Parce qu'elle ne l'a pas demandé

This new programming by France Culture in the Cour du Musée Calvet is based on the idea that literature, poetry, and theatre are not only weapons but also a way to distance oneself, to “disorient” oneself from current events. “A great writer must dare venture out like Don Quixote,” says Enrique Vila-Matas, special guest for this programme. The audience is therefore invited to a wild ride alongside some emblematic works, in the language of Cervantès but also in that of Diderot. With humour and whimsy, guaranteed.

In the presence of Enrique Vila Matas.

Parce qu'elle ne l'a pas demandée by Enrique Vila-Matas

The Festival d'Avignon and France Culture invite Enrique Vila-Matas, the Spanish novelist and essayist whose work has been translated into some forty languages and has won numerous awards. This production is an adaptation of a singular short story combining life and literature, reality and fiction. The artist Sophie Calle is the heroine of this story.

Character in search of an author - Contretemps, by Sophie Calle

"In Leviathan, writer Paul Auster borrowed episodes from my life. I suggested reverse the process, to create a fictional character that I would try to embody by obeying the book to the letter. Instead, Paul sent me Personal Instructions for Sophie Calle to make life in New York life in New York. I followed those instructions. But I wanted to become a novel heroine. After being turned down by five other writers, I read Bartleby et compagnie, by Enrique Vila-Matas. The book is based on a book by Marcel Schwob, Vies imaginaires, and the character Petronius, who conceives the idea of turning the adventures he has invented from parchment into reality. I didn't believe in it any more, but I contacted the author all the same. "You write a story and I live it," I summarised. Miraculously, a fortnight later I received The Journey of Rita Malú. Only my mother was dying, she had only three months to live, and I had just been chosen to occupy the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale the following year. Rita Malú couldn't bury my mother, nor represent France; it wasn't written in stone. I'd been looking for an accomplice for years, I'd finally found one, and I had to back out. Vila-Matas did not want to postpone Rita's journey so long. In his book Explorateurs de l'abîme (Explorers of the Abyss), published in 2007, a chapter entitled 'Because she didn't ask for it' is devoted to my deception."
Sophie Calle

Vila-Matas embodies literature, he 'is' literature, and his work is like a hall of mirrors in which readers love to lose themselves in infinite reflections. With Vila-Matas, everything is fiction and nothing is fiction. Literature is sometimes like an illness, and the famous "Montano disease" is the occasion for vertiginous mises en abyme. Just like his collection Explorateurs de l'abîme, from which we have specially extracted the short story Parce qu'elle ne l'a pas demandé. Written at the request of the artist Sophie Calle, it places the artist at the heart of the fiction. In the spirit of mischief, we asked Sophie Calle to physically enter the story and play herself.

Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948, at the height of Francoism. In 1974, he moved to Paris and took up residence in a maid's room rented by Marguerite Duras and previously occupied by the Argentinian writer Copi. After Franco's death in 1975, Vila-Matas returned to Barcelona and began to develop a unique and singular body of work. By immersing himself in other people's books in order to write his own, he became a kind of writer's writer, exploring the impossibility of writing, taking the motif of Kafka's Letter to the Father to the extreme, and arguing around the famous phrase attributed to Bartleby by Melville: "I would prefer not to". His work carries in its wake a myriad of writers, who will be found again in his Abrégé d'histoire de la littérature portative, published in 1985. With Le Mal de Montano, published in 2003, Vila-Matas won every accolade: the Prix Herralde, the National Literature Prize of the Generalitat of Catalonia and the Prix Médicis étranger in France.

With Audrey Bonnet, Sophie Calle, Jérôme Kircher
In the presence of Enrique Vila-Matas, invited by France Culture with the Festival d'Avignon
Directed by Christophe Hocké
Adapted by Marion Stoufflet
Assistant director Justine Dibling
Narrative from the collection Explorateurs de l'abîme, translated from Spanish by André Gabastou and published by Christian Bourgois.