A self-destructing narration. The egocentricity of language, transcendence of poetry, and psychoanalysis in P. J. Jouve’s novel Hecate

Abstract

Hitherto untranslated into Russian, P. J. Jouve’s Hecate (1928) not only interprets myths about the mysterious Greek goddess, doing it in the guise of a love-and-crime chronicle, but also represents the author’s unique attempt to construct a work of fiction on the principle of permanent self-destruction. Y. Muratov sets out to examine the novel’s plot and structure in the first study of its kind. According to the scholar, Jouve, in full adherence to modernist laws and simultaneously experimenting with them, purposely destroys his narrative, turning the destruction into a method: just as the characters in Hecate cannot be sure who they are and try to see themselves in other people’s reflections, the reader is deprived of the means to tell who they are reading about — neither quotation marks, nor the dialogue form, nor context offer any point of reference. Interestingly, Jouve does not play with grammatical person in order to shift the viewpoint of the narration, as in ordinary narrative practice, but to dismantle classical narration and immerse it in the process of creation, luring the reader into a kind of Plato’s cave of linguistically symbolical metafiction.