For three weeks beginning on March 19, the remarkably prolific and wildly imaginative French writer Éric Chevillard (M&L no. 8) kept a daily quarantine journal for Le Monde. (It has since moved to his blog, L’Autofictif, where he has mused that maybe he should change its name from “Sine die”—Latin for “indefinitely,” in the sense of postponement—to “Ad vitam æternam,” or “for eternity.”) Plenty of sheltered-in-place writers are doing similar work, of course, as he took care to remind us on day 15. But none have been so resolute, or so refreshing, in their refusal to take present conditions at face value. Instead, Chevillard is up to his old trick of finding a single loose thread in the fabric of daily life, winding it around a finger, and gently pulling until reality itself seems to unravel—a practice likely becoming, at the moment, more and more familiar to the rest of us.
—Daniel Levin Becker
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.
It’s an individual solution, alas. This is the fatal flaw of literature and the writer’s eternal regret. He can persuade himself that his stylistic touches and felicitous formulations will delight his reader or couch his meditations in just the right words—but even this, no doubt, is yet another immodest expectation. As long as literature is not performative, the writer’s energy will exhaust itself as soon as it emerges. The best-turned phrase presses, like a gag, moans and whimpers and cries of impotence.
But so it goes. The grieving writer writes about his dead father or son. The sick writer writes about her sickness. She strives to become a cancer to her own cancer. This is not weakness. On the contrary, it’s an attempt to recover within, and through, form. To not simply be the plaything of what she still has to go through. The anguish is there, so let it be useful. The writer is always writing from a prison. When he’s at the beach he acts like everyone else, collecting seashells and then lying on his stomach and shaping the sand into a little breast with his hand.
Read Magic Slate, the journal Georges Perros, asphyxiated by his own pipe smoke, kept during the last months of his life. All writing is a way of being. We can tire of our own performances, our system of thoughts and reflexes, and this is finally what the reader gets from literature: to enter another form. Read Believing in Beasts, the magnificent book Nastassja Martin wrote after an encounter with a bear, and see what she makes of that cruel adventure. Instead of letting herself be struck down by the beast’s paw, she wrote a singular book, rooted in a singular experience, that fully justifies an event that would otherwise have remained senseless and pitiful.
But let me choose my words carefully. I’m not claiming that the quarantined writer, confined in his comfort, is demonstrating admirable courage or that he should be compared to those who have persisted and written in the bleakest, sometimes even the most inhuman conditions. But it was necessary, I think, to say a word about the string on which we’re so highly strung these days, and why we’re all bursting out of our containment boxes by rattling our pages.
Until tomorrow.
Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker
(2 April 2020)
Éric Chevillard was born in 1964 in La Roche-sur-Yon in the west of France. He published his first novel, Mourir m’enrhume (Dying Gives Me a Cold), at the age of twenty-three, and has since gone on to publish more than twenty works of fiction, including The Crab Nebula, On the Ceiling, Palafox, Prehistoric Times, Demolishing Nisard, and The Author and Me. His novel The Brave Little Tailor is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Daniel Levin Becker is an editor, translator, and Oulipian based in Paris.
Banner: an image from Chevillard’s journals, courtesy of the artist.