The day of her funeral, the truck in which we were riding swerved suddenly and flipped over near “Smelly Springs.” Although no one was hurt, the accident itself upset me greatly. And I was even more horrified by the fact that my Grandmother would end up buried in a cracked coffin. Only eight years old, I’d already been made aware of life’s cruel workings. With all its problems. Its surprises. Its complications. I knew that something didn’t work correctly. I couldn’t accept the fact that misery had been long nipping at the heels of a poor peasant woman, and had ruthlessly pursued her to her very grave.
Now that I have so much better understood Grandmother, I wonder if I’m not the only one in the family to keep an inheritance of torments and worries buried deep inside. In my body, sealed-in pain. In my heart infused with the tears of a night when love pitifully projected its lonely and fateful shadow on an earthen wall. Like Grandmother, I’m waiting for someone. Anyone. A touch. A human voice. A face. A Jastrame. I’m waiting to no longer be alone.
Three in the afternoon. Raynand is at Paulin’s house, in his bedroom. He’s clearly surprised by the atmosphere of silence and order that suffuses the little gray room. He’s impressed. So astonished that he can hardly speak. He doesn’t know where to begin. Not in a million years would he have imagined such discipline from someone as noisy and explosive as Paulin. He glances quickly at the shelves of the bookcase before sitting down. A bunch of marked-up manuscript pages have been arranged on a metal table.
— Are you the one who wrote all of that, Paulin?
— I’ve been working on a novel for the past few months. It’s been tormenting me mercilessly, beating me like a draft horse. I’ve been carrying a heavy load ever since I took on this project.
— You say you’ve been working on it for months now?
— This could even take years, my dear Raynand.
— I’ve heard that the novel is a difficult genre.
— Yes, in a sense, rather difficult. Especially when it comes to breaking with tradition. To renewing something. To creating. Literature is beginning to grow old. And having arrived at this state of decrepitude, it risks being dethroned by cinema, which, conversely, shows brand-new vigor. Making use of the scientific technologies of the twentieth century, and using the resources of other branches of the arts as helpful tools, cinema has achieved almost a miracle: it has raised itself to the level of a total art form. The threat it poses to literature is enormous. Certain. Yet it isn’t a question of doing battle, or of eradicating it. That would be a waste of time. Literature is dying. It will die, without question. Not even the most seasoned doctors can save it. Its tissues, its arteries are sclerotic. And its heart, having turned into rusty metal, feebly pumps out rotten blood.
— If that’s the case, what’s there to do? I’d say you should stop writing. You might as well break that useless pen in two and then tear up these sheets of paper before throwing them in the fire.
— What’s left is waiting for the end; the death throes can go on for some time. In the interval, literature will accept its place as underling. And we can still slow down its ultimate end by infusing this old, ailing organism with a bit of new blood. With something enriched that has been extracted from the drama of its own dying, which is also that of men — for whom the earth is no longer enough. The planet has become a straitjacket for man’s respiration. He needs wings to rise up. To conquer infinite illuminated spaces. But literature, that decrepit old man, loses its breath in the course of such vertiginous ascension. And free falls terrify it. In the meantime, cinema, marvelously new, served up by the television and by communication satellites, quickly travels along the new itinerary of cosmic waves. That’s why, my friend, to produce a literary work that pays close attention to the aesthetic becomes so difficult. Originality, authenticity — these are the stumbling block and the challenge. We must create, more now than before. As we wait for the certain turn toward death. The fascinating era of interstellar acrobatics.
Raynand is spellbound by Paulin’s words. After a few moments of contemplation, he lights a cigarette.
— Tell me, Paulin, how far along are you with your novel?
— The first chapters are already written. I’m at a crucial point, and I’m finding it very difficult to move forward. It happens at times that I end up spending hours doing battle with a single blank page. A cruel sheet of paper that refuses to fill up. That stubbornly refuses to bear the scratch marks of my pen or the strikes of my typewriter. A resistance that undermines my spirit. Often reduces me to tears. Because in such moments, neither semantics nor the dictionary, nor grammar, nor memories of past reading are of any help. And so, I give it up. I get into my bed and tell myself that literature is a curse. The surest path to my self-destruction. To suicide. But then the next day, I wake up full of enthusiasm. And I go back to writing, like a rebel full of rage. A masochist full of vices. An incorrigible megalomaniac. A zo-bouke-chen — irredeemably shameless!
— So what is it that holds you back?
— It isn’t that I don’t know what to say. It’s the way of saying it that torments me. The obsession with language in the crucible of solitude. Writing is the stumbling block. There are moments when I feel the weight of several tons pressing down on my shoulders. And then I lose my breath. And the clutch slips. I think that’s where the essential difference lies between painting and music, on the one hand, and literature, on the other. The basic instruments used by the painter and the musician to communicate their ideas — that is, colors and notes — are external and allow for easier manipulation. Whereas the writer has no direct grasp of words, which are completely internal. The painter has before him his palette and the whole range of colors. The musician, his instrument, and the panoply of scales and registers. As for the writer, he must constantly risk an incursion into the interior volcano, in order to extract, burned by lava, even the simplest word.
— I think I understand a little. So, Paulin, what’s the subject of your novel? What’s the title?
— I haven’t started worrying about the title yet. That will come, I’m sure. For the time being, I’m sorting out the structure of the chapters.
— But what are you going to talk about? You must have a story to develop.
— Not one I have the least idea about. Look, I don’t want to write a narrative novel. Or a story that goes from one end of a straight line to the other.
— If I understand what you’re planning, you’d like to try out the experiment André Gide conducted in The Counterfeiters?
— Not exactly … More like expand it. Gide composed his novel en abyme. That, of course, already marked some measure of progress in the construction of the novel as a genre.