This essay looks at the intertextual presence of French literature in Bolaño’s writings, which are famously global in their intersecting plots and cosmopolitan characters. With a focus on the contemporary urban experience, Bolaño elevates the Baudelairean flâneur motif to a global scale, and inherits the Surrealist topos of the city as a place of chance encounters. The quest for a missing or forgotten writer, a structuring device used over and over in Bolaño’s fictions, can be traced back to Surrealist aesthetics, and it also provides a serviceable image of a quest for the validation of narrative. We look at what Bolaño’s novels, in which“visceral realism” defeats the grand 19th-century principle of the well-constructed plot in favor of a loose stringing together of episodic lives, owe to the tradition of Marcel Schwob’s imaginary lives, to Georges Perec’s aesthetics of the collection, the list, and the “infra-ordinary,” and to more contemporary poets of documentary everydayness and small lives such as Pierre Michon and François Bon.

This chapter explores the novel-writing of the experimental writing collective the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo). Despite the seeming mismatch between the Oulipo's attachment to form and the perceived formlessness of the novel, many oulipians have experimented with writing novels. This chapter begins by considering how oulipians have re-invented the novel form via the transposition of structures and constraints from other genres and disciplines. It then reflects on the various functions of these structures and constraints arguing that, while some serve primarily as architectural devices or creative stimuli, others are intrinsically meaningful. In particular I reflect on the ways in which oulipian-authored novels explore the relationship between self and system, and between the individual and the collective. Indeed, oulipian-authored novels often bear the collective stamp of the Oulipo. As this chapter argues, the group has developed a compelling shared imaginary that marks its novelistic production and that raises questions concerning authorship and creative ownership. Lastly, this chapter considers the ways in which oulipian-authored novels frequently invite the reader into a literary game that draws out his or her own creative potential.

Histories of Holocaust consciousness sometimes begin with a chapter on forgetting and silence. Yet, if there was not in fact silence (as the preceding chapters have tried to show), why were so many convinced that there had been one? Psychiatry had an explanation ready to hand. The psychic trauma of the Holocaust had led to a repression of memory, and, now in the 1970s and 1980s, that repressed memory was at last boiling to the surface, helped along, of course, by the exertions of a new generation no longer in thrall to the kind of obfuscating stories that Gaullists and Communists had once told. How this psychiatric template emerged in the French context owed much of course to the work of child psychologists like Claudine Vegh but also something to the literary experiments of Romain Gary, Patrick Modiano, and Georges Perec. All three adapted and played with the template, as did Gary in La Danse de Gengis Cohn (1967), Modiano in La Place de l’étoile (1968), and Perec in W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris, 1975).