Les non-sens et les sens de l’écriture digressive d’Éric Chevillard. Le cas de Palafox

Nonsense and sense in the digressive writing of Éric Chevillard. The case of Palafox The novels of Éric Chevillard oscillate between logic and absurdity, due to not only the subject matter but also the rejection of novelistic conventions, which are replaced with a variety of unusual narrative strategies, digressive narration being the most important of them. Frequently used as a narrative mechanism distorting the eventfulness of the text, in his early writing it functions rather as a technique whose aim is to structure the plot in an unusual manner and to highlight its thematic concerns as well as transforming the reader’s traditional reception of a literary text. The present paper discusses these textual functions of digression on the example of Palafax, the novel in which atypical narration tallies with the story being told.