Vies pøtentielles by Camille de Toledo (review)

Camille de Toledo envisages the defining characteristics of Vies pøtentielles as constituting something of a meta-discourse on the inherent embodiment of the novel. The codex is deployed as a hyper-stylization of form, here “the novel” is stripped of its familiar linearity and narrative conventions. The progressive development of the plotline is transcended by three contiguous streams: microfictions, authorial exegesis and a paradoxically visual “chant” laden with typographical puns and links that are evident to the eye but inaudible to the ear. According to de Toledo, an interview with Bruno Racine and Laure Adler for Le cercle littéraire de la BnF (http://vimeo.com/34554117): “c’est un livre qui a conscience de ce qui est en train d’arriver au livre.” The editor of the collection La Librairie du XXI^e Siècle Maurice Olender has stated that initially, de Toledo had wanted the work to appear as electronic literature before its release as a paperback publication. In response to this point de Toledo responds that he has paradoxically not signed the “contrat de cessation numérique” which would allow for such a form of publication to exist.

Indeed, the form of this reluctant “roman” is very much an unconventional one. The narrative is comprised of three separate strata of texts: stories, exegesis and a song. The stories or “microfictions” as de Toledo refers to them are largely interwoven with the critical exegeses of the author. Ironically, it is this authorial intrusion, typically a rare deviation in a narration, that de Toledo sees as belonging to the category of “roman” or novel: “s’il y a roman dans le livre ça passe du côté de l’exégète.” This figure of the exegete named Abraham is a double of the author de Toledo, sharing the author’s traumas and biography; the death of his parents and brother. The voices of the micro-fictions are emblems, their under-characterization being continuously pointed out by the exegete. The plot is woven not out of the emblematic plurality of voices in the micro-fictions but instead from the development of the more sustained voice of Abraham, the exegete. Insisting on the use of loaded terminology associated with both religious texts and the literature of antiquity, the voice of Abraham struggles to bring unity to the fragmentation and fissuring that our lives and subsequently the novel have undergone.

The meaning to be teased out of this astonishing work stems from the interaction between the fissured lives of the twenty-first century and their interpretations: these lives are so deeply fissured by fiction that the real and the fictional lose their distinction in a kind of psychotic emanation of the Zeitgeist. Much like de Nerval’s “épanchement du songe dans le réel” as de Toledo notes, except that “songe” becomes “fiction.” As a woman dressed in the female accouterments of 1950s cultural icons repeats her ritual of observing herself from the platform of a rush-hour train station, she feels the need to point herself out to those passing. As she beholds herself from afar she is engulfed in the current of so many hurried lives: she is the guitar player, the cigarette, the doctor, the air hostess, the child’s eyes, the briefcase, the schoolbag, the white collar of the senior official and a lady’s skirt all at once. The walls of her apartment cease to be the barriers of her private personal space only to become the screen for a projection of herself. This kind of disembodiment and effusion of the self into the bustle of rush hour imagery or some other delusion is a recurring motif and it is one that speaks to the life of the exegete. Like this psychotic woman adorned with the trappings of another time, the writer too with his own antiquated trappings and gestures is cast into a fragmentary multitude of tasks that according to Abraham, no longer make for a coherent career. The author is a...