Repetition and Resistance in The Cavalier
Kayla Hassett
Book Review
A review of Nathalie Quintane’s The Cavalier (Winter Editions). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.
When we read history, become aware of and engage with it, where does it go? From the page to brain to life, does it sit idly, watching from behind us, or does it breathe inside us? By what force or alchemy does it make itself tangible, legible to us as we continue to forge its path through time? These questions may or may not be relevant as one reads The Cavalier by Nathalie Quintane, but this does remain true: that all matters of human existence, past and present, are most relevant to us as one continuous, poetic interrogation of the now.
Nominally centered on a mid-1970s scandal involving a philosophy teacher accused of “inciting minors to debauchery” in a provincial French town, The Cavalier quickly refuses the stabilizing comforts of narrative closure and archival certainty. In undertaking a form of historical attention that is discontinuous, recursive, and insistently present tense, this writing practice rejects the past as an object to be retrieved and analyzed from afar. Instead, history is reconfigured with and transcends through memory; memory that is present, lived through, and being lived.
Quintane, a member of the generation of post–May ’68 French literary activists, has long resisted the separation of poetry from politics, or form from critique. From her early prose-poems and essays through later works such as Un œil au moins, Quintane has cultivated a writing practice that emanates from post-’68 political critique, repeatedly mobilizing poetic form as a site of resistance to institutional language and depoliticized literary norms. In The Cavalier, that resistance manifests as a method of fragmentation; across the pages unfolds a constellation of anecdotes intersecting documents, personal recollection and reported speech, journalistic excerpts questioning their own authority. The book’s structure seems to mirror the conditions it interrogates, which is the expression of how repression operates obliquely, how scandals are produced through accumulation rather than evidence, how collective memory is shaped by rumor, fear, censorship, and institutional indolence.
Quintane moves between decades with little interest in linear progression, allowing 1968 to echo against today as unfinished business. The book circles the 1970s moral scandal in which philosophy teacher from Paris, Nelly Cavallero, was expelled from teaching in a regional French town for discussing sexuality, contraception, and politics openly with her students. This was conduct deemed unacceptable by both school authorities and local opinion. Returning to this episode decades later while teaching in the same region, Quintane occupies a mirroring position: simultaneously implicated in the institution that punished figures like Nelly Cavallero and acutely aware of her own vulnerability within it. This self-situating is a way of refusing false distance. The book repeatedly insists that what is often framed as a dead rumor, or “closed case,” is anything but closed: the same mechanisms of moral panic, bureaucratic punishment, and social silencing recur under different guises. Through this lens, The Cavalier clearly isn’t reviving the scandal of its subject but shows us how it was never dead. As Quintane herself insists, “this work is not the revival of a scandal nor even that of a news oddity but a current update for the here and now,” a formulation that reframes the Cavallero affair as an ongoing structure, not a point merely fixed in time. We see how history has and still does discipline bodies, speech, and desire, especially in small towns where visibility itself becomes a form of risk:
In May 2021, I send Joseph his passage from this book to look over. He talks, talks about the students, talks about the news of the day, he asks me whether I thought the swim was in the right place —I was still not sure of where to put it— the photos from the time at a local swimming hole, Nelly naked and some younger people, under the cover of vegetation back then, and the cops during the crime scene visit hurry hurry and cut it back for visibility from the road, and then Joseph starts talking about how things are nowadays, about the instant parties thrown during Covid abstinence and about the police who would come and lock the kids up, when he suddenly lowers his mask and says: But why don’t they revolt?
Crucially, Quintane’s investigation is also an investigation of literature and of form. The refusal of genre—history, memoir, essay, reportage, prose poem—is constitutive. Her syntax often advances by accretion rather than cut and dry argument, circling its object through repetition and hesitation. With a candid and often humorous tone, statements are revised mid-paragraph, and conclusions are suspended or quietly withdrawn. “This text could have been written out of thwartedness,” she tells us, and elsewhere outright asks us, “What right of mine was it to go digging around in a town’s past?” all while not letting us forget her strength in other sensibilities with questions like “But is that what’s in one’s head, at thirty-three? In the mid-1970s, after seven years at war now that one is starting to lose, the war?” This stylistic variability produces something closer to poetry than to narrative nonfiction, where meaning arises not from resolution but from juxtaposition, from the friction between voices and temporalities. The text seems to ask, repeatedly, whether coherence itself might be complicit with the very systems it seeks to critique, and, whether historical inquiry is also an inquiry in speech, in language.
By the book’s end, there is a lingering effect, a dissatisfaction satisfied by a sharpened sense of historical irresolution. Quintane does not offer redemption—neither for the utopian energies of the post-’68 generation nor for the contemporary moment that inherits their failures. Instead, she offers a poetics of attention: a way of writing that refuses to smooth over contradiction, that accepts incompleteness as an ethical stance. She incites us to look critically at our institutions, our education systems, to interrogate ourselves for the histories that we find ourselves situated in over and over again. The Cavalier becomes poetic precisely because it abandons the promise of mastery. It does not seek to restore the past or redeem it, but to keep it unsettled, therefore, alive enough to continue troubling the present.s are not only externally ubiquitous but inextricably imbedded inside us all.
The Cavalier
Nathalie Quintane
Winter Editions
121pp
$20
Kayla Hassett is a poet from Long Island, with a B.A. in English Literature and Art History from Skidmore College. In addition to being a Prose Reader at L’Esprit and Indirect Books, she currently works as an Editorial Assistant at Abbeville Press in New York, supporting the production of illustrated books. She is interested in writing and editorial work that bridges criticism, art, and lived experience.
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