ABSTRACT
In writing Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Gide explicitly set out to test the conventions of the novel as a genre. He was to refer to this book as his only novel, hinting thereby that it attained a summit of accomplishment surpassing that of his earlier narratives - but also implying that the majority of his writing was not that of a novelist as such. The narrator's elegant patter and the fluency of his technique tend to elide questions of representation, of narrative chronology and causation. The work on transitions produces, then, a text in which the signifier has a certain autonomy, a text which points towards the non-mimetic relations within language. These ludic elements furnish an entertaining continuity of surface texture, divorced in many respects from events in the story. The fact is that the structure provides Gide with precisely the kind of parodic critique of conventional plots he sought.
