Jouer avec la page : Les Romans de Stéphane Vanderhaeghe

Abstract

My paper shows how Stéphane Vanderhaeghe’s work goes against the grain of a literary mainstream whose most prominent authors (and literary prizes) favor autofiction or narratives re-exploring a more or less recent historical past. Instead, Vanderhaeghe’s radical writing seeks to challenge the formal potentialities of literature, thus inscribing his work in the experimental traditions of Oulipo and Nouveau Roman. Charøgnards, his first published novel, opens with a twenty-page prologue written in an invented, futuristic French language. The remainder of the text functions as an unpaginated journal whose chronology is constantly re-assessed in light of the numerous rewritings to which the unreliable narrator confesses. Graphemes gradually disappear from the page, figuring the slow disappearance of language as a result of the takeover of invasive crows. The color of pages veers from white to gray before turning into black, so that the book stands out in its unique materiality. Though À tous les airs presents itself as a more traditionally manufactured book, the text proves no less experimental, through the forgoing of characters and repetitions with minor mutations. These literary practices reveal the author’s singular literary identity whose ambitious nature runs the risk of alienating readers.