Cauliflowers and Plane Trees: Cultivated Vegetal Matter in Le méridien de Greenwich (1979) by Jean Echenoz

Sara Bédard-Goulet

doi:10.1353/esp.2020.0043

Cauliflowers and Plane Trees: Cultivated Vegetal Matter in Le méridien de Greenwich (1979) by Jean Echenoz

L Esprit Créateur ◽

10.1353/esp.2020.0043 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 60 (4) ◽

pp. 121-133

Author(s):

Sara Bédard-Goulet

Keyword(s):

Plane Trees ◽

Jean Echenoz

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D’une hétérotopie à l’autre où le vagabondage au féminin (Jean Echenoz, Un an)

Quêtes littéraires ◽

10.31743/ql.4583 ◽

2014 ◽

pp. 156-163

Author(s):

Simona Jişa

Keyword(s):

Point Of View ◽

Standard Of Living ◽

Human Being ◽

The South ◽

Railway Stations ◽

Spatial Point ◽

Strong Feeling ◽

Continuous Decrease ◽

One Year ◽

Jean Echenoz

Jean Echenoz’s text presents Victoria’s story who runs away from Paris, believing that she has killed her lover. Her straying (that embraces the form of a relative deterritorialization in a Deleuzian sense) lasts one year and it is built up geographically upon a descent (more or less symbolical) to the South of France and, after that, she comes back to Paris and encloses the spatial and textual curl. From a spatial point of view, she turns into a heterotopia (Foucault) every place where she is located, fact that reflects her incapability of constituting a personal, intimate space. The railway stations, the trains, the hotels, the improvised houses of those with no fixed abode are turning, according to Marc Augé’s terminology, into a « non-lieux » that excludes human being. Her vagrancy is characterized through a continuous flight from police and people and through a continuous decrease of her standard of living and dignity. It’s not about a quest of oneself, but about a loss of oneself. Urged by a strong feeling of culpability, her vagrancy is a self-punishment that comes to an end when the concerns of her problems disappear and she finds out that her lover is alive.

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