The Novel of Adventure and the Adventure of the Novel: L’Équipée Malaise by Jean Echenoz

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse the employment and transgression of generic norms in the  contemporary French novel on the basis of the fiction of Jean Echenoz, a major figure in modern French literature. A story of unfulfilled love and unsuccessful plot, L’Équipée malaise is first of all an unconventional text which rejects conventions and subverts the habitual mode of reading. In his re-writing of the adventure novel Echenoz does not naively imitate the generic conventions or write a simple parody. Only occasionally employing its staple motifs and characteristic scenes, he creates an unusual novel, which is simultaneously an inverted reflection of the genre and a transgression of its boundaries. By juxtaposing a stereotypical story with nomadic narration based on digressions, repetitions and numerous plot twists, he turns the novel of adventure into “the adventure of writing” which offers the reader an intellectual journey into the world of fiction, whose norms have been subverted.