Machine célibataire

Machine célibataire is Pelletier’s image for the solitary bachelor, at once an isolated individual and one instance of a vast, anonymous multitude. The expression gathers his thoughts about Archimboldi’s possible old age into a vision of solitary men moving through the world at high speed, carrying their loneliness with them.

The bachelor and the aging writer

The phrase occurs as Pelletier considers the Serbian critic’s imagined Archimboldi: an old man, perhaps seventy-five or eighty, who might have set out for Morocco. The critic’s portrait turns the young postwar writer into an elderly figure while suggesting that, beneath the years and the accumulated books, he has remained essentially the same. Pelletier compresses this possibility into the image of the machine célibataire: the bachelor who suddenly grows old, or who returns from a journey at light speed to find that the other bachelors have aged or become pillars of salt.

A multitude in transit

Pelletier’s thought expands from one imagined old man to thousands, then hundreds of thousands. They cross an amniotic sea every day on Alitalia, eating spaghetti al pomodoro and drinking Chianti or grappa, their eyes half closed. Their destinations are airports in Africa or America, described as burial grounds for elephants; air travel becomes a passage toward great cemeteries traversed at light speed. The expression thus binds ordinary details of the journey—airline, food, drink, and half-closed eyes—to an image of mass solitude and mortality.

Pelletier’s uneasy recognition

The vision is not detached literary theory. Pelletier wonders why he is thinking this, looks at his hands, and associates spots on the wall with spots on the skin. His attention shifts from Archimboldi’s possible age to bodily aging and the prospect of death, and he ends the thought in irritation at the Serbian critic. The bachelor machine is therefore both a figure for Archimboldi’s imagined solitude and a trigger for Pelletier’s own anxious recognition of time passing.

Narrative function

The expression turns a discussion of literary criticism and a writer’s identity into a chain of increasingly strange images: the unchanged author, the suddenly aged bachelor, pillars of salt, an amniotic sea, and cemeteries reached at flight speed. That imaginative detour makes the familiar fact of solitary travel feel uncanny. It also preserves the distance between the Serbian critic’s speculative portrait and what is actually known: Pelletier’s image registers a fear of aging and disappearance, not confirmation of Archimboldi’s fate.