• 1 Novels of Patrick Deville :
• 2 See for instance : Fieke Schoots, “Passer en douce à la douane” : l’écriture minimaliste de Minui (...)
• 3 For another discussion of Kampuchéa, see Pierre Schoentjes, “Les ‘beaux hasards’ de Patrick Devil (...)

2Deville’s oeuvre1 is all the more astonishing granted that he seems to have reinvented himself in mid-career. From the mid-1980s until the end of the century, he published a series of five novels at the Editions de Minuit: Cordon-bleu (1987), Longue Vue (1988), Le Feu d’artifice (1992), La Femme parfaite (1995), and Ces deux-là (2000). Based on that body of work, many critics described him surely and definitively as a minimalist, an impassive fictionalist, and a paragon of the Minuit School.2 In the new century however, Deville migrated to the Editions du Seuil, and the five texts that he has published there to date—Pura Vida: Vie & mort de William Walker (2004), La Tentation des armes à feu (2006), Equatoria (2009), Kampuchéa (2011), and Peste & choléra (2012)—are very unlike his Minuit books, suggesting a writerly retooling of a very rare sort. Among those more recent works, I am most particularly interested in Pura Vida, Equatoria, and Kampuchéa, because they appear to constitute (for the moment at least, that is to say, presently) a trilogy of sorts, one that circles the globe at the equator, and whose heroes seem in each case to be places, rather than people. Or perhaps, in another perspective, one might argue that the protagonist of these texts is the novel itself, because each of them—and whatever else may be at issue—puts forward a vision of the novel searching for a new shape, right now. That process is a compelling one, because it testifies to the way that culture itself shifts, right before our eyes. In what follows, I would like to focus closely upon Kampuchéa, because I believe that it builds upon the texts that precede it, and responds to them in key manners. Moreover it is in Kampuchéa that Deville puts his new writerly skill set to work most adroitly3.

• 4 Strictly speaking, it is the narrator who addresses us in Kampuchéa, but in light of Deville’s ef (...)

3Like Pura Vida and Equatoria, Kampuchéa presents itself as a novel, complete with the term roman emblazoned on its cover. Yet there is very little fiction here—if indeed there is any at all. Focusing upon Cambodia, roughly from Henri Mouhot’s “discovery” of the temples of Angkor Wat in 1860 to the present time, Kampuchéa (the title is the Khmer word for “Cambodia”) puts on offer a meditation on history, on geography, on politics, on culture, and on the way those categories necessarily overlap in a place that has always found itself precariously situated “entre l’enclume et le marteau” (187). The event that draws Deville4 there is the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, and especially the trial of Kang Kek Iew, or “Duch,” the first of the five former Khmer Rouge leaders to be indicted, and who would be convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison in July 2010. That trial provides the text with its principal narrative thread, around which Deville weaves an impressive variety of other stories. That of the French Mekong Expedition in 1866-1868, lead by Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier, for instance; or that of Marie-Charles David de Mayrena, who declared himself King of Sedang in 1888; or that of Vann Nath, who survived the Khmer Rouge camps by painting portraits of Pol Pot; or that of Pol Pot himself, a man who returned to Phnom Penh after his studies in Paris in order to teach Vigny, Verlaine, and Rimbaud, and whose clandestine activity eventually resulted in his being named Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea. The regime that he presided was a short-lived one, lasting only three years, eight months, and twenty days, yet it left a very bloody legacy. In Patrick Deville’s view, the task of sketching a panorama of such dimensions demands a new kind of narrative form. If he calls this book a novel, he does so at a time when the horizon of possibility of that genre is constantly in question (one thinks of the recent work of Jean Echenoz, Pierre Michon, Marie NDiaye, Jean Rolin, Lydie Salvayre, Olivier Rolin, Marie Cosnay, Iegor Gran, and Emmanuel Carrère, to name just a few). That questioning is intended to restructure and reinvigorate our manners of writing and reading, to be sure; but what is also at stake, clearly, is the way we understand our world.

• 5 See Jean-François Hamel’s discussion of the politics of Deville’s Pura Vida and La Tentation des (...)

9In other instances where Deville sees degraded revolutionary ideals, more obvious forces are at work. Human greed, for instance, and the allure of new capitalism can account for some of those examples. Strolling through Saigon, he notes, “il est curieux de voir ce soir stationner la météorite rouge sang d’une Ferrari Testa Rossa, devant la boutique Louis Vuitton, sise rue de l’Insurrection-Générale” (93). That scene is an ironist’s dream, but it is clear that Deville himself takes things far more seriously, and that the corruption of revolutionary ideal offends him deeply.5 Sharing a meal with a survivor of the killing fields, he admits, “au milieu des années soixante-dix, j’ai rêvé des tables rases. On arrête tout, on recommence. Le slogan courait de l’Europe à l’Amérique latine” (38). In a sense, then, Deville’s inquiry is very personal indeed, and very deeply bound up, by his own account, with his personal history.

• 6 See his remarks in “La Fabrique du héros” 22 : “J’ai trouvé la forme du livre dès la première ver (...)

11When he himself is not in Phnom Penh, Deville follows the trial in newspaper accounts. Newspapers are yet another way of coming to terms with the world, but unlike history they focus upon the immediate, upon very recent (and indeed ongoing) events. In the first pages of Kampuchéa, Deville makes it clear that newspapers are very much a part of the narrative fabric that he intends to weave. Reading an issue of the Bangkok Post, he remarks : “Je survole l’actualité aux commandes de mon bimoteur, une cigarette aux lèvres et les pieds nus sur les palonniers, la bouteille entre les cuisses” (12). That kind of overview allows him quickly to invoke, one after the other, the Khmer Rouge trials in Phnom Penh, the arrest of the head of a drug cartel in Mexico, the trial of ex-President Alberto Fujimori in Peru, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania, and the trail of former Croatian generals in The Hague. This moment is an important one in terms of the way he chooses to stage things in Kampuchéa. First, it allows a brief contextualization of the Khmer Rouge trials in terms of contemporary events. Second, it serves to remind us that crimes against humanity are not lacking in the world, and that what happened in Cambodia was not absolutely exceptional. Third, it suggests the narrative perspective that Deville will adopt in Kampuchéa, that is, an overview of a century and a half of Cambodian history. It might be argued, moreover, that this kind of approach has characterized all of Deville’s work since he left the Editions de Minuit; and he himself has pointed out the fundamental role that newspapers played in the conception and execution of his first book for the Editions du Seuil, Pura Vida.6

• 7 Patrick Deville, “Plus formaliste peut-être que minimaliste…”, in Marc Dambre and Bruno Blanckema (...)

14It would be difficult to find two contemporary Cambodian destinies more different than those of Pol Pot and Soth Polin. Yet both were deeply informed by literature. Does literature then have absolutely no effect upon human beings and how they behave? Or is it more a matter of what one does with literature? Deville tends toward that latter conclusion. And if his efforts to renovate the French novel have a political dimension to them, those politics are in the first instance communitarian, that is, they embrace the idea of literature as a kind of community. Speaking at a colloquium on contemporary literature at the Centre Culturel International in Cerisy in the summer of 2003, Deville explains why he chose to attend that event : “Il y a pour moi au moins une espèce de complicité, ce que nous faisons à la fois quand on écrit, quand on est libraire, universitaire, lecteur, etc., tout cela fait partie d’une même activité, activité qui est extrêmement menacée. J’ai l’impression que nous appartenons à un tout petit réseau de résistants en voie d’extermination et que, donc, c’est la moindre des choses que de soutenir ce genre d’activités”7. The notion of resistance is a crucial one. It is a central term in his theory of literature, and it is a key figure of all of his recent writings. In Deville’s view, literature must be promoted as literature, but also as a way of coming to terms with a world and a reality that can be very oppressive indeed. Literature is, and must be, both artifact and tactic.

• 8 See for example 52 : “On peut regretter que le bourreau Ta Mok n’ait pas eu le talent de Coppola, (...)

16Among the many writers who stride through this novel, two are preeminent on Deville’s horizon. The first is Joseph Conrad. He appears in Kampuchéa as a precursor figure, a traveler and a writer who found a way to turn the rich experience of his travels into novels. Two of his texts figure heavily in the intertextual weft of Kampuchéa. First, Heart of Darkness, both as a tale of the Congo and as a tale of Southeast Asia. Let me explain. On the one hand (and most obviously), Marlow’s story of his travels on the Congo exercises a strong pull on Deville’s imagination—all the more so granted that he himself has spent a lot of time traveling in the Congo, thinking about that region’s vexed history, and writing about it, all of that activity resulting materially in Equatoria, the book that immediately precedes Kampuchéa. But another version of Heart of Darkness is just as important for Deville, Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of the novel in Apocalypse Now. In that film, the Marlow-figure, Benjamin Willard, follows the fictional Nung River all the way into Cambodia to find his “Kurtz.” That Deville is indeed thinking of the film, as well as the novel, is confirmed by explicit references to Coppola in the text.8

• 10 André Malraux, La Voie royale, Paris, Grasset, 1930, p. 16 ; Kampuchéa, p. 118.

20Just as in the case of Conrad, it is both the author and the character that interest Deville. Malraux is clearly a strong precursor figure for him. Like Conrad, he is a writer who has traveled broadly and who has brought that experience to bear in his art. Yet Perken appeals to Deville too, for he embodies the ideal of the adventurer. That idea is a powerful one for Deville, and he puts it into play explicitly on several occasions. Two of those instances deserve attention. In the first one, Deville speaks of Malraux in the 1920s and 1930s, and the circumstances of publication of La Voie royale: “En 1930 il publie son roman autobiographique et invente son double aventurier Perken. C’est la gloire littéraire et ça n’est pas assez. Il veut encore agir, peser sur l’Histoire, sortir de la bibliothèque” (71). The epithet “roman autobiogra­phique” is intriguing, insofar as it suggests a very transparent reading of Malraux’s novel. The vision of Perken as Malraux’s “double” is likewise interesting, most especially because of what it suggests about Deville’s own writerly strategies. Moreover, it is legitimate to see both of the terms that I mentioned a moment ago, imagination and dissatisfaction, at work in this passage. Were “invention” and “imagination” and “literature” not enough to satisfy Malraux? Will they not suffice to satisfy Deville, either? In the other instance, Deville quotes Malraux’s own use of the word aventurier in La Voie royale, in a remark that has since attained the status of aphorism: “Tout aventurier est né d’un mythomane.”10 Thus does a boat captain describe Perken to Claude; but for Deville, the same might be said of Malraux. Adventure, after all, is a kind of heightened, sharpened experience, experience viewed through a narrative lens and organized according to principles of narrativity. A mythomaniac is someone who exaggerates the truth, who embellishes the truth, who imagines things because the truth alone is not satisfactory. In other terms, Malraux’s remark points to the very essence of what a novelist does, and when Deville adduces that remark in Kampuchéa its specular function could not be more obvious.

• 11 On page 158 of Kampuchéa Deville remarks, “Je lui dis avoir écrit le récit d’un voyage en train d (...)

22Yet another dimension of Deville’s intertextual strategy is played out in a series of allusions to his own writings. Those allusions engage Pura Vida and Equatoria almost exclusively; there is only one allusion to La Tentation des armes à feu,11 and none at all (none that I could identify, at least) to the five novels from Deville’s Minuit period. A few examples of Deville’s tactics will suffice. When he mentions William Walker (61, 239) anyone even passingly familiar with his work will inevitably think of Pura Vida, whose subtitle is Vie & mort de William Walker. Likewise, when he invokes Nicaragua or the Sandinistas (22, 65, 85) one thinks of Pura Vida. When Deville remarks that he had traveled up the Ogooué River “sur les traces de Brazza” (83) however, he is clearly alluding to Equatoria. More interesting still are passages where both of those prior texts come into play. In one of those, Deville mentions Pierre Brazza and then quickly thereafter William Wilson (167), sketching in the lightest of strokes two of the central figures in the broad historical panoramas that he paints in Equatoria and Pura Vida. And when he remarks, “En cette année 79, les révolutionnaires sandinistes prennent le pouvoir au Nicaragua et la CIA organise les Contras au Honduras. Les Soviétiques envahissent l’Afghanistan, soutiennent les Cubains et le MPLA en Angola” (229), the effect is similar, except that this time what is at issue is the very recent history that he describes in Pura Vida and Equatoria. Those moments in Kampuchéa serve to affiliate that text with Pura Vida and Equatoria. In other words, the autoallusive tactics in Kampuchéa appear to be driven by the desire to suggest the mutual intrication of Pura Vida, Equatoria, and Kampuchéa, and to postulate their coherence as an oeuvre.

• 13 Patrick Deville and Thierry Guichard, “La Fabrique du héros”, Le Matricule des Anges 49 (2004), p (...)
• 14 Ibid., p. 18.

25A year after those remarks (and thus after the publication of Pura Vida), in an interview that appeared in Le Matricule des Anges, when Thierry Guichard remarks to Deville that Pura Vida displays a radical departure from his usual style, Deville responds with more assurance. “C’est parce que j’ai voulu faire quelque chose que je ne savais pas faire,” he says. “Et réinventer des manières d’écrire. J’ai longtemps été devant un mur, j’ai fait des tentatives. C’est exactement comme si en musique, j’essayais de changer d’instrument”13. The notion of reinvention is a compelling one, and it is absolutely fundamental to Deville’s project. As he imagines it, the problem is to get from something that he does know how to do as a writer to something that he doesn’t yet know how to do. In both cases however, that “something” is a novel, and clearly the task that Deville sets for himself is in the first instance a formal quest. In that perspective at any rate, he remains faithful to the principles that have always animated his writing. Speaking of his first novel, Cordon-bleu, he remarks : “Je suis toujours un peu formaliste. Il me fallait trouver une forme”14. And a bit further on in that same interview, he makes it clear that for him the search for form is essential to the aesthetic gesture, whatever guise that gesture may eventually assume : “Ecrire un roman, une symphonie ou peindre un tableau c’est aussi tou­jours créer des formes ; simples au départ elles deviennent de plus en plus complexes” (20).

• 15 “Plus formaliste”, p. 319.
• 16 Deville clearly recognizes that trait. See for example “Plus formaliste” 323-24 : “Tout peut s’ap (...)

26The dynamic of formal creation, of innovation, of invention is thus both crucial and indispensable for Deville. He suggests that a great part of the satisfaction he derives from his craft is bound up in that process. “D’ailleurs, ce qui me plaît le plus, je crois, c’est l’invention des formes,” he says. “C’est un grand plaisir d’inventer ou d’utiliser des formes”15. The will to make things new is of course central in art; and in the twentieth century it became the signature impera­tive of the avant-garde. Indeed, it became such a tyrannical diktat that one might argue it was the key factor leading to the avant-garde’s exhaustion. The way the principle of innovation plays out in Deville’s work is a bit different, however. More than anything else, it is a question of the search for new possibilities of expression in a literary genre that is—and indeed has always been—a significantly protean one.16

• 17 Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne : Rapport sur le savoir, Paris, Minuit, 1979, p.  (...)

27For the new is the lifeblood of the novel. Indeed the very name of the form—at least in English usage—suggests just that. We have been hearing reports of the model’s demise for a good half-century now. In fact, many people of my generation cut their readerly teeth on novels that had somehow escaped from that very death sentence. And thankfully, writers continue to produce novels, despite proclamations that the novel as a cultural form is doomed. In point of fact however, the history of the novel suggests that the novel has always been in crisis, such crisis being more or less dire in any given period. What does seem to be true is that certain traditional models of narrative are no longer as viable and performative as they once were, and Jean-François Lyotard was undoubtedly correct when he argued, in La Condition postmoderne, that we are far more skeptical with regard to grand narratives than we used to be17. What is also demonstrably true is that contemporary novelists, since the New Novel in the 1950s, have steadily elaborated new models for the genre, and have proposed them to the reading public, with varying degrees of success. Patrick Deville takes his place in that experimental tradition consciously and deliberately. Moreover, he inscribes that gesture in the books he writes, putting his quest for a new kind of novel broadly on display, in the very middle of that quest.

• 18 “Plus formaliste”, p. 324.
• 19 See Fieke Schoots (op. cit., p. 92) : “Le Feu d’artifice est un roman sur l’écriture d’un roman, (...)
• 20 “La Fabrique du héros”, p. 22.

28Looking closely, one can see in Deville’s career an evolution that plays out the recent history of the novel itself. His five Minuit books are relatively conventional with regard to the norms prevailing at that time (roughly, the last decade of the twentieth century) and that place (France, more specifically Paris, more specifically still the Editions de Minuit). They are traditional, even classic novels, as Deville himself is quick to point out: “Pour moi, les cinq premiers livres sont indubitable­ment des romans. On ne peut pas plus roman… C’est Mme de Lafayette quoi !”18. Then, to all appearances, Deville decides that that kind of novel is no longer valid, and he undertakes a dramatic renovation of his own writerly practice, looking for new and more invigorating possibilities for prose narrative. Those early texts are nevertheless marked by a strong specular dimen­sion, one that insistently asks the question of what a novel is and can be.19 And when Deville turns away from those models, he is clearly still grappling with that very question. “Le but a toujours été de faire un roman,” he remarks about Pura Vida. “J’ai utilisé nombre de genres pour ce livre : épistolaire, romanesque, poétique, journalistique, diariste et histo­rique”20.

• 21 “Plus formaliste”, p. 323.

29That hybridity may seem extreme when viewed in the strict focus of any given text; but in a broader perspective one recognizes that the novel has always borrowed from other genres. Indeed, the generic specificity of the novel is notoriously difficult to define, undoubtedly in part because the novel has always spoken in a variety of accents. Patrick Deville’s novelty wagers precisely upon that aspect of the genre, upon the way it changes shape while still remaining a novel. He wagers also that some point of connection will be made between his desire to write new kinds of novels and our desire to read them. Throughout, he is guided by an idea that he articulates in each of his texts. Sometimes he expresses that idea subtly, sometimes more overtly, but whatever form it may take it is clearly for him a confession of faith: “Je persiste à croire que le roman est le genre littéraire majeur21. Think what one may of that notion, it would be difficult to find a writer in France (or anywhere else for that matter) who has defended it more vigorously and more boldly than Deville, in what we think of as our very own literary and cultural present.