Jacques Jouet and the Literature of Exhaustion

In the last two decades, Jacques Jouet has patiently constructed one of the most astonishing bodies of work in contemporary French literature. During that time, he has published some 40 volumes in a variety of literary genres. By turn a poet, a novelist, a playwright, a short story writer, an essayist, a lexicographer, and a member of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo), Jouet never seems to rewrite himself–and such a consideration alone would serve to distinguish him from many of his peers. As diverse as they otherwise may be, one finds in each of Jouet’s books a vast literary curiosity, a deep impulse toward innovation, and a will to test the possibilities of literature through the elaboration of what may appear in retrospect to be an evolving catalogue of the various forms available to a writer today. In short, Jacques Jouet is an experimentalist in the noblest sense of that word, a writer whose work comes to us fresh, each book a “new” book, all of them clearly the product of a literary imagination animated by a keen, ludic intelligence. Having followed his work closely for many years, I also believe it is legitimate to suggest that Jouet is a man of letters (as antiquated as that term may sound to our postmodern ear). He belongs thus to a species that is gravely endangered in our time and latitude; and consequently it is in an ecological spirit, conservationist but not conservative, that I shall present this account of his work.