Excerpt from "Composition Discomposed" by Jean Ricardou, translated by Erica Freiberg:

On the fictional level, La Route des Flandres deploys a world in the process of complete disintegration. The manifestly privileged situation is the debacle of the French army in 1940 in which a number of the novel's protagonists are involved: George, the narrator; his cousin, Captain de Reixach; Iglesia, previously the Captain's jockey, now his orderly; Blum, Wack, and their horses. The havoc wrought by the military debacle can be subdivided into five categories.

With the dissociation and decimation of the army...and the disintegration of the discipline which had consolidated it...an entire military order is in the course of demolition.

The breakdown of the military organization is accompanied by a parallel dissolution of the social order. Scattered along the roads, the civilians have lost their essential function, their trade. And, in an incident which occurs in front of the captain, when a peasant threatens the deputy mayor with his hunting rifle, we detect a direct reversal of the civic order.

In the mechanical order, the all but dismembered automobiles...and the dismantlement of their motors contribute to the general tide of delapidation and decay.

The spatial order, represented here by the traditional military space, endowed with significance and hierarchically divided into front and rear, becomes depolarized with the disappearance of the battle lines and the inextricable entanglement of the two armies...

The temporal order, the chronological arrangement of events, is subject to a similar vitiation.

Jean Ricardou is equally well known for his fiction, including L'Observatoire de Cannes (Les Editions de Minuit, 1961), La Prise de Constantinople (Minuit, 1965), Les Lieux-dits (Gallimard, 1969), and his criticism, including Problemes du Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1967), Pour une Theorie du Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1971), and Le Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1973)."ARTISTS ON ART: Birth of a Fiction" appeared in the Winter 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. Erica Freiberg regularly translates Jean Ricardou's works. She holds degrees in French and Italian, philosophy and modern literature from the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and the University of Geneva.

© 1976 by The University of Chicago. All excerpts appear in Critical Inquiry, Volume 3, Number 1 (Autumn 1976). This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or reduplication of this text in other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.

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