A. Gefen : “Hasard et littérature contemporaine / Chance and Contemporary Literature”

Quelques pistes en trois entrées, des formes les plus fortes à la simple thématisation :

1. Hasard et narration : le hasard comme processus créatif, la performance du hasard dans des poétiques spécifiques : dans la tradition oulipienne ou dans celle de dispositifs contemporain, création de machines textuelles à faire intervenir le hasard dans le récit. Entreprises renouvelées par l’intervention de communautés numériques et l’art relationnel et participatif. Autre nouvel horizon : les agentivités non humaines, l’écriture post-créative des intelligences artificielles. Roubaud, néo-oulipiens, romans numériques expérimentaux, dispositif à la frontière de l’art moderne, littérature conceptuelle.

2. Hasard et complexité : hasard comme forme rêvée par le récit : poétique de la complexité effet de hasard comme effet de la narration complexe ; figuration du hasard comme projet cognitif ; hasard comme condition de l’homme moderne ; sensibilité à la globalisation, aux interactions innombrables permises par le numérique, aux fractures et feuilletages temporels : romans mondes, romans choraux, romans sommes illustrant le croisement des représentations et des consciences, l’enchevêtrement de déterminismes trop complexes pour être saisis et tentant restituer l’ivresse d’un monde multi-dimensionnel. Rolin, Mauvignier, Bon, Kérangal, Énard.

3. Hasard et romanesque : hasard comme thème, la mise en scène de l’aléa, du hasard, de l’accident, de l’incertitude ; contre le storytelling, contre les mécanismes d’exposition et l’hyper-rationalisme, exhibition d’une appétence pour la sérendipité, la poésie des rencontres, l’errance des enquêtes, le pouvoir suggestif de l’étrangeté des phénomènes ; dans la tradition de Nadja, réinvestissement de l’aura, du kairos, des correspondances, de la psychologie des profondeurs. Carrère, Modiano, Blonde, etc. Mais aussi tragique : les attentats ou autres formes de négativité : Le Chat de Schrödinger de Philippe Forest.

Chance at the dawn of the 21^st century find itself at the intersection of geo-economic globalization, an ecological crisis that radically complicates different forms of determinism and resists both interpretation and transformation, and mathematical tools of unprecedented power. Indeed, datafication and statistical analysis have made dazzling progress in their arrest and inspection of human liberty, at a time when the world order has been destabilized and the anthropocene has become uncontrollable. One might think of the irony with which Kant regarded the idea that “we could calculate a human being’s conduct for the future with as much certainty as a lunar or solar eclipse,” but at a time when behavior is subject to massive digital documentation, along with cognitive science, free will seems to be shrinking, leading literature into an organized defense of chance conceived as a place of freedom against measurable regularities. Nature frightens man with its catastrophic deregulation, and paradoxically a world is born that is ultra-modeled by mathematics. We feel that literature emphasizes individual arbitrariness or improbable bifurcations of reality, rather than erasing singularities in favor of types, as it has been able to do in the past. It has seized on the now rather old wish expressed by Marcel Schwob: “Art stands in opposition to general ideas, describes only the individual, desires only the unique. It does not classify; it declassifies.”

Possible approaches, grouped into three topics, to consider this theme, from its strongest forms to a simple thematization:

1. Chance and narration: chance as a creative process, the performance of chance in specific poetics. The creation of textual machines involves chance in narrative, whether in the Oulipian tradition or in that of contemporary devices. This undertaking is renewed thanks to the intervention of digital communities and relational and participatory art. Another new horizon: non-human agency and post-creative writing based on artificial intelligence. Roubaud, neo-Oulipians, experimental digital novels, devices bordering on modern art, conceptual literature.

2. Chance and complexity: chance as a form dreamed of by the story. The poetics of complexity, the effect of chance as an effect of complex narration; the representation of chance as a cognitive project; chance as a condition of modern man; sensitivity to globalization, to the innumerable interactions made possible by digital technology, to temporal fractures and skimming: world novels, choral novels, sum novels illustrating the intersection of representations and consciousnesses, the tangle of determinisms that are too complex to be grasped and that try to restore the intoxication of a multi-dimensional world. Rolin, Mauvignier, Bon, Kérangal, Énard.

3. Chance and the novelistic: chance as a theme, the staging of contingency, of chance, of accidents, of uncertainty; against storytelling, against the mechanisms of exposition and hyper-rationalism, exhibition of an appetite for serendipity, the poetry of encounters, the wandering of inquiry, the suggestive power of the strangeness of phenomena; and, in the tradition of Nadja, the reinvestment of aura, of kairos, of correspondences and of depth psychology. Carrère, Modiano, Blonde, etc. But also tragic: terrorist attacks or other forms of negativity: Schrödinger’s Cat by Philippe Forest.