The Hospitality of Strangers in Jean Echenoz's I'm Gone (Je M'en Vais)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Awarded prestigious Prix Goncourt for fiction in 1999, Jean Echenoz's vagabond novel I'm Gone now enjoys a weighty critical acclaim that sets it at odds with its title and emphasis on levity, transience, and inconsequentiality. A cinematic succession of scenes of leave-taking and desertion, Echenoz's story documents the alienating effect of contemporary [...] urban and suburban landscapes composed of what Jean Auge calls non-places--environments designed to be passed through (Emer O'Beirne, Navigating 'Non-Lieux' in Contemporary Fiction: Houellebecq, Darrieussesecq, Echenoz, and Auge, Modern Language Review 101. 2 (April 2008), p. 389). Moving from airport chapel to facsimile highway motel bedroom, from metro station entryway to desolate stages on a North Pole dogsled journey, I'm Gone conveys no sense of character or plot development, no narrative teleology. Unlike other contemporary French chronicles of post-modern anomie, Echenoz's novel offers playful tribute to pleasures of fresh experiences and interesting strangers. While title sentence is first and last line of novel, Echenoz's hero does not avoid people or eschew relationships, but is transported by haphazard circumstances from failed marriage to fugitive love affairs, relocated by whimsical job aspirations to different points across globe. In a 2000 interview, Echenoz concedes that his novels are collections of throwaway events and disposable observations yet suggests that his insistence on perishable things is itself meaningful and lasting. There are themes that are recurrent: displacement, absence, abandonment. They come back (Dans l'atelier de l'ecrivain, Entretien realise par Genevieve Winter, Pascaline Griton, et Emmanuel Bathelemy, in Jean Echenoz, Je m'en vais, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2001, p. 250, translated by author). Having relinquished ambition to paint or sculpt, Echenoz's hero, Felix Ferrer, takes over as proprietor of a Parisian gallery, another non-lieu in being both a repository and a point of transit--less a locus than a mechanism for promoting circulation of art works as commodities. Ferrer's stable of painters display their canvases in public places, not private homes. Their works are meant to be experienced as impermanence. Ferrer acquires them and then resells them. No sooner does a painting arrive than it departs (il s'en va). The plot impetus setting Echenoz's own story in motion is reported discovery of a priceless trove of Inuit art lost when vessel carrying it had become frozen in an Arctic wasteland. The image of an immobilized ship and its priceless cargo conveys what author and protagonist consider unacceptable arresting of art as engine of its own retransmission. Encased in ice, historic Eskimo artifacts assume magical property of treasure, acquiring value because they have ceased to act as a medium of exchange, instead becoming objects susceptible to hoarding, possessions returned to stasis by their physical re-embodiment. As Ferrer flies to Montreal, then books passage on an icebreaker traveling past Labrador, crosses permafrost expanses in sleds and snowmobiles, exoticism of locales and strangeness of events fade into unchanging grey of Arctic night. On board ship, Ferrer spends his time as he had at home, performing laborious acts of personal hygiene, watching pornography or video cassettes of Kiss Me Deadly or Rio Bravo, making half-hearted yet successful attempts at seducing a fellow-passenger. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".