by Dominique Ferrier, for Le Cahier Noir, Spring 1998
When the suitcase was unzipped in Strasbourg in 1993, the literary world barely noticed. Another set of mold-soft pages, another forgotten manuscript from a minor Parisian essayist—no one expected to find inside the most structurally unsound and emotionally precise novel the twentieth century never quite published.
The Corridor Without Doors, long believed to be apocryphal, was known only through whispers, references in correspondence, and the wine-stained recollections of jazz flautist Vic Blackwing. For decades, Duvant’s reputation hinged on his minor essays—philosophical miniatures exploring solitude, ritual, and memory in the Parisian margins. That he might have written a 7,000-page novel—and one so sprawling, so recursive, so exhaustingly sincere—seemed absurd.
But the Corridor exists. And it is relentless.
Architecture as Absence
To read The Corridor Without Doors is to submit oneself to a literary architecture that denies orientation. The book has chapters, but no narrative arc. It has a protagonist—the Custodian—but he shifts tenses, changes names, and is often described in the third person as if someone were watching him. The plot, such as it is, concerns the Custodian’s assignment to catalog a corridor that may or may not exist. Bureaucracy, surveillance, and doubt compound in pages of reflection and footnoted hallucination.
“There is no door because I was never meant to leave,” the Custodian writes in the fifth chapter. “The light flickers in Morse, but I have forgotten the language.”
The novel unfolds like a psychological fugue—Kafka filtered through reel-to-reel delay, with echoes of Beckett and Foucault but filtered through Duvant’s personal ghost dialect. The prose is recursive and devotional: phrases reappear in altered forms, sentences loop like mantras, and entire sections are redacted, as if the book itself censors the reader’s understanding in real time.
Memory, Ritual, Collapse
At the core of Duvant’s work is ritual as resistance. Where Camus gave us the absurd man who defies meaning, Duvant gives us the minor civil servant who finds meaning in every absurd gesture. The Custodian sharpens his pencils, reorganizes unsorted files, and writes in ledgers no one will read—all with the intensity of prayer.
And yet the novel constantly undermines these acts. Time loops. Files rewrite themselves. The corridor is never described the same way twice. Reality becomes administrative hallucination.
“I was told to describe what cannot be seen. Each time I look, it alters to remain undocumented. The corridor is not hostile. It is simply uninterested in being known.”
Reading Duvant’s novel is itself a ritual—a slow procession through memory’s fog, lit only by the small candles of recurring imagery: a window that won’t open, a typewriter with the wrong alphabet, a form that asks, “What have you forgotten to forget?”
Legacy: A Mirror with No Glass
The book’s influence since its rediscovery has been quiet but profound. Poets cite it as an exorcism text. Filmmakers describe it as a storyboard of non-images. A cult of archivists and writers—calling themselves The Custodians—claim to be building a physical version of the Corridor in an abandoned office park outside Leipzig.
Critics remain divided.
Some call it unreadable, narcissistic, paranoid to the point of incoherence.
Others, like myself, return to it like a fever dream—a book that refuses you, until you are finally broken enough to understand it.
Duvant did not write a novel to be consumed. He wrote a containment device. A whisper loop for the unreconciled self. A cathedral for the archivists of sorrow.
Final Thought
The Corridor Without Doors is not a novel. It is a mirror that forgets your face every time you look into it.
It is not a question of whether you’ll finish it. It is whether it will finish cataloging you.
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