Marcher au hasard: Clinamen et création dans la prose du XX siècle by Morgane Cadieu (review)

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• Marcher au hasard: Clinamen et création dans la prose du XX siècle by Morgane Cadieu
• Peter Schulman

Morgane Cadieu, Marcher au hasard: Clinamen et création dans la prose du XX siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2019, 214 pp.

Ancient atomic theory has enjoyed a type of renaissance since Steven Greenblatt's groundbreaking and highly successful book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011) launched a new examination of Lucretius' tantalizing philosophy surrounding the clinamen, the one atom that deviates and swerves from the regular trajectories of the rest of the atoms. For Greenblatt, and other literary scholars such as Harold Bloom, whose earlier revolutionary book The Anxiety of Influence (1973) also spawned a reawakening in terms of the early atomists, the clinamen can be seen as a metaphor or spark of creativity that separates everyday artists from pedestrian ones. Morgane Cadieu stakes her own claim to this scholarly heritage by examining the clinamen not necessarily in terms of creativity, but in a manner more scientifically in line with the early theorists: in terms of chance, and even, when she writes of the Oulipo movement, in terms of constraint.

Cadieu thoroughly walks us through the atomic debates between Democritus and Lucretius with great agility while leading us to the modern chronotopes of André Breton, Georges Perec in particular, Oulipo, Anne Garetta, and Sophie Calle. With an emphasis on Perec's Un homme qui dort, which Cadieu analyzes with depth and elegance, the clinamen can be read through the lens of the seemingly aimless protagonist's peregrinations through Paris. As Cadieu sees it, "Un homme qui dort est un récit exemplaire pour penser l'interaction entre hasard et espace. Le projet d'amnésie du narrateur repose sur une régulation du hasard figurée dans la cartographie parisienne" (84). Through a painstaking va-et-vient between classical atomic theory and Oulipian craftsmanship, she posits that Un homme qui dort can even be read as a type of twentieth-century De Rerum Natura. It is a very thought-provoking reading of Perec.

Cadieu goes on to re-evaluate Perec's fascination with lists and counting in such texts as Penser/Classer and Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien as a counterweight to Bloom's understanding of the clinamen by focusing on [End Page 119] Perec's deliberate interest in a reorganization of the accepted order of things rather than a complete break from it. As she explains: "Perec change et complique ce phénomène en ajoutant une inversion de la flèche temporelle. Son clinamen n'est pas, comme pour Bloom, une déviation hors d'un système, mais une réorganisation, une recombinaison" (139). Through her re-reading of Perec, she treats her reader to new ways of wandering through Paris itself.

Her last chapters focused mostly on Sophie Calle's Suite vénitienne posits an even fresher vision of the clinamen in terms of sexuality. With Calle's text as well as Jean Baudrillard's post-face to it (Please Follow Me), Cadieu reads Calle's obsessive trails through Venice as a type of sexualized hasard, a sex drive driven by the aleatory and the elusive. From Paris to Venice, from Ancient Greece to modern Europe, Cadieu dexterously weaves complicated atomic theories into contemporary urban topographies in a very compelling fashion. My only criticism is that I would have enjoyed more weight given to her readings of Calle and even Patrick Modiano whom she only touches upon towards the very end of the book. Moreover, even though the book is heavily bent towards Perec's work, it doesn't thoroughly include important previous research on him that might have been helpful, such as David Bellos's or Michael Sheringham's Perec-driven studies. Although she touches on Warren Motte's pioneering article on the clinamen and Oulipo, for example, she does this ever so fleetingly. It would have been enjoyable to see her challenge Greenblatt and Bloom with more depth, or even for her to touch upon my own book, The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern Eccentric (2003), which is also centered on the clinamen in terms of Perec and Oulipo...