The Salvayre Method

In the cartography of the contemporary French novel, Lydie Salvayre’s oeuvre occupies a place apart—she affirms herself with a singular freedom of tone and a refusal of the serious. The laughter she provokes is neither high-brow nor delicate; humor resonates throughout, often descending into farce, caricature and vulgarity. Therein lies her singularity—in this almost offensive laughter, so distant from the “esprit” or wit from which she nevertheless borrows several traits. Salvayre’s laughter is full of dark humor, but not in the least humorous; full of spirit but not in the least spiritual, making it problematic for the critic, in that it cannot be reduced to a predetermined type, even though it borrows from nearly all registers of the comic. Salvayre’s liberated tone is farcical but not simply that, caricatural but subtle, vulgar but affected; it belongs to the polyphonic and clashing comedy she deploys. In the words of her “lecturer” at Cintegabelle (La Conférence de Cintegabelle), the comic is “this tearing apart” [écartèlement], this “vacillation” between a thing and its opposite (Conférence, 73). Among other effects, this makes it difficult for the critic to situate her. For the very logic of vacillation dictates that laughter must be countered by seriousness, and vice-versa, without ever becoming fixed. Thus comic accents correspond to those of refutation, of cogitation, of the lesson or the meditation that a priori have nothing funny about them, and thereby form discordant pairs. These paradoxical pairs are, in Salvayre’s case, the only ones that “hold.” Her “lecturer” understood this well: “Look at Don Quixote and Sancho, Tobby and Trim, my two little favorites, Ahab and his whale […], Lucienne and me. Sublime couples. Impossible couples” (ibid., 67). Vacillation and opposites marry; they re-launch themselves from one end of the oeuvre to the other following an imperturbable logic—or rather, one that is infinitely perturbed.