ABSTRACT
Women-authored fiction usually voiced a patriotic desire for family unity during the war years. Rather than offering a solution to personal incompatibility, divorce was depicted as a residue of the selfish indulgence of ‘decadent’ pre-war France. Divorce then is seen to represent a crisis in the horizontal relations within the family tree which upset its vertical unfolding down through the generations. If the divorce motif is in danger of becoming a cultural cliche, one literary response is to absorb this narrative turning point into a wider human poetics of beginning, continuing and ending — as in Laurent Mauvignier’s novels Loin d’eux and Apprendre a finir. If the plot which heads towards divorce might seem kitsch, the plot which begins with departure has asserted its own paradoxical force, in Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy and Jean Echenoz’s Je m’en vais. Beyond focused treatments of the motif, divorce is unobtrusively present in literally countless recent plays, novels, films, and television dramas.
