Readerly Challenges in Marie Darrieussecq’s Twenty-First-Century Texts

For the past twenty years, Marie Darrieussecq has been a constant presence on the French literary scene, marking the rentrées littéraires, prompting significant interest from academic, critical, and media milieux. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the reading dynamic encouraged by the Darrieussecquian aesthetic universe, and to evaluate its potential impact on self-other relations. By reading four of Darrieussecq’s twenty-first-century texts together – Le Bébé (2002), Tom est mort (2007), Clèves (2011), and Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes (2013) – this chapter examines the main challenges and tasks facing the reader. Some of these include: the need to share meaning creation with others; the need to navigate a liminal space between trust and distrust; the need to make creative use of the ambiguities raised by discours indirect libre; and the need to come to terms with the impossibility of exhausting all intertexts. In an effort to overstep the diegetic/extra-diegetic boundary, these challenges and tasks will be read from the perspective of the encounter with the other.