Percival Everett by Virgil Russell : le laboratoire du roman

• Main Author: Anne-Laure Tissut
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès 2018-05-01
• Series: Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
• Subjects: fiction; exploration; naming; likeness; identity; invention
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/11382

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.