Image 1 of 1
“En tout cas, quand je suis arrivée en haut de la colline, un peu plus loin dans les terres il y avait un château. Je me suis dit que c’est là que je demanderais l’asile pour la nuit. J’ai repris en mangeant mon orange les forces que j’avais perdues en l’épluchant. Je me suis imaginé de loin une petite fille dans les vignes, une orange à la main, sans me vanter c’est incroyable que ce tableau n’ait pas déjà été acheté par un musée. L’orange paraissait un peu bizarre, évidemment, mais je crois pourtant que c’est à cause d’elle qu’on est tellement ému devant cette toile.”
Éric Chevillard (born 1964) has published more than thirty books since Mourir m’enrhume, his first novel, in 1987, the starting point of an iconoclastic body of work shaped by the absurdism of Samuel Beckett (both published by Les Éditions de Minuit). Chevillard delights in turning literature against itself, wielding a form of humor that is at once exuberant and merciless. Behind the scaffolding of language and reason, his writing is haunted by an awareness of finitude, not death itself, but the consciousness of it, which colors everything with a kind of comic urgency. He has received numerous prizes, from the Prix Fénéon for La Nébuleuse du crabe (1993) to the Prix Alexandre-Vialatte for his overall contribution to literature (2014), yet he remains little known outside literary circles, though his novels are funny, sensitive, and surprisingly accessible.
His characters are very often engaged in a struggle with language itself, which, when it becomes a source of confusion, quite literally transforms reality; for if you name things incorrectly, they appear distorted. Readers thus find themselves witnessing, bewildered yet not without a certain delight, wildly inventive chains of reasoning that culminate in dizzying conclusions. As a result, Chevillard's novels are populated by narrators who are as eccentric as they are endearing. Published in 2017, Ronce-Rose is a striking example of this approach, and its singular voice has attracted numerous theater directors who have brought it to the stage.
The eponymous heroine is an eight-year-old girl who records her thoughts in a secret notebook. Ronce-Rose is brave, resourceful, and determined to become, no less, an “ornithologue étymologiste”! She has had little opportunity for formal education, but her father has taught her dictionary definitions by heart. When one night he fails to return from one of his countless mysterious expeditions, she sets off on a desperate quest in search of the man she calls “Mâchefer,” armed with her impressive arsenal of words. The text recounts her adventures that take her across enchanted landscapes, forests, and distant lands as far away as Russia. Along the way, she encounters characters who seem to have stepped straight out of a fairy tale.
From the very first pages of this strange expedition journal, readers are likely to be as amused as they are perplexed. They quickly realize that the world Ronce-Rose reconstructs is limited to the words she knows and the interpretive models available to her; before long, fairy-tale motifs and conventions begin to emerge everywhere. Literal and figurative meanings exist in a state of charming confusion, which, however enchanting, prevents her from fully understanding or confronting the world around her. The reader is thus invited to glimpse, between the lines, the reality concealed beneath these fantastical imaginings.
By adopting the perspective of a young girl, Chevillard continues his exploration of language, though in a different mode whose nature the reading itself gradually reveals. Yet by restricting the world of the narrative to the realm of fairy tales, he brings into view a form of poetry that is at once whimsical and uneasy. In little more than a hundred pages, Chevillard offers a lesson in literature: how can we speak about what happens to us when we do not have the words to do so? In an entry dated 3 January 2013 on his blog L'Autofictif, Éric Chevillard formulated a maxim that Ronce-Rose has unknowingly made her own: “La littérature [a] tout de même pour mission de nous offrir une version plus acceptable de l’existence.”