. However, as his teaching left him little time for his own writing, he resigned from the French school system in 1977 and only still accepted the occasional conference. In 1973 he obtained a degree in Modern Literature at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes), then in 1975 a “Doctorat de 3e cycle, Littérature française”, and in 1982 a “Doctorat d'État ès-lettres et sciences humaines” (Toulouse-Le Mirail). From 1980 to 2016, he assumed part-time work for the International Cultural Center at Cerisy-la-Salle (France) as programs and publications advisor.
Although he was already writing in primary school,One of his essays, written at age 11, “Un croûton de pain”, about his childhood in Cannes under the German Occupation, was awarded first prize for composition in 1943, and his picture was in the local newspaper. his literary career began in 1955 when, intrigued by an unfavorable review judging Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel Le Voyeur incomprehensible, he decided to model his own writing on what was then just beginning to be known as the “Nouveau Roman”. His first novel L'Observatoire de Cannes was published in 1961 by Editions de Minuit. In 1966, his second novel, La Prise de Constantinople (Minuit, 1965), was awarded the Feneon prize for literature.
Ricardou published his first book of critical theory, Problèmes du Nouveau Roman (1967), in the “Tel Quel” collection (Le Seuil, Paris). He co-directed the first major conference devoted to the French New Novel at Cerisy, attended by the main new novelists, and then directed the conferences and debates on Claude Simon (1974) and on Robbe-Grillet (1975), with the participation of the two writers.
In 1985, whilst teaching a seminar at the International College of Philosophy (Paris), he devised a new theory of writing: la textique (textics). From 1989 until 2015, he conducted an annual seminar on the subject at Cerisy.
His writing is characterized by his meticulous and often poetic style, and by his determination to provide a coherent articulation between three activities usually kept separate: “practice” (fiction writing), theory (of writing and the operations involved in writing) and education (as a schoolteacher and subsequently as visiting university professor).
Fiction The importance of Ricardou's theoretical works tends to distract attention from his fiction (novels and short stories). Nevertheless, a statement he made many times throughout his lifetime should be emphasized: the reason he devised his theory was to understand the fiction which came, partially beyond his conscious determination, from the act of writing itself. In his case, writing involved certain principles of generation and selection that he developed and amplified (and renamed) throughout the years, and his theoretical work was mainly based on his experiments in fiction writing, i.e. discovering what could be generated by the deliberate integration of certain formal procedures and constraints. Such supplementary structures, far from stifling inventiveness, actually provide stimulation to go far beyond that which, without these formal rules and principles, he might initially have imagined. The following quotation, from Révélations minuscules, says as much (and more). Instead of an approximate and inadequate translation, one might propose as a paraphrase a sentence from Ricardou's 1971 conference at Cerisy, “Birth of a Fiction”: “The generative operations of similitude and of selection by overdetermination, far from restricting a supposed creative aptitude, are in fact the machinery whereby an entire production of elements and relations becomes possible”:
Ce que personne, de nos jours, ne devrait méconnaître, (...), c'est avec quelle force les directives d'écriture, funambulesques maintes fois quelques-unes il est vrai, loin d'interdire, ainsi que les naïfs le croient, les mouvements de la pensée, lors confondue sans doute avec le vague à l'âme, savent offrir à l'invention, au contraire, et parce qu'elles lui posent, tout simplement, de très exacts problèmes, les meilleures des chances. (...). Mieux: telles supplémentaires structures, non seulement elles permettent d'obtenir, et beaucoup plus qu'on ne l'avoue, ce que fors elles on n'eût jamais conçu (et c'est pourquoi mieux vaut, que n'a-t-il susurré (si un temps suffisant, du moins, m'est consenti, je le ferai paraître un soir pour Mallarmé), de préférence à tout pyramidal recensement d'un univers imaginaire, fournir la stricte analyse des matérielles relations par lesquelles un poète imagine), mais encore, tel est le dos caché du mécanisme (...), elles conduisent quelquefois à produire des idées strictement étrangères, peut-être, à ce qu'on se figure avoir émis.Ricardou, Jean (1988). Révélations minuscules, en guise de préface, à la gloire de Jean Paulhan, added to the second edition of Révolutions minuscules, Paris/Brussels 1988, Les impressions nouvelles.His earliest writing, both prose and poetrySee “Textes de jeunesse” in Intégrale Jean Ricardou tome 1, Les Impressions Nouvelles, Brussels, 2018 (now archived at the IMEC] Institute for the Memory of Contemporary Writing, Abbaye d’Ardenne, France), confirms, if not the predominance, at least the precedence of his fiction over theory. Some of these early writings, surrealist in style, were published in 1956 in L’Herne, a mimeographed avant-garde review edited by Dominique de Roux. However, impressed as he was in 1955 by Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel Le Voyeur, then by Michel Butor’s L’emploi du temps or Claude Simon’s Le Vent:
Ricardou soon adopted and considerably adapted the model of the early “Nouveau Roman”, with its non-realist, “creative” use of description, the interest of which, Ricardou put it, in a much-cited formula, lay less in “l’écriture d’une aventure” than in “l'aventure d’une écriture”. It was a technique, with voyeuristic male fantasies to boot, that Ricardou quickly made his own, and one he develops, with more rigor and ingenuity than ever apparent in his mentor, in his first novel, L’Observatoire de Cannes (Minuit, 1961). The inverse relationship between writing and referentiality thus laid bare (not for nothing did he call literary “description” a kind of “strip-tease”) soon became one of the hallmarks of his writing. Traditional plot and character, conspicuous by their absence, were replaced by an intricate quasi-musical web of textual and intertextual variations on selected motifs.Review by Leslie Hill, University of Warwick, in FRENCH STUDIES: A Quarterly Review, Volume 74, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 314-316, Published by Oxford University Press
La Prise de Constantinople The many favorable reviews of L’Observatoire de Cannes encouraged Ricardou to compose a second, much more ambitious novel, La Prise de Constantinople, which was awarded the Fénéon prize for literature in 1966.
The book was an innovation even for the New Novel movement. To start with, the titles on the front and back cover were not the same (La prise/La prose de Constantinople), inaugurating the wordplay that would characterize the entire novel, whose pages and chapters were unnumbered. Then, assuming Flaubert's project of “writing a book about nothing”, it began literally, as did the poem “Salut” (“Rien, cette écume, vierge vers”) that inaugurated Mallarmé's collected Poésies, with the word “rien”. As he explained:
Nothing, one day, seemed more imperative to me than the project whose fiction would be constructed not as the representation of some preexistent entity, real or imaginary, but rather on the basis of certain specific mechanisms of generation and selection. The principle of selection may be called overdetermination. It requires that every element in the text have at least two justifications. (...) Elsewhere I gave the name generator of elements for a fiction to the couple formed by a base and an operation. The operations are numerous; I do not propose to list them here. (...) As for the base, it may be either a single word or a group of words. Since the book is supposed to be constructed without the establishment of any preexistent entity, what generative base can be chosen? It goes without saying that nothing is suitable, and that the book must be built upon nothing.Ricardou, Jean, trans. Erica Freiberg. “Birth of a Fiction”. Critical Inquiry, vol. 4, no. 2, The University of Chicago Press, 1977, pp. 221–30, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342960
Called by Lynn Higgins a superbook which “not only exploits its points of departure (puzzles, material givens of the cover design, generative wordplay), but also explores the enigmas of its own evolution and takes responsibility for meanings produced”,Lynn A. Higgins, Parables of Theory - Jean Ricardou's Metafiction, Summa Publications Inc., Birmingham, Alabama, 1984, pp. 93 sq La Prise de Constantinople led the way toward a new kind of composition: the polydiegetic novel, i.e. “a text that combines different “stories” taking place in what are a priori incompatible space-time worlds.Michel Sirvent, De Tel Quel au Nouveau Roman textuel, Rodophi, Amsterdam-Atlanta, 2001, “Un roman polydiégétique”, pp. 104-120
It also devised and endlessly refined a procedure that fascinated Ricardou all his life, from when, at 5, in his first year at school, the teacher had the class sing canons, and the staggered repetition was a revelation, as he later said: