Eric Chevillard ou de la littérature aux prises avec ses limites
Eric Chlevillard or literature struggling against its limitations

Summary/Abstract: What is reasonable to say in literature? Which are the words that matter? These are some of the questions posed in the writing of Éric Chevillard, one of the most original French writers, for whom the novel is essentially a systematic interrogation of literature and of the world. What drives a writer to write these days? Is it the void, is it the silence of the world surrounding him, or is it a marginality that he could not and would not give up? What doekkk writing mean, after all? Does it mean bringing nuance into a world that can no longer discriminate between differences and grow richer by such discrimination? For Chevillard, writing is both a limit-experience and an experience of the limit; it is a way of trying both his personal limitations as a writer, and the limitations of literature itself. In other words, to write is to go against the grain, to change the established rapport between things and beings, to expand consciousness. The writer is duty bound to experience consciousness to the full in order to be able to name the world in his own way and put it in order it as he pleases. This paper aims to shed light on certain aspects of Chevillard’s construction of the novel as a dual enterprise: on the one hand, an undermining of literature, and on the other hand, an immense effort of giving a new poetic meaning to the world.

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