Back to Green Integer Review. Yet for all of these accolades, for all of the many biographies that have examined his life in close detail, there have been comparatively few literary studies of his novel which has been consistently criticized as being "flawed" by critics such as Robert Gibson. In my study of the novel I gave the first explanation of the novel's coherent structure, and examined just some of the Russian sources that helped inspire it.
In a article I elaborated on Thomas Hardy's influence on the novel, and I hope to soon publish a bold revisioning of the entire novel which will expand on a forthcoming book of mine which establishes Fournier's influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, Fournier was not the man of only one novel. His collected short stories, Miracles , has been translated into English, and if some of it is juvenilia, some of the stories are veritable gems of small town life.
The six and some chapters which follow are clearly a very early draft of the novel which Fournier never got a chance to weave into the layered richness of his more successful novel. Still, there are signs that such a weaving was going to take place. First of all, we notice the characters' names. The name of the hero "Autissier" combines the word "auteur'' author with the verb "to weave"[tisser] so that his hero was apparently going to be the dreamweaver of the text controlling all the other characters as they bobbed in and out of the mists of his mind.
Another character is Big Voyle whose name is a homonym of "Big Vowel" which makes it likely that he would be a figment of the author's imagination. He is a clear version of Big Meaulnes from Fournier's great novel. Both the names of Marazano and Amanda would seem to derive from that of Mirande which again was the real name of the village that Fournier had lived in.
Fournier would continue to draw on the English novels that he loved so much because he has his hero read an English Bible: Only a few paintings remained on the walls. A few chosen books were placed on the pedestal table; a pile of student notebooks on the desk; and in the bedroom, on his nightstand, opened carelessly, an English Bible such as are read at night, by the heroes of novels This is a line that was used to describe Meaulnes as "the hero of a novel.
