32 Fictions July 2003

BACKWARDS IN MODERNITY
The end of representation in recent works by Emmanuel Hocquard

Charles Grivel

Portuguese

The feeling of fiction among the Moderns, and its extension, is the main subject of this essay. «Modern», in literature, is a book that questions its nature as book, as well as the reasons that have led the one who signs it to write it. This postulate is corroborated in two recent works by Emmanuel Hocquard (Le commanditaire [1993] and Le voyage à Reykjavik [1997]),that have as a distinguishing feature the conjunction between photography and text in search of the object of its observation. Far from bolstering the desire of representation that drives the narrator, the images in the book lead that desire to emptiness. «Backwards in modernity», as Benjamin’s Angel, such is the strategy of these books, without leading to melancholy, because they make their insignificant object fully recognized in its form.