In this chapter, the author, as a psychiatrist who has written books on Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Samuel Beckett, both writers who push back the limits of literary writing, focuses on Beckett's change of literary language, not from the starting point of exophonic writing and self-translation, as most critics writing on Beckett’s bilingualism usually do, but ‘from underneath’, making this change of literary language appear as an apparent severing of links to continue writing on the ‘maternal side of language’. The author brings his specialist knowledge of adolescent care to bear on his subject and explodes some of the myths surrounding Beckett’s change of language, such as the famous ‘no style’ of French and the idea of a ‘counter-language’ to ward off the ‘(s)Mother tongue’. The author presents Beckett’s use of French as a paradoxically regressive move, which allows him to live ‘in exile within exile’, to set up the conditions of ‘nostalgia’ by putting the distance of the foreign language to the service of a risky regression to infancy in search of the body, in search of sensory perception and archaic aggressivity: a language ‘beyond the verb’.

The chapter studies modern exophonic/translingual fiction in French, acknowledging its emergence as a recognizable phenomenon in the interwar period in the work of authors such as Irène Némirovsky, but exploring in particular its consolidation over the past three decades since the rise to prominence of authors such as Andrei Makine and Vassilis Alexakis in the 1980s. The consecration of translingual authors among those celebrated in the 2007 ‘littérature-monde’ manifesto is understood as an important stage in this process. The chapter interrogates the power of French literature to recuperate difference – whether linguistic, cultural or social – by conscripting translingual novelists to a national literary ‘project’ defined in terms of ethnolinguistic nationalism and the ‘genius of the French language’. The chapter explores these authors’ relationship to French language and literature, seen as ‘realms of memory’ in their own right. Translingual writing has, however, the potential to disrupt Pierre Nora’s limited and Hexagonal understanding of Frenchness: the corpus explored to demonstrate this possibility includes work by Akira Mizubayashi (of Japanese origin), Chahdortt Djavann (of Iranian origin), Vassilis Alexakis (of Greek origin) and Katrin Molnár (of Hungarian origin), all of whom fictionalize their acquisition of the French language and deploy this in various ways to test the limits of the contemporary ‘French’ novel.