N° 30, 2025 – The Spy Novel, edited by Chloé Chaudet and Alexandre Gefen
Plan
Haut de page“J’aimais Malko, le prince espion et pornographe de Gérard de Villiers, celui qui défendait l’Occident contre les Rouges”, writes Philippe Lançon in Le Lambeau, when his injury forces him to take refuge in his memories. But few French-language critics dare, as he does, to mention Gérard de Villiers (the creator of SAS) or Jean and Josette Bruce (and their hero OSS 117). The spy novel is not limited to these well-known examples. In fact, it is an extremely popular, culturally important and inventive genre. It may be less canonized than the detective story or the thriller, but its origins are no less noble (The Old Testament, The Odyssey, The Art of War). And one can argue, as Luc Boltanski does in Énigmes et complots. Une enquête à propos d’enquêtes (Gallimard, 2012), that it engages in a hermeneutic of the world and of the book which is fundamental to Western modernity, or, as Peter Szendy writes in Sur écoute. Esthétique de l’espionnage (Minuit, 2007), that it exposes original modes of perception of socio-historical evolutions.
Admittedly, the rather limited interest in this narrative form in France stems from the fact that its manifestations are more widespread in the English-speaking world where it originated. In Great Britain, from the outset, highly subtle British fictions (Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, 1907) went alongside more codified suspense stories (John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, 1915), before cinema got involved (the many films inspired by Graham Greene, Ian Fleming or John Le Carré, in addition to Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptations). Nevertheless, even before Pierre Nord, often considered “the father of the French spy novel”, police spies were already obsessing Balzac, Stendhal and Dumas. They were also central characters in the stories by Paul D’Ivoi, Gaston Leroux and Maurice Leblanc (L’Éclat d’obus, 1916), that reflected the climate of the First World War. Julien Gracq’s Le Rivage des Syrtes (1951) turned espionage into poetry, while in Les Gommes (1953), Robbe-Grillet set up a “Bureau des enquêtes”, a kind of counter-espionage service, to deconstruct the codes of the genre.
An interest in the motif of espionage is obvious in contemporary French literature. Adrien Bosc, Frédérik Tristan, Olivier Guez, François-Henri Désérable, Antoine Bello, Karine Tuil and Pierre Assouline told the stories of real or fake spies. In Mathias Énard’s Zone and Boussole, the characters are not so far removed from those by John Le Carré. The same is true of Olivier Rolin’s Le Météorologue and Patrick Deville’s Taba-Taba. After Robbe-Grillet’ s last book (Djinn ou La Reprise) and Échenoz (Les Grandes Blondes, Envoyée spéciale), the theme continued to fascinate the Éditions de Minuit: e.g. the narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s La Clé USB, who becomes a spy in spite of himself, or the spies seeking to mitigate the impact of a subversive work of art in Julia Deck’s Sigma. In Le Vingtième siècle, Aurélien Bellanger deals with the French counter-espionage investigation into the “Benjamin” group, while Laurent Binet’s HHhH and Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski evoke infiltrators during the Second World War. The narrator of Abel Quentin’s Le Voyant d’Étampes uncovers the dark machinations of the clash of the Blocs. Giuliano da Empoli’s Le Mage du Kremlin deals with a master spy in contemporary Russia.
Out of Europe, several literary works take up the ideal of the spy as a “paladin of the West”, as studied by Érik Neveu (L’Idéologie dans le roman d’espionnage, Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1985). In Mathématiques congolaises, In Koli Jean Bofane invents a counter-espionage operation targeting the French State that is about to denounce the Congo-RDC government’s human rights abuses to the UN. In Kamal Jann, Dominique Eddé imagines the CIA’s manipulation of an Islamist militant’s brother, in a work that confronts the figure of the spy with that of the terrorist. Cave 72 by Fann Attiki reconfigures the topos of the Western spy, showing in a dizzying narrative how a dictatorial state (Congo-Brazzaville?) keeps watch over its own people.
Echoing Georges Perec’s « 53 jours », where the motif of espionage is woven into the multi-layered narrative of a textual manipulation, contemporary literature explores the multiple articulations between espionage and writing. In Jean Rolin’s Le Traquet Kurde or Ormuz, the investigative writer runs the risk of being mistaken for a spy. Jean-Claude Kauffmann is not far from this position during his investigations. This is undoubtedly because, like the spy, the writer is an individual who possesses a privileged knowledge of humanity and an ability to construct legends. Hence, perhaps, a renewed tendency for espionage to function as a metaphor - for amorous jealousy or voyeurism, but also for investigation into other people’s intimate territory, in particular through the digital world (e.g. Camille Laurens’ Celle que vous croyez, or Jean-Jacques Pelletier’s novels, that describe our surveillance societies). Espionage can even become a metaphor for literary introspection in general (“Grâce à ce fantastique espionnage qu’est le monologue intérieur, nous avons énormément appris sur ce que nous sommes”, notes Milan Kundera in L’Art du roman), and it’s no surprise to see symbolic evocations of espionage flourishing in Régis Jauffret’s Microfictions. It could be used as a metaphor for literature itself, if we think of Antoine Volodine’s spy-authors in Écrivains. Doesn’t the narrator of Houellebecq’s La Possibilité d’une île describe himself as “a kind of old spy of humanity”? At a certain level of generality, isn’t literature mainly concerned with information and code, and isn’t every novel a kind of spy novel?
The contemporary avatars of the spy novel, its poetic resources and socio-critical stakes, as well as its suggestive power, are the focus of our reflections, whether on thrillers (DOA, Éric Paulin, Catherine Fradier), historical fiction (Marc Dugain, Louis Hamelin), reflexive and experimental narratives (Philippe Vasset, Abdourahman Waberi), or spy story as a metaphor. Proposals for articles taking a comparative and/or transhistorical approach may be accepted, provided they focus on the language and period of writing covered by the Revue de fixxion française contemporaine.
We welcome original contributions on the following issues (not exclusive):
- Who are the (new) characters in today’s spy novels? Do they reveal significant changes in relation to the sometimes heroic, sometimes ordinary, or even mediocre spies who are at the center of the canonical English-language stories or French novels of the 1950s to 1980s? How does the spy novel, at the turn of the 21st century, take up the new figure of the “whistle-blower”?
- What does the spy novel tell us about the task of writing and its relationship to society? About reading and criticism? Could its models and vocabulary be an inspiration for literary theory, and if so, how?
- What are the current specificities of the French-language spy novel? Do they lie solely in a greater reflexivity?
- The inflection and subversion of codes founding certain “popular” genres is a widespread phenomenon in experimental literature. What would be their specific features within spy fiction? Do they help explain why the spy novel is less represented in French than in English?
- What form and meaning do parodies of the spy novel and of related figures take in contemporary literature?
- How can we define the aesthetics of “ultra-contemporary” espionage after the fall of Communism? In which works? Does that aesthetics imply new considerations on the importance of the media in disclosing information a priori inaccessible to civilian populations?
- What has become of the gendered topoi of early spy novels? We still observe a clear predominance of male characters (and authors), but what about contemporary variations on the virile representations that informed earlier works - where they were based, among other things, on the revival of the codes of the adventure novel? And what about today’s female figures? Are there any resurgences, updates or subversions of erotic representations of the spy à la Mata Hari?
- Do contemporary narratives borrow from spy movies, whose development, concomitant with that of the spy novel, has given rise to increasingly transmedial images and narrative structures? What about serial forms of narration, whose importance is reflected, for instance, in the fact that Le Bureau des légendes (Éric Rochant, 2015-2020) is one of the most exported French TV series in the world?
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Deadline: Juin 1, 2024. Proposals for contributions (approximately 300 words), covering French-language literatures, should be sent in French or English to fixxion21@gmail.com (an assistant will register you as the author and send you the journal’s MSWord template).
After notification of the acceptance of the abstract, the text of the final article (entered in the Word template and respecting the styles and instructions of the Editorial Protocol) must be sent to fixxion21@gmail.com before December 15, 2024 for evaluation and proofreading by the members of the Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine/Critical Review of Contemporary French Fixxion.
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Suggested bibliography:
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Alix, Florian, “Le terroriste et la culture : roman d’espionnage et intertextualité savante chez Wajdi Mouawad, Abdourahman A. Waberi et Dominique Eddé”, in Figurer le terroriste. La littérature au défi, eds Élara Bertho, Catherine Brun et Xavier Garnier, Paris, Karthala, “Lettres du Sud”, 2021, p. 231-242.
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Bérody, Laurence ; Poirot, Jérome, “Roman d’espionnage”, Dictionnaire du renseignement, eds. Hugues Moutouh et Jérôme Poirot, Paris, Perrin, 2018, p. 666-677.
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Bleton, Paul, Les Anges de Machiavel. Essai sur le roman d’espionnage, Québec, Nuit Blanche, 1994.
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Bloom, Clive, Spy Thrillers. From Buchan to Le Carré, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990.
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Boltanski, Luc, Énigmes et complots. Une enquête à propos d’enquêtes, Paris, Gallimard, “NRF Essais”, 2012.
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Boucher, François-Emmanuël ; David, Sylvain ; Prévost, Maxime (eds.), dossier “Espionnage, complots, secrets d’État : l’imaginaire de la terreur”, Études littéraires, vol. 46/3, automne 2015.
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Hepburn, Allan, “World Citizens. Espionage Literature in the Cold War”, in Andrew Hammond (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, p. 303-322.
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Midal, Alexandra ; Orléan, Matthieu (dir.), Top Secret. Cinéma & espionnage, Paris, Flammarion, “La Cinémathèque française”, 2022.
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Neveu, Érik, “Trente ans de littérature d’espionnage en France (1950-1980)”, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 10, avril-juin 1986, p. 51-65.
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Neveu, Érik, L’Idéologie dans le roman d’espionnage, Paris, Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, “Académique”, 1985.
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Schweighäuser, Jean-Paul, Panorama du roman d’espionnage contemporain, Paris, L’instant, 1986.
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Szendy, Peter, Sur écoute. Esthétique de l’espionnage, Paris, Minuit, 2007.
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Veraldi, Gabriel, Le Roman d’espionnage, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, “Que sais-je ?”, 1983.