Jean-Claude Pelletier

Jean-Claude Pelletier is a French scholar of German literature whose discovery of Benno von Archimboldi shapes his career and draws him into the close-knit circle of Archimboldi’s readers. From an isolated, impoverished student he becomes France’s leading authority on the writer, translating his work and pursuing the possibility of meeting him. Yet the more Pelletier and his fellow scholars investigate Archimboldi, the clearer it becomes that scholarship cannot bring the absent author into their lives; their shared pursuit instead becomes the setting for friendship, desire, and difficult negotiations over intimacy.

Discovery and Literary Career

Pelletier first read Archimboldi in Paris at Christmas 1980, aged nineteen and studying German literature. The book was D’Arsonval. He did not know it belonged to a trilogy with the English-themed The Garden and the Polish-themed The Leather Mask, but that gap in his knowledge did nothing to diminish his admiration. He became an enthusiastic reader and began searching for more of the author’s work, despite Archimboldi’s near-invisibility in the academic world around him: his professors had scarcely heard of the writer, and correspondence with the Hamburg publisher went unanswered.

The search was practical as well as intellectual. Pelletier looked through German bookstores in Paris and found scattered references to Archimboldi in a German-literature dictionary and a Belgian magazine about Prussian literature. In 1981, a trip to Bavaria with three fellow students led him to a small Munich bookshop on Voralmstrasse, where he found Mitzi’s Treasure and The Garden. Reading those books confirmed the admiration D’Arsonval had inspired.

In 1983, at twenty-two, Pelletier undertook a French translation of D’Arsonval without being commissioned. He liked the novel and enjoyed translating it; he also saw that a translation accompanied by a study of Archimboldi’s work could serve as his thesis and perhaps the basis of a future dissertation. He completed the final draft in 1984. A Paris publisher accepted it after a period of inconclusive, contradictory readings, and brought Archimboldi into print in France. Although the book initially seemed unlikely to sell more than a thousand copies, its first printing of three thousand sold out following several sharply differing but positive, even enthusiastic reviews. Further printings followed.

By then Pelletier had read fifteen Archimboldi books and translated two others. He had become, almost universally, the preeminent French authority on the author. The ascent from obscurity to scholarly standing is set against his earlier circumstances: as a young man he lived in a small attic room in Paris, sharing a sink and a deeply unhygienic bathroom with fifteen other residents. The contrast makes his professional achievement concrete without making it a simple triumph. Recognition gives his devotion a public form, but the object of that devotion remains distant and difficult to find.

The Archimboldian Circle

Pelletier’s scholarly career develops through repeated encounters with other readers of Archimboldi. He first met Piero Morini at German-literature colloquiums in Leipzig in 1989, during the GDR’s final crisis, and saw him again at a Mannheim symposium later that year. At a 1990 forum in Zurich, Pelletier and Morini met Manuel Espinoza. Pelletier and Espinoza encountered each other again in Maastricht in 1991, where each presented a paper pairing another German writer with Archimboldi. They began reading each other’s work in scholarly journals and became friends, or something close to it.

In 1992, Pelletier, Espinoza, and Morini met again at a seminar in Augsburg, each presenting on Archimboldi. Rumor had suggested that the author himself might attend, but a telegram from his Hamburg publishers, received two days before the gathering, conveyed his apologies. The conference disappointed the three critics in other respects as well. The absent writer was already the organizing center of their professional lives, but he repeatedly eluded the occasions arranged in his name.

The four scholars—Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Norton—first saw one another at a contemporary German-literature conference in Bremen in 1994. Over the course of their encounters, Pelletier’s connection with Espinoza becomes both intellectual friendship and romantic rivalry, while Norton becomes the focus of desire for both men. The arrangement is not merely an extension of their shared academic interest: their evenings and journeys establish a private fellowship in which the four can speak, laugh, and test one another’s intelligence. At night in Avignon, they walk together, sometimes with one of them pushing Morini’s wheelchair, and discuss their common obsession without interrupting one another. The image of the four moving through city streets gives physical shape to a bond that is both affectionate and precarious.

Norton, Espinoza, and the Friendship Pact

After returning from Avignon at the end of 1994, Pelletier comes home to his Paris apartment, leaves his bag by the door, pours a glass of whiskey, and looks out at the familiar view of the Place de Breteuil and the UNESCO building. He listens to the answering machine and, despite his exhaustion, takes a shower and turns on his computer. Only then does he recognize how much he misses Norton. He wants not only to talk to her but to be with her and to tell her that he loves her, hoping to hear that she loves him in return. Espinoza undergoes a similar realization on his flight to Madrid, deciding that Norton is the woman he has hoped to find. Their feelings make the intellectual group’s closeness newly unstable.

During a later search for Archimboldi, Pelletier and Espinoza walk through Sankt Pauli and visit Mrs. Bubis. They recognize that literary study, however consuming, cannot fill the whole of life: they can read and analyze Archimboldi, but they cannot laugh or grieve with him, because he is always far away. The deeper they enter his work, the more it seems to consume those who study it. Their conclusion shifts attention from the absent writer to their own need for love and human connection.

Pelletier acts first. Three days after meeting Archimboldi’s publisher, he arrives in London without warning and tells Norton the latest news. He invites her to dinner at an elaborate Hammersmith restaurant; afterward, she invites him home, ostensibly to discuss Archimboldi and what Mrs. Bubis has disclosed, including critic Schleiermacher’s contemptuous judgment of the author’s first book. Their conversation turns into laughter and a kiss, and they become lovers. Pelletier’s pursuit of Norton is therefore bound up with the scholarly search, but it also moves beyond it: the meeting that supplies literary information becomes the beginning of a personal relationship.

The relationship changes the balance between the three. Later, after an awkward encounter involving Alex Pritchard, Pelletier and Espinoza dine with Norton at Jane & Chloe. They do not press her to explain Pritchard, and she does not clarify who he is. Instead, the three discuss how close they came to destroying the friendship they shared. Pelletier and Espinoza agree that sex should not be allowed to damage a bond grounded in emotional as well as intellectual affinities. They tell Norton that she may eventually choose one of them, choose neither, or postpone a decision indefinitely; the choice, they insist, belongs to her. Their pact does not dissolve the rivalry or settle the relationship. It makes room for Norton’s agency while preserving the friendship as something all three fear losing.

The Search and Its Limits

The pursuit of Archimboldi carries Pelletier beyond European conferences and into Mexico. When Morini declines to join the expedition, citing his doctor’s prohibition against travel, Pelletier goes with Espinoza and Norton from Paris to Mexico City, where El Cerdo is waiting. The next morning they fly to Hermosillo. El Cerdo is delighted to host distinguished European academics, though disappointed that they refuse his hopes of arranging a lecture at Bellas Artes, UNAM, or the Colegio de Mexico.

In Mexico City, Pelletier and Espinoza go with El Cerdo to the hotel where Archimboldi had stayed. A clerk lets them consult the computer, and El Cerdo scrolls through the names recorded under the date of his meeting with the writer. Pelletier notices the dirt under El Cerdo’s fingernails and understands the origin of his nickname. This brief detail places Pelletier’s habit of close observation inside the practical work of the search: the scholar’s eye attends not only to books and bibliographies but to the people who hold clues. The hotel record offers a trace of Archimboldi, not the presence of the author himself.

In Santa Teresa, Pelletier, Norton, and Espinoza explain their reasons for searching to Oscar Amalfitano. They say they want to find Archimboldi because they study his work, because he is dying, and because they believe the greatest German writer of the twentieth century should have an opportunity to speak to his readers and return to Europe. Amalfitano points out that they have never seen Archimboldi in person and questions the effort to find someone who does not want to be seen. When he challenges their ranking by naming Kafka, the critics qualify their claim: they mean the greatest postwar German writer, or the greatest German writer of the second half of the twentieth century. Their adjustment reveals how certainty about Archimboldi’s stature coexists with uncertainty about the man himself.

Eventually, Pelletier states the limit of the expedition plainly: he and Espinoza are not going to find Archimboldi. Espinoza replies that he has known this for days. Their acknowledgment does not cancel their earlier efforts, but it changes the search from a straightforward quest for an encounter into a recognition of absence. Pelletier’s career has made him an expert on Archimboldi’s books; it cannot compel their author to appear.

Significance

Pelletier’s arc is organized around a tension between literary knowledge and lived attachment. His early devotion is productive: it leads him to discover, translate, and help publish a nearly unknown novelist, and it establishes the scholarly reputation that defines him. But the same pursuit can become consuming, turning an author who cannot be reached into the center of the critics’ shared lives. The group’s encounters repeatedly bring that limitation into view, from Archimboldi’s missed appearance at Augsburg to the hotel records in Mexico and the admission in Santa Teresa that they have never seen him.

The novel also makes Pelletier’s critical vocation inseparable from his relationships with other people who read Archimboldi. His friendship with Espinoza is neither incidental nor simply competitive: each man desires Norton, yet both try to protect the friendship they fear their rivalry could destroy. Their agreement leaves Norton free to choose, or not to choose, while preserving the possibility that affection may outlast the arrangement that first made them lovers and rivals. Pelletier’s most consequential discovery is therefore not a new fact about Archimboldi but a limit on what the search can provide. The absent writer can be studied and pursued; love, friendship, and shared life must be made among the living.