The Uses of Brevity: Valuing the “No More to Be Said” in Jean Echenoz’s Plan of Occupancy and the Transcontinental “Critical Novel”

Abstract

This paper examines the value of brevity in contemporary French novels, particularly Jean Echenoz’s Plan of Occupancy, in relation to the broader context of transcontinental fiction. Its central claim is that the stylistic minimalism of such fiction informs a “minoritarian” subjectivity that has both aesthetic and political implications. Additionally, I discuss, in brief, other texts that are central to this issue including Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist, an example of an American novel that not only limits itself to a page count far below the average in American fiction, but presents a style that is indicative of precisely the kind of minimalism that is accepted and, indeed, celebrated by DeLillo’s French contemporaries.