In his hugely influential 1960 essay ‘Modernist Painting’, Clement Greenberg famously locates ‘the essence of Modernism’ in ‘the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence’. Many of the decisive literary works of the early twentieth century are marked by just such a modernist concern with their constitutive formal features: we might typically think of Joyce, for example, working on the encounters between prose narrative, consciousness, social existence, and cultural heritage to form works which are at once densely impacted and vertiginously expansive; or, at the opposite extreme, of Kafka, paring this defining material down to its uncanny minimal elements. This self-consciousness is no less a defining feature of the key French novels of the modernist moment; and, indeed, of the modern French novel per se. Recursivity, here, has little to do with solipsism, however. Rather, an emphasis on the constraints and possibilities of form tends to be part of the enquiry carried out by the works of this period into the ways in which individuals and collectivities register, reflect upon, and act in the world. The following account of these works will, accordingly, be guided by this line (which the twentieth century inherits from the novel as its generic ‘area of competence’): the fault-line, or, better perhaps, the membrane which connects and separates self and world, on which the shifts and dramas of their relation are articulated, and which it is the business of any given novel to trace.