La Chute: A Literary Analysis

First, I will ask two of you to come to the board to participate in an experiment… Here are the materials: use them however you like…

When I was a little boy – that is to say not so long ago – I was always drawing, drawing, drawing… all day long – even in class – most of the time, massive churches or elegant castles. Kaplas, Playmobils were invading the living room for months… Construction games were a passion, a unique way of making my dreams concrete. But as I had to clean the rooms – the least fun – I was always inventing a dramatic way of doing it: a cataclysm breaking the monument was by far, my favourite part. « La Chute », the destruction was an essential part of the story, the condition to liberate the space in order to rebuild some

Anna Karenina deals with two interlocking destinies spiraling up or down, around the narrative axis. Levin climbs the stairs and reaches happiness while Anna irremediably falls down the stairs until she commits suicide.

III-Architectural transposition emphasizes the importance of construction in literary works. But what about destruction?

Destruction is inspiring writerS as well… In Jane Eyre, the castle’s destruction by fire is the narrative condition for destroying Edward’s first mariage and allows Jane and Edward to be married at last. The destruction of the castle is a liberation, a rebirth, a reconstruction.

The same idea goes for Apollinaire who destroys the traditional format of the poem with his beautiful Calligrammes…

Literature can also destroy the genres, the topoi, the horizons of expectation, the sense, the character… Literature can destroy itself, revealing how transgressive, playful and experimental it can be. In fact, destruction is a synonym of

Because architecture helps us to define literature in a lot of ways…

As a vertical conquest – steeple, castle tower, factory chimney – or a horizontal extension – bridge, tunnel –, architecture, like literature, is a matter of links and connection [bridge] but also of frontiers and separation. In the sense of archi-structure, one could also speak of social, familial, cultural, moral architecture that literature can question…

Now, let’s have a look at what our architects have built… Both of them had the same amount of kaplas in the same colours… However, their creations are different. Just like the writers make different books but use the same language, the same colourful or neutral words…
The Tower of Babel myth explains Lit and Arch were bound together from the very beginning. The real cement that allows mankind to build the tower is language, this adamic tongue whose words are reproducible moulded bricks. The Babel partition can be thus considered as the birth of civilisation, when architecture began to tell stories and stories began to deal with