Among the oldest debates of literature, it crosses often that of the source of inspiration, stories and by extension, the finished character or not imaginable situations and can be integrated into a romanesque construction. Salman Rushdie, a few years now, had represented this as a more or less fish sea where all authors were regularly buying tales and schemas. This sea, on which it recalled, had no known limits. Fishing was not preserved, neither the rest required no principled policy or resource management.

Among the extraordinary campaign of new edition of the writings of Enrique Vila-Matas in hand that began this month Christian Bourgois (to note reissues at the same time of Burroughs, Pocket, which is again), there for 7 euros, a kind of small new in form of test on the novelistic theories is a true happiness. The book is called Loss of theories and “tell”, if it can be said, the history of a double of the writer, invited to a symposium in Lyon, and quickly abandoned by the organizers (strange, strange, this case) to his reflections on the novel. The author discussed on Julien Gracq and offers, free or almost, a conception of the novel takes on a dozen pages and could clarify some strange horizons. It is thus up page 45 on our history of stories by reference to a critical article he read shortly before. Eclairant:

” I learned in small steps to no longer respect the intrigues.”. Learning has become final on the day where I read statements by Vilem Vok in The Paris Review which confirmed my suspicion: there is that a reduced number of intrigue, it is not necessary to give a disproportionate importance, it is sufficient to introduce a – almost by chance – in the book it is writing to thus have more time to refine what should always import us more thanstyle. What are these intrigues? Vilem Vok made clear: “someone fourre in a hornet’s nest and is doing;” someone loses something that he found; someone is a victim of injustice and then to venge;…; someone did not stop Strip; two beings éprennent one of the other and see many people to step between them; a virtuoso is accused wrongly of sin and a crime; a person faces a challenge with courage, in triumph or fails; someone launches an investigation into a case to find the vérité… »

It is clear that this does not completely close the debate. The fiction material may other closer model of DNA, a few strands, identical or few in number, which the reconstruction can give an infinite number of combinations. Is it to say that because the acids of base are few, the result of the combinations they form Assembly has little interest? Can thus defend formalism or showcase all style. Can also think the opposite and put the plot in the heart of the heart. Perhaps after all is what this debate which, on paper, seems the most interesting of the world, has long already been exceeded by piles of authors and is not worth. It is even a certainty. In any event, it is better read that thinking. Write to the rigour, but what then?