Cet article écrit par Alyson Waters, universitaire américaine, publié dans la la revue sites (volume 3.1), débute par le récit de son coup de foudre pour la première phrase de Préhistoire.

Pour nous amener finalement à Prehistoric Time, la traduction anglaise du premier chapitre du livre.

   Some four years before the time of this writing, on what began as an unextraordinary riffle through a bookstore in the small city of Armentières (Nord), I picked up a book, opened it to the first page, and read the following sentence:

   Boborokine n'était pas grand, sans être ridiculement petit, devait avoir ou faire ou tirer une tête de moins que moi, à en juger par son uniforme, mais cette tête de moins était plus large que la mienne, nettement, à en juger par sa casquette, et ses membres étaient plus courts que les miens, proportionnés à sa taille modeste, je n'en doute pas, mais trop courts pour un homme comme moi, et, par voie de conséquence, sont trop courtes aussi les manches de sa veste et les jambes de son pantalon, tandis que je déchausse ses souliers à chaque pas, le gauche, puis le droit, puis le gauche, d'ou je conclus que ses pieds étaient plus longs que les miens, voire un peu trop longs pour un homme comme lui, de même que son ventre était plus gros, beaucoup plus gros que le mien puisque j'ai vraiment l'air d'épier le monde de derrière mes rideaux, dans cette veste trop vaste, le petit monde qui m'entoure.

   I had never heard of the author, but it was, for me, love at first sight. The humorous, mysterious, Russian-sounding name with which the book opens (notice the name contains the word "book" in English); the length of the sentence; the wordplay [avoir ou faire ou tirer une tête de moins...]; the alluring alliteration of "cette veste trop vaste" (or, as my poorer English version would have it, "this giant jacket"): everything about this opening sentence drew me to the book. Its author, I discovered, was, and is, Eric Chevillard (b. 1964). And the novel is Préhistoire (pub. 1994).

   As of this writing, only one of Chevillard's books has been translated into English: his 1993 La Nébuleuse du crabe, rendered as The Crab Nebula by Eleanor Hardin and Jordan Stump, and published in 1997 by the University of Nebraska Press (Crab, by the way, is the protagonist's name; or is it the species to which he belongs?) Chevillard's other novels are : Mourir m'enrhume (1987), Le Démarcheur (1988), Palafox (1990), Le Caoutchouc décidemment (1992), Un Fantôme (1995), and, most recently Au Plafond (1997), this latter being a narrative of and by a young man who carries an upside-down chair on his head at all times.

   While each of these novels has its own individual appeal (and the titles alone reveal some of this appeal), I have chosen to translate the opening passage of Préhistoire because... I love it. More seriously (why is love never serious enough?): because it offers up a smorgasbord of pleasures representative of the Chevillardian text in general: word games a la Queneau; a Kafkaesque bureaucratic situation; a Beckettian first-person narrator prone to splitting hairs; or, for a more contemporary comparison, reminiscences, in its attention to minutiae, of the early Nicholson Baker, when Baker was so much fun to read (think The Mezzanine); all combined to bring into being something entirely original, underivative, a unique narrative voice, while harking back to, or swimming along side of, some of the greatest authors who have come before.

   Yet if Chevillard's writing carries within it the mark of a Frenchman, a Czech, an Irishman, and an American, Préhistoire adds up to more than cosmopolitan postmodern appropriation-for-appropriation's sake. Chevillard can ask some "big" questions, too: what is prehistory? what was the world before writing, before stories written down? In the passage below, the narrator, who is a kind of tour guide cum security guard at a prehistoric cave site, grapples with nothing so grand or distant as prehistoric times; here, he is interested in his own history/story, or more specifically, the history of his uniform that, unsurprisingly in a work by Eric Chevillard, is not a uni-form, but a multi-form, with a history/story all its own.

Prehistoric Times

   Boborikin had not been a big man; and, though not ridiculously small, he must have been or amounted to or measured a head shorter than I, judging from his uniform; still, this head, though shorter, was wider than my own, most definitely, judging from his cap, and his extremities were shorter than mine, no doubt in proportion to his modest size, but too short for a man such as myself and, consequently, the sleeves of his jacket and the legs of his pants are also too short, while with each step I take his shoes slip off my feet, first the left, then the right, then the left, from which I gather that his feet were longer than mine, perhaps even a bit too long for a man such as he, just as his stomach was fatter, much fatter, than mine because, really, I seem to be spying on the world from behind my curtains in this giant jacket, peeping at the little world that surrounds me. Boborikin is dead. I am his replacement. His uniform does not fit me, not in the least. I asked for a new one, made to measure. In order to be more efficient, I maintained, convinced that my argument was sound: stricter, prompter, adding: and to represent the profession with greater dignity. I have the audacity to believe that my request will be heard on high and satisfied at long last, after all that dilly-dallying by the Administration. Meanwhile, I am obliged to wear Boborikin's uniform, and it doesn't suit me at all.

   This uniform--in usual uniform fashion--is navy blue, with--in usual uniform button fashion--gold buttons; for in order for one to distinguish among uniforms, it is first essential that a uniform conform to the idea that one has of the uniform and, likewise, the buttons of one uniform must not be too different from the uniform buttons generally used to button uniforms, lest the very notion of the uniform fade into the blur of erotic suggestion, along with the scantiest panties or those unfathomable chemisettes that evanesce like the first snowflakes upon contact with the ground. In the case of a uniform worthy of its name, it is, on the contrary, he who dons it who effaces himself, coupled forever after with the function he holds and that holds him as well. But Boborikin's uniform is both too short and too wide for me. I am obviously not the man it needs.

   From on high comes the sharp rejoinder that a uniform needs no one, save to stand erect, and that one handful of bran is as good as another to stuff a doll, Boborikin or I, what's the difference, my request cannot be heard and in fact depends on an utterly perverse sense of values since it should be up to me, rather, to adapt myself, in all logic, to gain weight and to climb down a bit from my haughty height in order to slip myself into Boborikin's uniform, and that my habit of flowing out of it on all sides could very well be considered a disciplinary infraction, in itself an egregious error, an affront to obedience, and as such I am grotesque in this uniform, I disgrace it, to the detriment of the entire profession, I will need to change, and pronto, if I want to avoid punishment; my attitude is unspeakable and I am in no position to ask for anything, let alone a uniform, just look how I wear it, have I really inspected myself lately, that free and easy manner of mine, that slovenliness about me, how dare I aspire to a new one?

   And, from up high, to crush me, they add that Boborikin's uniform--about which I am, precisely, complaining because it belonged, and still does, in a certain sense, to Boborikin, who was fatter and shorter than I--was for a long time worn by his predecessor, Crescenzo, who was smaller than he and thinner than I, which never stopped Boborikin from carrying out his duties with distinction, perfectly buttoned up in this uniform, whose cut he no more contested than he questioned the rules of the profession and the obligations of his function, and in this he was a worthy successor to Crescenzo who had even requested to be buried with his uniform--a moving last wish, but hardly reasonable, this second skin having survived the emphysematic illness that carried off the poor man, and it would have been absurd and criminal to expose it to contamination, a corpse rots everything that surrounds it, as everyone knows, the general atmosphere, so Crescenzo was stripped rapidly, the miraculously spared uniform taken away, dusted off, entrusted to Boborikin, who lived up to it. The same is expected of me, the same flexibility and the same rectitude. It is in my interest, it seems, to make myself very, very small, and fatter.

   While indeed it was love at first sight, it wasn't exactly a blind date. I had picked up the book in the first place because it bore the familiar blue-bordered white cover of Les Editions de minuit, a publishing house that had provided me (and others, no doubt) with so many of the books I cherish, including those of Beckett and Pinget. Minuit has always published some of the best fiction - Francophone or otherwise - around, and no look at "fiction of the 90s" would be complete without at least one of Minuit's writers.

Alyson Waters

Sites
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies
volume 3.1 - 1999

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