This paper argues that Julia Kristeva’s image of the text as a mosaic serves as a tantalising metaphor for the processes operating in this de/reconstruction of Madame Bovary.
As the reader is encouraged to retrace Emma’s final steps across the Normandy countryside, Doumenc can thus be seen piecing together his own contribution to the murder-mystery genre.
Whilst still set firmly in the nineteenth-century, and with its protagonists still recognisable in their bourgeois mediocrity, the fictional investigation plunders the textual and thematic resources of Madame Bovary before fusing them with the more recent aesthetics of the twentieth-century roman policier. More importantly, however, Doumenc’s work engages in a creative deconstruction of its Flaubertian intertext. In an affectionate homage to Flaubert, Doumenc extends the apparent finality of Emma Bovary’s death into a new narrative beginning, postulating that she did not commit suicide but was murdered. This article examines the themes of time and textual memory in Madame Bovary and Philippe Doumenc’s 2007 novel Contre-enquête sur la mort d’Emma Bovary.
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