Samuel Poisson-Quinton

Samuel Poisson-Quinton's novel "Hapax" (Actes Sud / Inculte, 2026) tells the story of a Parisian aspiring writer who, after the death of his father and the loss of his inheritance, falls into a crisis of grief and loss of language, while simultaneously living in a politically deformed, authoritarian, ecologically transformed city and developing an intense long-distance relationship with the horsewoman Artémise; the episodic-grotesque plot – from funeral and expropriation to absurd encounters, arrest, and interrogation – culminates in the revelation of Artémise's pregnancy, thus closing the circle of death and birth and contrasting the experience of existential return with formal linearity. The review argues that the novel's Oulipo constraint—no word may be repeated—is not merely a formal experiment, but a structure-forming principle that permeates all levels: style (chains of synonyms, shifts in register), plot (grotesque episodes resulting from linguistic necessity), character conception (disappearance instead of return), and poetics (self-reflection on the rule). A striking contrast emerges between the often crudely comical, grotesquely exaggerated sequence of events and the archaic, sublime, deliberately artificial register of language, which pathetically elevates these banalities while simultaneously exposing their absurdity. Central to the analysis is the thesis of a productive self-contradiction: while the linguistic law forbids any repetition, the narrated world insists on cyclical patterns (mourning, desire, generational succession), so that the novel necessarily heads toward its own rupture, which occurs in the deliberate transgression of the rule in the final scene. The essay reads this collision as an allegory of transience and recurrence and interprets the constraints as a poetic equivalent of mourning work: The forced invention of ever new words for the same referent becomes the linguistic analogue of a loss that cannot be repeated and yet constantly returns.