Into great silence: Pierre Péju’s La Petite Chartreuse, a contemporary tale of secular pilgrimage

Abstract

AbstractLa Petite Chartreuse (2002), penned by the prolific yet understudied novelist and essayist Pierre Péju, charts an unlikely relationship in the wake of a devastating accident. As he walks the Massif de la Chartreuse in the shadow of the Carthusian Grande Chartreuse, a solitary bookseller searches inner depths and mountainous heights before confronting his eponymous young victim’s death—and his own. Informed by the hermeneutical relationship between tale and travel, this chapter reads the novel as a contemporary conte (as theorized by Péju himself), as well as a secular pilgrimage (informed, notably, by Thomas Merton). I contend that Péju’s secular antihero, within (rather than in spite of) physically circumscribed conditions, paradoxically scales spiritual heights epitomized by these two wayfaring narrative traditions. His tale offers a defense and illustration of reading in the face of modernity’s acceleration and dematerialization, challenges contemporary unease before suffering, and belies personal and narrative expectations like progress and harmonious closure. Ultimately, I suggest that Péju plots a profoundly humanistic voyage unto death, as he defamiliarizes the very terrain of these travel genres.