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

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.

This is the problem when everyone’s mind is working away at the same questions. And there’s really only one subject of contemplation these days, even for those whose expertise was focused, before the pandemic, on Périgordian gastronomy, electric-scooter crash testing, the reproductive habits of the convolvulus hawkmoth, the export of plumbing valves, or the modeling of linear dynamics problems. All those brains, provisionally or perhaps permanently estranged from their normal concerns, are coming together like a single encephalon—our own little bundle of nerves tumbling downhill to join this avalanche of gray matter—to take on that singular subject of preoccupation: the coronavirus.

And even if there are some sorcerers among us who, tapping into their knowledge of medicinal herbs and plants, can mobilize their resources of intelligence and imagination to search for the healing electuary or concoct the vaccine that will allow us to once again lick each other’s faces without dying two weeks later, the great majority of us are finding ourselves utterly without means of action. In such a case, humor is another form of resistance. A way of refusing to falter, of proudly reaffirming our dignity. This reflex is an old one. Jokes often ring out at the repast following the funeral of a beloved friend. There was, as we know, humor in the concentration camps. Concerning his writing, Antoine Volodine has spoken of a disaster humor, a perfect definition that we could adopt in all of the above cases.

Paradoxically, then, confinement turns out to be conducive to creativity: we are bombarded each day with videos and images and jokes, so many ways of answering bad fortune with good faith. But alas, all of this unbridled inventiveness also shows the limits of the imagination, reaffirms the overpowering reign of banality. Ideas intersect and overlap and echo as if by contamination, as if the law of Covid-19 were imposed even on those spared the fever, as if the same pun could be transmitted from mouth to mouth like another contagious cough. Honestly, has this pandemic nothing but bitter lessons to teach us? In the solitude of confinement, are we destined to remain hopelessly gregarious creatures? Unless, perhaps, the joke’s herd behavior is a ruse, propagated by far-flung guerrilla fighters from the resistance—each one in their own shrub, imitating the call of the cuckoo—so we might form a society once more and make it through these trials, together, in spite of it all. Let us bravely choose that option…

Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker

(1 May 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: “Murmuration” by Laura Thorne. Reproduced under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.