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La villa Chagrin, à Bayonne, fait l’angle des boulevards Alsace-Lorraine et Jean-Jaurès. Derrière, l’Adour est haut, au mois de mars. En 1938, on enfermait à la villa Chagrin ceux qui tentaient de rejoindre l’Espagne, ou ceux qui la quittaient. » C’est de ce côté-là que rôdent les souvenirs de la narratrice – une femme qui vient de perdre son amour. Tout en songeant à l’homme aimé, celle-ci se penche sur le destin de Marthe Arnaud qui fut la compagne du peintre Bram Van Velde (1895-1981) de la fin des années 1930 jusqu’à sa mort accidentelle en 1959. Les traces du séjour à Bayonne de Marthe et de Bram – années difficiles de silence et de dénuement – croisent celles de la disparition qu’est en train de vivre la narratrice. Même économie, même réserve, même intensité réduite à l’essentiel: l’errance fantomatique des deux destins autour de la villa Chagrin révèle, en Marie Cosnay, une styliste dont l’inspiration reste encore très proche de la poésie.
Jean-Maurice de Montremy, La Croix, jeudi 18 mai 2006
Le monde des livres
La Villa Chagrin, à Bayonne, fait l’angle des boulevards Alsace-Lorraine et Jean-Jaurès. En 1938, on y enfermait ceux qui tentaient de rejoindre l’Espagne ou ceux qui la quittaient. Sujet hollandais, revenu depuis peu de Majorque après la mort de sa femme Lily, Bram van Velde est arrêté lors d’une promenade dans les environs, avec sa compagne Marthe Arnaud-Kuntz faute de papiers d’identité, il est emprisonné quatre semaines à la Villa Chagrin où il réalise une série de dessins – le Carnet de Bayonne. C’est en ce lieu précis, à mi-chemin entre l’Adour et la maison où vit la narratrice, que se croisent deux histoires celle où, douloureusement, elle perd de vue l’homme qu’elle aime, et celle qui unit Bram à l’énergique Marthe, qui en 1959, devenue presque aveugle, mourra renversée par une voiture. Le tissage subtil des notations brèves, la densité poétique de l’écriture mêlent magnifiquement le récit et l’hommage au peintre qui écrivait à Beckett : « Mon travail c’est un saut, un salto vers la vie, vers l’énergie qui fait vivre.
Monique Petillon, Le Monde, vendredi 31 mars 2006
Marie Cosnay’s Roman-fleuve
par Warren MOTE
Villa Chagrin (2006), Marie Cosnay’s third book in a body of work that now includes eleven titles, may not be a roman-fleuve in the strict sense of that term (indeed it may not even be a novel), but a river most certainly runs through it, from first page to last. That river is the Adour, as seen from its right bank, across from Bayonne, in a place called Saint-Esprit. At some seventy-five pages, this text is certainly no Jean-Christophe, no Chronique des Pasquier. Nonetheless, it flows in full spate, picking up and melding along its way an impressive variety of narrative currents: the story of the painter Bram van Velde and his companion, Marthe Arnaud-Kuntz; an examination of the nature of disaster, conceived both as a collective phenomenon and as a personal one; a love story wherein absence looms far larger than presence; a meditation on the image and the fate of the image in representation; a parable of writing and its uses; and more besides. Like the Adour, Villa Chagrin is very fluid, very dynamic. Its author, a classicist by profession, is well placed to understand why a river seemed so apt to Heraclitus as a figure of time; and just like a river, this novel (for that is what I shall call it) is mutable in astonishing ways.
Michel Charles has argued eloquently for a vision of the literary text as an artifact constantly in motion, one that is difficult to apprehend in any way other than on the run, as it were.i That way of looking at textuality is particularly productive in the case of a work such as Cosnay’s, wherein a powerful continuity is achieved through a narrative technique that seems, on the face of it at least, constantly interrupted. The multiple diegetic threads that I mentioned contribute to that sense of interruption. More telling still is the fact that Cosnay structures her novel like a diary, with dated entries and a progressive intercalated narration. Maurice Blanchot reminded us long ago that any discourse at all relies in some measure on interruption for its coherence,ii and in that perspective it is easier to understand how Cosnay enlists multiplicity in the service of singularity. The image of the river is also helpful in that regard, as is Michel Charles’s characterization of literary textuality as “essentiellement un long discours, où le récit apparaît par intermittence” (199). One important consideration that such a manner of conceiving a work of literature suggests is that any reading we bring to it must strive to be as mobile as the text itself—a tall order, certainly, and one that inevitably calls us to attention.
The incipit of Villa Chagrin invokes both time and space, and appears to situate the narrative instance precisely: “Le 15 novembre je suis restée à la maison, évitant la brume sur l’Adour et le flot cotonneux aperçu la veille vers sept heures quarante cinq quand j’allais dans l’invisible, roulant vers le lieu le plus familier de la ville” (9). Yet that invocation relies significantly on imprecision for its effect, and the narrator insists upon phenomena (“la brume,” “le flot cotonneux,” “l’invisible”) that serve to thematize the notion of imprecision. It is a technique that Marie Cosnay will exploit throughout her novel, and one that is deeply imbricated in the fluvial images that teem therein.
Those images are extremely various, and they serve a variety of purposes. From time to time, Cosnay personifies the river, in order to underscore the narrator’s state of mind, either by identification or by contrast: “Le fleuve était imperturbable” (10). It is a thing both alive and reactive, whose spirits and modes of being change continually: “Non loin de la villa Chagrin, à Saint-Esprit, je regardais l’Adour. Il dégueulait un peu. Des ponts successifs le barraient. La brume est venue” (35). Like the narrator and every other human that she puts on stage, the river has traversed a significant span of both time and space in order to arrive at the here and the now: “Ville où la rivière joint le fleuve qui sur deux cents kilomètres a parcouru jusque-là les monts rougis de bruyère” (10). Though one might have imagined that the prison which lends its name to the book would have served as the center of Cosnay’s novelistic topography, it is in fact the river instead. Speaking of her own house, the narrator remarks, “Non ce n’est pas loin de la prison. Ni de l’Adour qui est par rapport au point du Mandrill l’endroit symétrique” (11).
That symmetry marks Villa Chagrin indelibly, and the point upon which it hinges is the river itself. In that perspective, it is the river which guarantees the rest of Cosnay’s landscape, conceived both literally and figuratively. As the narrator tells the story of Bram van Velde, for example, the incidents and anecdotes she provides take their place in a chronology that the river certifies, through metaphor. Moreover, in contemplating the river, the narrator becomes convinced of a broader existential lesson, one that might have seemed obvious from the start, but whose truth is so trivially conspicuous that it demands confirmation at a deeper level: “La vie passe en effet” (62). The river perceives each of the narrator’s gestures, and serves as a mute witness to her circumstances and her thoughts. It observes her both as she acts and as she refuses to act: “Je viens au coin des boulevards Alsace-Lorraine et Jean-Jaurès, non loin de l’Adour et non loin de chez moi. J’ai jeté les photos prises par l’homme que j’aime, je me suis allongée, victime de paludisme peut-être, de tremblements nouveaux, je me suis allongée dans le soleil qui regardait l’Adour, j’y suis, c’est le moment. Pas encore” (56).
Finally, and as if inevitably, the river serves as an image of the text itself. Both are phenomena whose nature is difficult to grasp upon first encounter, things that change and that change again, but which are nonetheless governed by a directional logic—that is to say, both of them go somewhere. Importantly, the manner in which the river resists representation limns a discourse on representational difficulty that flows unabated through Villa Chagrin. “L’homme
i See Introduction à l’étude des textes 138: “Or, dans la pratique, justement, dans l’opération de lecture, le texte se présente non comme un objet immobile que l’on pourrait contempler d’un seul regard, mais comme un défilé d’énoncés aux frontières floues, les passage en continu, et selon des rythmes variables, avec des pauses parfois aléatoires, d’une suite d’objets qui se recoupent incessamment les uns les autres. Il y a là une dynamique, qui est celle de la lecture.”
ii See “L’Interruption,” and especially this crucial insight: “L’interruption est nécessaire à toute suite de paroles; l’intermittence rend possible le devenir; la discontinuité rend possible la continuité de l’entente” (107).