Percival Everett by Virgil Russell : le laboratoire du roman

Résumé Fr En

Dans son dernier roman, hautement métanarratif, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Percival Everett s’aventure dans la fabrique du récit, ne montrant pas tant l’envers du décor qu’un texte qui ne se distingue plus nettement du travail qui l’a produit. Cette exploration, profitant de la large capacité d’accueil du roman, non seulement dissèque le récit de fiction et les procédés de sa production, mais va plus loin, en interrogeant le langage, et, par-là, le rapport au monde. On tentera d’éclaircir l’expérience menée par l’écrivain et celle offerte au lecteur, à travers l’émergence de nouvelles formes de savoir et d’existence, et l’invitation qui lui est faite à poursuivre l’expérimentation langagière.

In his highly metanarrative novel, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Percival Everett delves into the making of fiction, not so much showing what happens behind the scene as exhibiting a text that is no longer clearly distinct from the work that made it. Taking advantage of the welcoming capacity of the novel genre, Everett’s text not only dissects the narrative and the processes of its creation, but further puts language to question, thus challenging our very relation to the world. This paper aims at clarifying both the experiment carried out by the writer and that offered to the reader, through the emergence of new forms of knowledge and existence, as well as through the invitation conveyed to the reader to pursue the linguistic experiments started in the novel.