Jean Echenoz's 14: Renewing the Historical Novel

Extract

[...] We see death falling on the trenchmate right next to you. " In this example, the use of would have excluded the reader from the situation faced by these men. We live and feel more strongly the circumstances of the living conditions of the poilus." Thus, through the entire set of these procedures, Jean Echenoz includes the reader in the situation of the conscripts of the Great War. The reader perceives an impression of reality, allowing this work to be inscribed as a historical novel. [...]

[...] The author distinguishes himself from the historical novel, in this novel by the way he tells the story of the Great War through the account of the lived experience of the conscripts, but also through a sometimes bitter or ironic tone. Thus, it is relevant to question the process used by Jean Echenoz to renew the historical novel, in a more contemporary form. We will thus see the different writing procedures of the author, in order to then highlight the use of irony in this historical novel, in order to finally show that this book stands as a renewal of the historical novel. [...]

[...] To do this, he will use a cinematographic technique: the focalization coupled with a fluctuating rhythm. It is thus that certain chapters strive to describe situations quite long, it is the case of the first chapter which tells the moment of the mobilization call of the men. The entire novel has a different rhythm, allowing to retrace the entire period of war without sinking into a long story. For example, to describe the situation of the women left behind during the war, the author intercuts the war story with the description of the situations experienced by these women. [...]

[...] Anchored in historical reality positions itself first as a historical novel. The main bibliographic resource of this work are the travel notebooks of a conscript of the Great War whose memoirs transcribe the daily life from 1914 to 1919. This novel is therefore inscribed in a historical reality that is that of the First World War. It is thus that Echenoz delivers the daily life of five characters, conscripts of the Great War, marching for miles without end, the perversity of bombings in the trenches. [...]

[...] In fact, at the death of Charles Sèze during the war, his nephew Charles was born on November We then see an allusion to the rebirth of the soldier, measured by the Second World War, of which the newborn Charles will be an adult and recruitable in 1939. III. Through all these processes, Jean Echenoz impels a renewal of the historical novel. It is by choosing a subject that has been treated many times that Jean Echenoz tries to dust off the historical narrative as known. The author responds to the question of the realization of a story of a period that has now passed a decade. [...]