Jean Echenoz’s 14: The Quiet Start of a World on Fire

 

A hot Saturday in August. In the département of Vendée, a man rides his bicycle through the countryside. Upon reaching a hilltop, the accountant lets his gaze wander: market towns, fields, the occasional automobile. The idyllic calm is broken by the tolling of the alarm bell. As the almost unnatural August wind grows stronger, it drives Anthime back to town, where he is met by a laughing crowd. The ringing of the bells as a signal for mobilization has brought everyone out into the streets that Saturday, even Charles—someone Anthime would have preferred to avoid. The whole thing seemed inevitable, but in two weeks, they would all be home again.

This is one way—more or less—to summarize the first chapter of Jean Echenoz’s 14. Inspired by a war journal from his in-laws’ estate, Echenoz initially plunged into historical research before turning to the literature of the time (Barbusse, Remarque, Jünger) to make the topic his own for this new novel. In doing so, the author deliberately turns away from the theory-heavy nouveau romans of the 1960s and 70s, building his multilayered and complex novel about the "five men who went to war" and the one woman left behind on the home front upon a relatively banal story: two brothers in love with the same woman. With this retour au récit, attentive readers are already prompted to ask what kind of story this is: Does this love triangle make 14 a romantic tale with a comedic happy ending, a historical novel, or perhaps even a retelling of the oldest story known to humankind—the rivalry of two brothers who share more than just their initials with Anthime and Charles (Abel–Cain)?

So what exactly is being told here?

As in Echenoz’s earlier works, his 2012 novel features relatively clearly defined protagonists. The settings (Vendée – the front – and back again) are constructed with realistic fidelity by a “sovereignly guiding omniscient narrator” (Überhoff). Yet it must be noted: even here, Echenoz does not revert to traditional “realistic narration” in the manner of Balzac. Instead, through intertextual references, he invites his readers to fill in narrative gaps and to follow textual traces—similar to Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

To offer a first impression of the novel’s richly intertextual and subtly imaginative construction—its virtuoso use of language and playful narrative and stylistic techniques—let us take a closer look at the incipit and the first chapter. Unlike history books, Echenoz is not interested in precise historical accuracy, in tracing causes and effects, or in questions of guilt. That would be “a volume top massif” (Echenoz, 7). On the contrary, a seemingly banal story of love and sibling rivalry becomes, as one critic put it, a “universal way of getting into the time and the complexities of the story.” On one hand, it is indeed a “miniature of the great slaughter” (miniature de la grande boucherie, Lançon), an attempt to recover the “sensibility of an era” (sensibilité d’une époque) from within the war at eye level, but on the other hand, this slim 124-page book is also a poetic reflection on storytelling and the narration of history.

This is already evident in the very first sentence of the incipit: “Comme le temps s’y prêtait à merveille...” (Echenoz, 7). Although the narrator begins to explain with comme (“as” or “since”), the ambiguity of the French word temps—meaning both “weather” and “time”—undermines and relativizes any clarity. Are we talking about the weather—or time itself?

The image becomes clearer when the focus shifts to one of the main characters, Anthime. Far removed from civilization, he stands on a hill and surveys the rural Vendée of August 1914. Much like in Barbusse, the reader—or the prophetic pathfinder—recognizes certain natural phenomena as omens, decipherable only to him. Yet unlike in Le Feu, nature here—the unnatural August wind that leaves the beautiful landscape “momentarily disturbed” (momentanément troublé, Echenoz, 9)—becomes a visual marker of intertextuality.

Echenoz’s style, characterized by a blend of cinematic techniques, musical soundscapes, and inter- and metatextual allusions, often features an ironic undertone. His predominantly omniscient narrator renders events and places in meticulous detail. Anthime, an accountant with a signet ring (a symbol of authority), is introduced as a figure of control, attentive to details and inventory lists by profession. In conscious imitation of Genevoix’s Ceux de 14, Echenoz includes enumerations and lists: of Anthime’s plans (ses projets, Echenoz, 7) or of the details he observes in the landscape (paysage autour de lui, Echenoz, 9). However, his authority is quickly undermined—first by the narrator, then by Charles. Anthime wears the ring on the wrong hand and believes in its magnetic healing powers, which he thinks ease the pain in his right hand. This could be interpreted, prophetically, as a premonition of the phantom pain of his future “severed hand” (main coupée, Cendrars).

We also learn that this accountant, despite his limited fishing skills, once accompanied friends to the sea—useless in practice, but at least capable of compiling an inventory list of the catch. These and other intrusions by the narrator expand the reader’s perspective. Especially in the use of imagery, Echenoz paints the landscape anew, employing a kind of mise en abyme that, like a zoom-out camera effect, draws the reader into a poetic discourse: “nous étions au premier jour” (Echenoz, 9). This signals both a temporal placement (August 1st) and a clearer view of a sparsely populated rural region where the age of the automobile has not yet taken hold.

It is now four o’clock in the afternoon on August 1st, and into the quiet idyll of Vendée breaks the cacophony of a new beginning. All around Anthime, bells begin to ring, transforming the “pleasant landscape” (plaisant paysage, Echenoz, 9) into a “sonic space” (espèce sonore, Echenoz, 9), setting a “movement in motion” (un mouvement venait de se mettre en marche, Echenoz, 10). The beginning is thus marked by sound, not speech—setting everything into motion and foreshadowing, through subtle language, the overwhelming power of war. The regular bim-bam of the bells not only sets the marching rhythm but, through the “binary blinking reminiscent of the automatic valve of certain factory devices” (clignotement binaire..., Echenoz, 10), also invokes the machinery and production of war.

The synesthetic effect—auditory signs becoming visual cues—already suggests that the war will reshape Anthime’s entire world and perception. As the unnatural wind and bell chimes swell, forming a soundscape, a “serious, threatening, heavy disorder” (désordre grave, menaçant, lourd, Echenoz, 10), Anthime instinctively recognizes the alarm bell as an anomaly but cannot interpret it due to his youth. “Aures habet, et non audiet”—he has ears but hears not—comments the narrator, alluding to Victor Hugo’s 1793. The alarm bell becomes a death knell, a signal of mobilization, and a symbol for the “present state of the world” (état présent du monde, Echenoz, 11). But both the sound of death and Hugo’s warnings about the horrors of the Terreur, the bloodshed and crimes on both ideological sides, go unheard—left by the roadside.

By contrast, the “nous” draws the reader into both the action and the narrative process, inviting them to “overcome the kind of intimidated embarrassment” (vaincre l’espèce d’embarras intimidé, Echenoz, 13) of the past 100 years. The reader thus becomes part of this literary attempt to understand and process the first great catastrophe of the 20th century, taking on the burden of remembrance—and the responsibility to keep it alive for future generations. The detailed descriptions, reminiscent of inventory lists or even tableaux vivants, reinforce this effect.

When Anthime returns to civilization, the tolling of the alarm bell is drowned out by the noise of the jubilant crowd, by a “smiling mob” (foule souriante, Echenoz, 12), by hymns and fanfares, by patriotic cries. The beginning, then, is also marked by noise and chaos, into which Anthime is drawn—while the reader, now a step behind him, observes from the margins of the celebration on the Place Royale the surreal conversation about the ring’s magnetic healing powers between Anthime and Charles.

And Charles? Who is Charles?

By the end of the first chapter, the amateur photographer stands seemingly detached with his camera on a street corner, occasionally snapping shots of the crowd and their banners for posterity. Only on page 70 do we learn that Charles is Anthime’s brother—though he had already died in a plane crash on page 57. But that’s not truly his end. His memory is resurrected “during the battle of Mons” (Echenoz, 124) in Charles Jr. Charles thus stands at the end of a beginning, becoming a symbol of memory kept alive—and perhaps even of Echenoz’s text itself.

In the end, Charles was wrong. The “affair of fifteen days” (l’affaire de quinze jours, Echenoz, 14) did not end after two weeks. They were not home by Christmas. A century later, not even 2014 marked its end.