ABSTRACT
Souvenir de Reims relates a visit to Rheims undertaken by a narrator unable to complete work on the final chapter of a novel. This chapter describes his initial disappointment on finally seeing the famous cathedral, and then his discovery of its glory on returning there shortly afterwards. It would seem that the quest for 'la Terre non-humaine' announced at the end of Souvenir de Reimsis initiated in Laporte's next published work, line Migration, which eschews the overt reflexivity of the former work in favour of an ostensibly symbolic narrative more akin to some of Kafka's short stories, and indeed to the early récits of Blanchot. La Veillemarks an important shift in Laporte's writing, its inauguration of a new phase being marked retrospectively by its inclusion as the first text in the collected volume, Une Vie. In 1961, Laporte identifies a passage which, he says, is at the origin of La Veille, and could indeed be used as its epigraph.
