MANOR, FOLLY AND CASTLE

par Georges Sebbag

November 10, 2021

In the three novels that Jean-Michel Devésa has published at Mollat, the characters are particularly sensitive to the spirit of places. The perimeters in which they evolve provide the major framework for the unfolding of the action. Whether the space is urban or rural, artificial or natural, the terrain often takes command of the event. The novel Bordeaux la mémoire des pierres sees two episodes very distant in time clash on the same theater of operations. Une fille d'Alger follows step by step a young prostitute, with a French mother and Algerian father, who officiates in a small brothel; this novel tackles this dramatic period which concludes with Algeria's independence and sees almost all French and Europeans cross the Mediterranean. The third novel, Garonne in absentia, transports us to the banks of a river; it relates the patient restoration by Jean and Mathilde of a "neo-classical folly" named Labrune; but these works, which should have exalted and consecrated the union of this couple of lovers, end up drawing up the observation of a slow and inexorable degradation of their love relationship.

All this narrative carried by a narrator (or rather by a narrator, if one trusts certain passages) is only a vast flashback, a flashback on the long coexistence of a couple. While the imperturbable Garonne continues to flow, the story of Mathilde and Jean is apprehended under the spectrum of their estrangement, of their definitive separation. It is also under the sign of an absence, that of Suzanne Muzard, that André Breton undertook to write The Communicating Vessels, where the world of the day before had no equal but that of sleep. Previously, in August 1927, when the same Breton set about writing Nadja at the Ango manor, he took with him to reread two circumstantial works, En ménage and En rade by Joris-Karl Huysmans. In these two novels with autobiographical overtones, the author had also camped his companion. Ruined, the hero of En rade left Paris for the castle of Lourps, in the Brie country; he joined his sick wife there; but will the couple find refuge in this castle left abandoned? Such is the plot of the novel. Even if, at first glance, the Ango manor, hospitable and comfortable, seems the antithesis of the Lourps castle, despite everything, it happens that Breton shares certain terrors and anxieties, scrupulously detailed by Huysmans in En rade.

An analogous atmosphere, bordering on the gothic novel, seems to spread over three dwellings: the castle of Lourps, the manor of Ango and the folly Labrune. To the dovecote of the Ango manor which imposes itself in a hallucinatory way responds the round tower of Lourps serving as a dovecote. The first night of his arrival at Lourps, the hero of En rade dreams of a fabulous palace, a vineyard, a naked woman, a King. Now this dream of the naked woman continues on the Ango side. Marcel Duhamel would later relate how Breton, when both had gotten lost in the middle of a stormy night, had perceived or glimpsed a naked woman suddenly emerged from nothingness. In Devésa's novel, Mathilde is completely frantic at the phantasmal appearance of a lady who stares at her with "effrontery and malice" in one of the salons of the Labrune castle: "there on the boat-bed, a visitor like a mounaque, the mimicry frozen in a great bearing civility and white dress." Devésa does not hesitate to extend lexicons. Here, the word mounaque from Occitan designates a life-size doll dressed in clothes that can be staged in such or such a pose of daily life. The novelist constantly uses a profuse and precise, unexpected and elegant language, in which several rare words and some neologisms insinuate themselves. The gusts of images that succeed each other are the fruit of a sensitive music that modulates the joys and torments of a couple of lovers whose imagination recreates presence even in absence, through a whole series of enigmas and outbursts. Garonne in absentia teaches us that Jean-Michel Devésa has not rubbed shoulders in vain with poetry and the writings of the surrealists.

Georges Sebbag