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
The day of deconfinement is approaching. Soon we will be able to publicly show off our bodies transformed by inactivity, compulsive weightlifting, abuse of alcohol and screen time, vitamin D deficiency, approximative hygiene, dietary imbalance, and spousal violence. This will be a new human race that flows out into the street, a species of hunchbacked creatures with bare chests, hypertrophied arms, swollen abdomens, flat buttocks, bister complexions, disheveled manes, red eyes and deformed noses, dressed in rags from another century, droning and stuttering in an unfamiliar language. We may rejoice, however, that kissing remains contraindicated.
As luck would also have it, the faces of these toads will be concealed, at least in part, behind protective masks. Those who have been lucky enough to procure them, in any case. I’ve been thinking of making some for my family and me by fashioning them out of Lachesis’s webs, which have become graceful canopies lining our ceilings. According to my calculations, given the square footage of our home, I should be able to make five hundred thousand masks. But will it be enough?
I still haven’t contracted the virus, though I can’t say I’ve been so successful at resisting its insidious influence. If nothing else, it has jammed the well-oiled—or so I thought—machinery of the book I was writing when it first appeared. Everything stopped. Covid-19 parasited my writing completely. Not so long ago I boasted of having stood up to it at full height, fighting on the battlefield of the page to turn its virulence back on itself. Good luck, Chuck! Grow a pair, Baudelaire! Today this smug naiveté seems pathetic to me. The breathing apparatus I use when I write, and indeed all of my operating systems—circulatory, digestive, nervous—have been gravely damaged by its malignant effects. Cunningly, the virus has insinuated itself into my pen, liquified my language and overturned my turn of phrase; it has phagocyted the force of my words, commandeered their powers, used them as an intermediary host. I even wonder whether they haven’t become one of its primary vectors of transmission.
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.
Shame on me, then, for not having managed to maintain my liberty and treat this invader with the scorn he deserves. If literature is a Platonic absolute—and I would like to believe it is—why do I allow myself to be distracted from it and made to dally with these lamentable twists and turns, this ignoble epiphenomenon, all these misadventures, perhaps not so undeserved, of the human race? Wouldn’t I have been better off coughing in my little corner and continuing to write my book as if nothing were amiss? Am I such a plaything of circumstance, even when I believe my will to power is ringing out loud and bright (o, behold its sparkling armor and burgeoning plumage)?
Now where’s that vaccine?
Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker
(7 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: “The Long Kiss Goodbye” by Photocapy. Reproduced under CC BY-SA 2.0 license.