A feature by Éric Chevillard
The coronavirus has embedded itself like one of those secondary characters that the novelist no longer knows what to do with, even though he had assigned him only a lowly or insignificant purpose. How to get rid of him? This miserable wretch has settled down right in the heart of the action. Now he’s calling the shots, dictating the destiny of all the protagonists: I won’t just have to live with him, I’ll have to treat him like the main character, the hero! Nothing will be left for anyone else. At the end of the day, the story will bear his name as its title.
A feature by Éric Chevillard
I thought my little joke about the Zorro masks, which opened this column three weeks ago, was original. No sooner was it published, however, than I began to receive numerous photocollages, drawings, and sketches showing all too clearly that the same idea had germinated simultaneously in multiple brains—as was the case with the invention of photography, and of the phonograph, and even of photosynthesis, which was apparently conceived at the very same moment by a tree fern in La Réunion and a poplar in Maine-et-Loire that had never met one another.
A feature by Éric Chevillard
My older daughter doesn’t like Jerusalem artichokes, her younger sister doesn’t like rutabagas, and just you try preparing a meal in such conditions! All in due measure, of course—except that we’ve lost all sense of measure: our compasses spin endlessly in a vacuum, our tape measures are the streamers of an undertaker delighted by so many mensurations. All out of due measure, then, our current situation calls to mind the great historical restrictions, the siege of Paris, periods of war and occupation.
A feature by Éric Chevillard
We’re still allowed to go out, briefly, for the necessary daily walking of our pets. Let us note that the dog calls “walking” what the human calls “defecating,” and that he requires the street, even the whole city, to deposit his waste—while for us, on the contrary, this rite, this duty, is normally our only daily experience of confinement, in the little room at the end of the hall. In short, this pressing necessity is an occasion for the dog to get out of the house for a spell, and a good reason for his master, on the contrary, to come home running. In both cases, you might say, we get to stretch our legs.
A feature by Éric Chevillard
Confinement’s strict discipline shows us who we really are. Here we are at last, beheld by our own four eyes. That’s right, four eyes, because at least two beings at once are incarnate in each of us. The first one is all nerves, pacing back and forth, biting his fingernails to the quick and then the bone, impatient and furious, while the other one philosophically lets his wise-old-sage beard grow (the metaphor works for comely young ladies too, age and gender meaning nothing anymore) and tries to find something positive in this radical experience.
A feature by Éric Chevillard
I call her Lachesis. It’s a pretty name, I feel, for a spider. For a few days now, in an effort to break up my isolation and not limit my affective interactions to the three members of my family secluded with me, I’ve been working on taming her. Her silk thread is the last link connecting me to the world.
A feature by Éric Chevillard
Meanwhile, outside, nature takes its course. Today all our landscapes resemble a Chernobylian Eden. Animal species threatened by poaching, deforestation, and man’s innumerable destructive activities are reassembling their packs, their flocks, their herds, their hordes. A drone reportedly captured an image of a dodo frolicking in the Loir-et-Cher region. Or was it a baby phoenix?
A feature by Éric Chevillard
Now, the anxiety that comes with menace and peril doesn’t prevent us from also feeling that bitter yet very real pleasure of cancellation. Because everything that must be experienced, everything we have to make time for, these patiently constructed plans, all these prospects disturb us too. Simply because it’s coming, because it’s inescapable, because there’s no way to get past it without going through it, the smallest scheduled event vexes us like a dark omen. . .
A feature by Éric Chevillard
In a storage closet I found a big bag of masks, a treasure of incalculable worth in these times when they are critical to our survival and yet so difficult to procure. There’s one small hitch, which is that they’re Zorro masks left over from a costume party I held in the garden some years ago. Now, we all know the mask of Zorro is a deceitful bedfellow, hiding only the top of your face, leaving your nose and mouth exposed. All it protects is your anonymity, in other words, and I’m not sure the killer virus targets its victims so precisely, nor that it chooses them based on looks. And so, since even the tightest-lipped mutes can still let out a nasty cough, the intrepid Don Diego de la Vega could have been fatally contaminated by his faithful servant Bernardo. . .
A feature by Éric Chevillard
So yes, it’s inevitable, every writer working today is keeping a quarantine journal. It’s a required subject. It’s the only subject. Do not condemn us: it’s by writing that we develop our antibodies. The hippopotamus rolls in the mud to protect his delicate leather from ultraviolet rays. If he didn’t, he would turn pink and we would laugh at him. Nobody would confuse him with the rhinoceros anymore, and he likes being mistaken for that brute; it gives him courage. The writer has similar reflexes. He carries himself onto the page, and there he forges his weapons, his tools of resistance. . .
I began ejaculating when I was seven.
It came to me one morning, just like that. I started ejaculating feverishly all over my schoolbooks.
My parents disapproved. You’re not old enough to ejaculate. You’ll put an eye out.
So what. I continued ejaculating in secret.
I ejaculated, I ejaculated, I ejaculated, without fatigue, without boredom, without deviation, come hell or high water.
I held in my hand a magic wand. I ejaculated certain that I was creating marvelous things.
It was in my blood, to be sure. At the first free moment, did I play with marbles or chase girls? No. I did not watch television. I didn’t help my father in the garden. What did I do? I ejaculated.
At sixteen my ejaculations were strongly influenced by Rimbaud, but they weren’t very good now that I think about it...
A feature by Daniel Levin Becker
The formal resemblances between Édouard Levé's Works and Georges Perec's I Remember pale away compared to their spiritual perpendicularities: one is an assemblage of purportedly original things that do not yet exist, the other a motley litany of things that once existed but never truly belonged to anyone; one is a series of ideas abandoned at the moment before they crystallize, the other a series of memory-points that exist to be shared and collectively reified. Perec had none of Levé’s impulse toward detachment; the questing in his work was driven by his interest, on some level a desperate one, in the way people could be objectively united in their subjective experiences of time and place, even if they shared neither. Whereas Levé was fascinated by people from a remove, Perec wrote in enormous part to remind himself that he was one of them . . .
