Manet van Montfrans, ‘Jeux de mots, lieux de mémoire. Sur Parc Sauvage et autres récits brefs de Jacques Roubaud’.
In Parc Sauvage (2008), a seemingly simple story by Jacques Roubaud, one of the favourite
games of the two protagonists, who are living under the threat of German raids, is to
communicate secret messages. The arrangement of letters, syllables, or words by which
these messages are summarized at the end of the chapter proves to obey Oulipian rules.
Whereas the reader who is familiar with Roubaud recognizes certain facts of his life, the
text cannot be read as an autobiographical tale of childhood. Comparing Parc Sauvage
with other accounts of the same period reveals that Roubaud devotes himself to a memorial ambulation in which writing his memories of childhood makes them constantly
change shape. This approach reveals how in Roubaud the taste of Oulipian forms or other
formal systems exceeds the scope of playful experimentation.
Manet van Montfrans, ‘Jeux de mots, lieux de mémoire. Sur Parc Sauvage et autres récits brefs de Jacques Roubaud’. In A.E. Schulte Nordholt & P.J. Smith (éds.), Jeu de Mots/ Enjeux littéraires Jeux de mots – enjeux littéraires, de François Rabelais à Richard Millet | Brill/Rodopi, Essais en hommage à Sjef Houppermans,. Leiden: Brill, Faux titre ( 2018), 160-173.
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