Following on from Corniche Kennedy, Naissance d’un pont and Réparer les vivants, her next novel is Jour de ressac. This dark, more personal novel, will be the subject of a meeting and signing this Thursday 12 December at Athenaeum. Foreword…
This new book begins with a call from a police officer informing the narrator of a case that concerns her – the body of a man to be identified, found on the beach in Le Havre. You, what prompted you to get down to work this time?
That’s a difficult question to answer in one clear, precise word. Rather than a single fact, it’s more a collection of intentions. Starting with the desire to work on the discovery of a human body, on the public highway, a beach in this case. What does this say about the world we live in? Certain forms of violence, of course, endemic to port cities (settlings of scores, drug traffics, etc.), the tragedy of migration too, but also Pasolini and perhaps Ulysses who, like the narrator, returns home. Add to that Le Havre, obviously, and then, no doubt, the search for the expression of a single voice this time, with the use of a narrative ‘I’, whereas my previous novels were more polyphonic.
A unique voice, then, and more personal than in the past: for the first time, it seems like you have wanted to start from yourself, to be the material of your novel. Is that true? Why that?
I’ve been writing for a long time now. Over 15 years. Corniche Kennedy, Naissance d’un pont, Réparer les vivants, Un chemin de tables, Un monde à portée de main… all followed on from this prevalence of the documentary motif. The idea that fiction can explore a specific reality, the work of a collective: the construction of a suspension bridge, a heart transplant, a facsimile… This time, I felt driven by the desire to work the language differently, with a tighter focus, around the optical and psychic framework of a single being. This, coupled with the fact that I was writing about the town of Le Havre, where I grew up and which I left behind, resulted in a more personal text. So, yes, in a way, I inverted the way I worked in my previous books and started from myself. Even if, from my point of view, this novel is a catalyst for the same intentions as the others.
Starting from yourself: was it this choice that led you to write in the 1st person and, perhaps, not to give your heroine a first name?
Absolutely, but this narrator remains a fictional character. She’s not my avatar. She represents someone other than me. I absolutely wanted to avoid the memoir and go for the novel, a literary form that I’m still very attached to. So yes, we are almost alike. I’m a bit older than she is and I work in a profession that’s very similar to hers, dubbing, particularly in the notion of making people talk, of putting words and phrases into other people’s mouths. On the other hand, I think she has her own history, her own sociology. We catch her in a rather particular context, at a time of fragility: she has failed at certain recordings, she feels she is losing her voice… She has a life of her own. But it’s true that she also catalyses a lot of things about me. I could add, for example, her passion for stories. The novel is built around many stories other than her own. She meets people who tell her things, she listens, she rekindles… For a heroine of a novel of interiority, she’s full of exteriority.
As you say, the narrator is neither quite you nor quite someone else. More than a novel of identification, Jour de ressac is a work of recognition, isn’t it?
Yes, of course it is. It’s about the idea of what leaves a mark, how do we live with what endures within us? Basically, it’s about a very radioactive past. Yet I’d started out more as a novel of identification. Even though there’s something rather curt and straightforward about this kind of literature, I’m passionate about it too. But you never really write the book you want. You divert. Over time, this text has become a novel of recognition and Le Havre, with its rich past, a kind of palimpsest. This is a city that, one day, failed to recognise itself and was rendered unrecognisable…
In addition to these questions of recognition, there is another adventure, that of language, in layers, constantly being amended, to make it more precise, more expressive, more touching… Like a piece of work that you come back to, again and again, to keep improving. Did you grope for writing this novel?
Generally speaking, I write books in one go. There is no first draft. Not that I don’t pay attention to the quality of my texts, on the contrary; but, let’s just say that I couldn’t work for nothing, only to do better later. On the other hand, in this particular case, it has to be said that I wrote this novel very slowly, with a lot of trials and errors, a lot of doubts… At one point, I saw the city get the upper hand and the police plot take a back seat. It’s unsettling, but I felt that the truth of the text lay elsewhere. The temporality of the story, which unfolds over the course of a day, was also established during the writing process. I hadn’t anticipated it. Not to mention the fact that I’m used to writing by going back over my work, half-opening, embedding…, in order to clarify and, from there, sometimes digress.
And what about AI? It interferes in your novel, in the pages about dubbing, threatening the narrator’s professional future. Is this a subject that concerns you?
Of course! I’m very interested. I think it’s inevitable that computer-generated voices will take over from human speech. Translation is a bit different. In this field, there’s a whole metatext, a subtext… In my opinion, it’s already a little more complex; even if, for a whole area of translation, AI is already very present. As far as my work is concerned now, I’m naturally wondering: how can this evolve? Since we are dealing with nothing more than computing power, even if we were to prompt all the parameters of a piece of writing, from my point of view it could only provide a pastiche of it. What makes a novel is the way the author arranges its elements, the links he creates between his characters and their stories. He alone holds the keys. I don’t think AI has that capacity. In the future, the use of increasingly autobiographical writing may well systematically defeat it…