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Document Details :

Title: Gerard Walschap en de nouveau roman
Subtitle: Over cellen, skeletten en eunuchen
Author(s): VERVAECK, Bart
Journal: Spiegel der Letteren
Volume: 50    Issue: 1   Date: 2008   
Pages: 41-70
DOI: 10.2143/SDL.50.1.2033301

Abstract :
This article tries to disentangle the intricate network of relations that tied the Flemish novelist Gerard Walschap to the French nouveau roman. In 1966 and 1968 Walschap – at the time an established, almost classical writer – published two novels that were said to be parodies of the nouveau roman. The article first establishes some crucial characteristics of the nouveau roman, thereby distinguishing between the phenomenological version of Robbe-Grillet and the structuralist variety of Ricardou. Secondly, these characteristics are examined in the two novels, by looking at the fictional world, the narrative organization, and the metafictional statements. It turns out that Walschap restricts himself to the phenomenological version and that he dismisses the total subjectivity and the constructivist form of the nouveau roman. He does adopt some aspects, but transforms them until they become part of his own humanitarian expressionism. This results in an ambiguous and intriguing pair of novels that seem to hate what they partly embrace. Finally, Walschap’s non-fictional texts about the nouveau roman are analyzed. Those texts are less ambiguous. Walschap completely and polemically rejects the French innovation and the Flemish gatekeepers (Paul de Wispelaere and Hector-Jan Loreis) who introduced the nouveau roman in the Flemish literary field of the sixties.

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