Hagiographie profane et contemporanéité dans Vies minuscules de Pierre Michon

Abstract

According to Giorgio Agamben, being contemporary suggests an oblique relation to time, where the author must be both modern and anachronistic. This understanding of contemporaneity implies that a critical distance must be achieved by the individual vis-à-vis his or her own time in order to have a better overview of it. In Vies minuscules, Pierre Michon seems to adopt a reactionary position by going back to a traditional form of storytelling, by using extremely flowery language and by creating a literature devoid of any explicit experimental devices, thereby differentiating himself from the Oulipo and Tel Quel schools, which dominated the literary world in France at the time. However, this article aims to show that Michon’s novel is still very contemporary, in the sense that Agamben gives to this word: by focusing his writing on insignificant or reprehensible characters, by putting his journey as a writer at the center of his story, and by deciding to write in an archaic language, he travesties the medieval genre of the vita and therefore achieves a truly contemporary style. Between hagiography and autofiction, Vies minuscules offers an original conception of modern writing that is, as the author puts it, “always new, always from yesterday.”

Keywords:

• Contemporary literature
• Pierre Michon
• Giorgio Agamben
• hagiography
• autofiction
• Vies minuscules

Notes

1 Il est à noter que le narrateur se décrit comme « un athée mal convaincu » (204) et qu’il croit les vies des saints réels aussi fictives que celles de ses personnages (47) ; le renversement du genre de la vita prend donc aussi la forme d’une critique proprement sociale et culturelle, et n’est pas simplement artistique.

2 Bien que ce sujet dépasse le cadre de notre étude, il est pertinent d’un point de vue linguistique de considérer la part moqueuse ou ironique des noms propres, qui semblent choisis avec minutie par l’auteur : Georges Bandy rappelle le mot « brandy » et le personnage en question est alcoolique ; le père Foucault porte le même nom que l’un des penseurs les plus importants de l’époque alors qu’il est illettré ; Toussaint porte littéralement en son nom tous les saints, alors que le livre défait sans cesse l’idée même de sainteté.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabriel Proulx

Gabriel Proulx is a Ph.D. student at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His dissertation focuses on the influence of American and Irish modernism—mainly Gertrude Stein and James Joyce—on the avant-gardist poetic movements of the late twentieth century in France. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Études littéraires, @nalyses, Nottingham French Studies, and French Studies.