Museum Visits by Éric Chevillard

  When you walk around a gallery, pause for a few moments at a piece, process, and move on to another piece, you have Éric Chevillard’s Museum Visits. The book is a collection, essentially, of flash fiction stories or prose poems presented back-to-back with no continuous throughline.

With that in mind, the book hinges primarily on Chevillard style. He presents his scenes with humour and surprise. For instance, the second piece in the collection is about his constant need to ejaculate. For page after page, he writes about when and where and how much he ejaculates and it gradually becomes clear that he’s talking about writing. There are a number of these linguistic spins that emerge throughout the collection, too.

In addition to the linguistic playfulness, there’s a playfulness in the construction of the vignettes. In a two page story called “The Gift,” for example, a “stern-faced old wife” presents her husband with a gift for the first time in twenty years. The cold woman has a rare moment of kindness in which she gives him a fountain pen and that brings the husband back in time—back to a time where he had writerly ambitions. Like everything else, his ambitions have worn away. Within a few short pages, there’s the whole story of a marriage and its deterioration, culminating in a moment where the husband appreciates his fountain pen gift by leaning forward and stabbing himself in the neck with it.

The collection mixes a few different types of flash fiction pieces. There are a few character portraits, a few sections about particular artifacts or artworks, and a few more general philosophical reflections on spaces. In terms of referential pieces, I think one of my favourites was “Hegel’s Cap,” about going to see the philosopher’s hat. When he sees the hat for the first time, he reflects on how more philosophers should take on the eccentric style in the modern day. It then becomes a reflection on seeing an artifact for a second time and all the magic has faded from it. Another of my favourite referential pieces is a character portrait in which a grown man repeatedly discusses being a child and throwing moles over Samuel Beckett’s fence. The fact that he brags about this repeatedly brings up reflections on how Samuel Beckett’s life and writing could have been so different if he hadn’t had to deal with moles over the fence all the time.

In terms of the more spatio-philosophical chapters, there are several resonant passages about being in museums. On top of that, there’s a chapter about doors. It begins with the question: “Is there anything more idiotic than a door?” (71). Drawing maybe on a Bachelard influence, Chevillard continues, “The very idea could have come from a mind that was itself open too wide, if not downright unhinged” (71)—note again the playfulness in the wording. Chevillard extends the meditation as follows:

“For either the door provides passage at a point in space where there was formerly nothing to impede free circulation, thus standing guard over it completely uselessly, or it forbids access to this or that place by closing it off, but in that case it’s not enough, because as soon as it’s installed you have to put high walls around it, which means arranging a tiresome cartage of stones and beams, an entire industry of the most exhausting sort, followed by a superhuman labor that hurls the masons up to vertiginous heights on their makeshift scaffolding while the mind-numbing music of the spheres, captured on their transistor radios, resonates all around.” (71).

I love the sprawling nature of the passage, especially because the passage is about the blockages doors impose. Instead, it’s a long sentence, unimpeded by periods. It’s the kind of stylistic elevation to the content that makes Chevillard’s writing more powerful.

I’m going to decontextualize a passage by way of ending the review. In “An Overwhelming Success,” the entry ends with “some inner peace: a peace without images, without shapes or colours, the blessed primordial emptiness of those uncreated worlds where everything remains to be done” (50). I love that moment of raw potential—”where everything remains to be done.” It’s a shame to bring things to a conclusion, to have things so set that they foreclose growth. 

So, with that in mind, I hope that Museum Visits inspires you to seek out something new, something unfinished, something that you haven’t returned to that, like Hegel’s hat, has lost its lustre.

Happy reading!