Disalping illusions

Every month, our literary critic puts a work through a kaleidoscope, collecting the images it projects and reconstructing their diffractions. Even if the flashes of genius turn out to be shards of glass.

There are texts that gently pick up the reader, like a Sunday skier picked up by the chairlift. Désalpe («Desalpe») does nothing of the sort. Antoine Jaccoud prefers to take us by the scruff of the neck, with the delicacy of a shepherd shearing sheep while reciting Hölderlin. In other words: it rubs, it stings and it leaves a pattern on the skin. Written for the stage in 2011, this play didn't see the light of day in print until over a decade later. So, if this text made people laugh when it was first written, it makes faces much more tense today.

Fall from above, fall far below

Désalpe («Desalpe») is the story of a distressing situation: that of the people of the Alps, the Borloz, Schindelholz, Zuber, Schnyder, Zufferey, faced with the end of the snow, which brought with it the collapse of their business. Now, down on the plain, they speak of their lost white paradise. This is the disaster scenario of Antoine Jaccoud's play.

With his mineral humor, the writer from the canton of Vaud exposes these hoteliers, ski instructors and pom-pom hat salesmen to the harsh light of melting. All had seen the signals coming, naturally. Stunted winters, patched slopes, snow cannons spitting their denial into an increasingly tepid sky... However, opulence sometimes has the magical power to blind even trained eyes to an avalanche three kilometers away.

Patatras after Ratrac

Désalpe («Desalpe») is not a requiem, but a sensitive inventory: that of a world that «didn't see» its own meltdown coming. This is no longer the epic of the heights, but its administrative account, written in fine font, stamped «out of date». Antoine Jaccoud uses accumulation to conjure up a guestbook with familiar accents.

Yet what's striking is the balance between sarcasm and tenderness. For behind the mockery, something else emerges: a strange melancholy. The melancholy of a country that long believed it could replace snow with machines, winter with a budget and the unchanging mountain woman with a four-color tourist brochure. Désalpe («Desalpe») reminds us that it was all an illusion, and that the last great Swiss mirage has already been swallowed up by the thaw.

The melody of frosted memories

In spite of everything, this text is more sound poetry than narrative theater. Antoine Jaccoud plays with words, tinkling them, jostling their sonorities, denting them, to loudly chant the dramatic refrain: «En haut, c'est foutu» ("Upstairs, it's all over"). What's more, this is a total musical show, since Désalpe («Desalpe») was staged accompanied by an alphorn quartet. The theater resonates like a cracking landscape.

It's brief, it's nervous, it's a corpus of memories played full-throated. A desalp that doesn't bring back the herds, but a sunken world. And yet it continues to sing.

Quentin Perissinotto is a literary critic for Regard Libre. Write to the author: quentin.perissinotto@leregardlibre.com

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Antoine Jaccoud
Desalping. Followed by Sometimes I talk to myself
BSN Press
December 2023
88 pages

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