Metaphor used to belong to poetry. As a trope or figure, its scope in prose narrative is traditionally limited to an aspect of style. In a recent empirical study Gerard Steen sets out to prove that this commonly-held perception is misguided. In one of the tests devised by Steen a team of language experts were presented with a 25-line extract from Norman Mailer’sMiami and the Siege of Chicagoand asked to identify and isolate examples of metaphor. They agreed on nineteen cases.¹ That there should be such a concentration of metaphors in any small text, let alone one written...

There are perhaps too many texts in Tournier’s first published novel,Vendredi ou Les limbes du Pacifique: the presence of Daniel Defoe’sRobinson Crusoeas a powerful precursor-text remains a constant preoccupation throughout the narrative; the prelapsarian Tarot card preface provides a forestructure to the narrative proper and as such constitutes a predictive sequence, albeit in symbolic form; the Bible is an important resource for Robinson; the narration of his adventures on the island is animated by a series of transformations and renewals on varying scales forming a verbal edifice that seems to take its inspiration from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural...

In the 1970s two well-known French philosophers clashed swords. Theirquerelleconcerned the seemingly arcane issue of metaphoric reference. As we have seen, Paul Ricoeur argues convincingly inLa Métaphore vivethat metaphor is a cognitive tool, that it helps in certain circumstances to articulate our experience of the world. Ricoeur’s analysis is anchored to the established phenomenological precepts of Kant and Husserl, for in order that metaphor may refer, its transgressive character must ultimately be tamed by the master discourse of philosophy. However, according to Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive practice, the philosopher’s discourse is itself shot through with metaphor. It...

Tournier is a prominent media figure in France. In addition to his fictional output he is an accomplished essayist and expert on photography, and has contributed numerous press articles on subjects ranging from food, to German history, to arms sales. Just as the thematic content of some of his fiction has provoked hostility, so views that he has expressed in articles or during interviews have proved controversial. Inevitably therefore we are invited not only to read his work in the company of other Tournier critics, but also to situate it within the matrix of contemporary society. Tournier is not an...

Few critics have addressed seriously the role of the child in Tournier’s fiction. However, in his recent monograph David Gascoigne devotes an entire chapter to this, the most contentious issue in Tournier criticism. Gascoigne alights on a personal anecdote recorded at the start ofLe Vent Paracletin which Tournier relates the story of his grandfather who, as a six-year-old child at the time of the Prussian invasion of 1871, was made to hold up a heavy volume of music for the conductor of the German military band. The story seems to justify the placement of a typical Tournier epigraph...

The vituperative turn against naturalism and the nineteenth-century novel spearheaded by Alain Robbe-Grillet and other proponents of thenouveau romanhas contributed towards an insular vision of what constitutes the modern French novel. We can identify two main camps: the Flaubertians and the Sartreans. The former incorporate thenouveaux romanciersas well as ancillary figures such as Queneau, Duras and Perec, writers who in their vastly different ways strive for what a television pundit once described as the ‘heaven of pure style’. Existentialists, polemicists, women writers and many contemporary francophone writers rally to a different flag, which represents what may...