« À croire que Toussaint n’y connaissait rien aux abeilles » : Échappées apicoles dans Nue et Made in China

Abstract

In Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s work, the beekeeper is always miscasted. By turns clumsy, snobbish, venal, loony, laughing, he bears no resemblance to the wise, meticulous man who harvests honey and cares for his bees. In Nue and Made in China, he gives rise to a series of exaggerated, larger-than-life portraits. Yet this minor character is immediately attached to the writer’s name. Following in the footsteps of the beekeeper who "knows nothing about bees", as he writes in Nue, the author blithely appropriates beekeeping material to enable fiction to work at full speed.