This thesis argues that experiments with the novel in postwar France configured everyday life as a ground of human existence and a resource for ethical enquiry. If novelistic innovation in the 1950s and 1960s has been typically associated with a turn away from lived experience and history, I argue that experimental novels by Michel Butor, Georges Perec, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras open the everyday lifeworld as a site where ethical questioning encounters the historical process.

Each chapter pursues a close reading of a novel in relation to developments in twentieth-century history and contemporaneous theorizations of everydayness. Michel Butor’s La Modification (1957) presents a train journey as a figure through which to relate higher moments of experience to the run of everyday repetition: a diurnalization of the Sartrean projet that works as a supplement to Henri Lefebvre’s theory of moments. The protagonists of Georges Perec’s Les Choses (1965) experience a slide out of everyday practice caused by a surfeit of mimesis under conditions of aesthetic capitalism. While this movement illustrates Maurice Blanchot’s insistence on the escapism of the everyday, the text holds out, contra Blanchot, a potential alliance between mimesis and practice, which, in turn, reworks the valorization of asceticism implied by the text’s ironic presentation of consumer culture. If Butor and Perec thus relate everyday life to an art de vivre, inviting the reader to appropriate the texts in a process of self-fashioning, Nathalie Sarraute’s Le Planétarium (1959) and Marguerite Duras’s Le Vice-Consul (1966) instead approach the everyday from the fact of suffering and in the thick of coexistence. The negative tenor of Le Planétarium speaks to Stanley Cavell’s insistence that any vision of human betterment must start from the harms that are dealt in ordinary situations. However, the text insistently contests Cavell’s concept of human separateness, bringing his notion of everyday harm into a sustained reckoning with past and ongoing historical trauma. Finally, Le Vice-Consul explores how chatter among European diplomats in an imaginary ‘Calcutta’ sustains colonial affliction at the horizon of its lifeworld, and as the condition of possibility for the protagonists’ pursuit of the good life. As such, it suggests a discursive correlate to Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil – the banalization of colonial affliction – and an ethical imperative for a writing of disaster that would be, again contra Blanchot, adequate to the unexceptional nature of historical suffering.

The thesis argues for the significance of experimental fiction in the development of a conceptual history of the quotidien, and particularly for its capacity to reflect on the conditions of possibility for thinking ethics through everyday life. These texts allow us to map the historico-philosophical stakes of relating an art of living to everyday life, in the shadow of God and in the face of the possibilities opened, and suffering wrought, by an advancing modernity.