Une Écriture Blanche? Style and Symbolism in Édouard Dujardin's 'Les Lauriers Sont Coupés'

This article reassesses Édouard Dujardin's Les lauriers sont coupés through a close reading of its stylistic technique. Using contemporary stylistic theories, it argues that the psychological ‘flux de conscience’ in Dujardin's novel is constructed so as to foreground its own self-conscious exploration of literary style. Pace Roland Barthes's notion of ‘écriture blanche’’—representative of post-war attempts to strip language down to a ‘degré zéro’, to a supposed absence of style—the term is reapplied as emblematic of an absolute presence of style in Les lauriers sont coupés.