— And what do you plan to do?
— The novel is a vision of life. And as far as I know, life isn’t a segment. It isn’t a vector. Nor is it a simple curve. It’s a spiral in motion. It opens and closes in irregular helices. It becomes a question of surprising at the right moment a few rings of the spiral. So I’m constructing my novel in a spiral, with diverse situations traversed by the problematic of the human, and held in awkward positions. And the elastic turns of the spiral, embracing beings and things in its elliptical and circular fragments, defining the movements of life. This is what I’m using the neologism Spiralism to describe.
— Okay. Still, you’re not going to make me believe you’re writing this novel without even the slightest idea of where it’s going.
— I don’t have even the slightest idea. No fixed notion should hold back the breath of a work that reproduces the accelerations and the imbalanced spasms of life. I take the pulse of the spiral and inscribe it in graphs and charts, from the very life of writing. It’s a pluridimensionality at the level of words — words functioning as particles of sonoric energy in motion.
— Well, if that’s the case, your novel seems to be based on pretty expansive foundations. Which puts an extremely vast area of exploration at your disposal, I suppose. An immense field you can draw from at will.
— Not exactly. To say that I’m developing the theme of bankruptcy would be inexact. Rather, I suggest an ambience of failure. Writing a thermometer-novel capable of indicating the temperature of fictional landscapes. Making it so that the reader feels the climactic and spatio-temporal variations.
— I fear, Paulin, that you’re going about it all wrong. That you’re following the wrong path. That the public won’t understand.
— The public will understand. In fact, that’s who I’m writing the last chapter for. Does one have to be a genius to know if the weather is good or bad, if it’s night or day, if it’s cold or hot outside? Everyone knows, with no fear of getting it wrong, when it’s raining and when it’s sunny. That’s why, theoretically, I won’t explain anything to my reader. He’ll make out the landscape by the ambient temperature that touches his senses directly. He’ll play along from the start. What’s more, I’d like the dialogue between characters in the Spiralist novel to recall that of the theater, and for it to be situated right at the limits of poetry.
Raynand realizes this is one of the rare moments in his life where he’s hearing someone speaking with conviction. Paulin’s voice resonates more seriously than usual. It was as if the room were being lit up by his presence. By his words. As if all the light were surging up from the very depths of his wild eyes.
— What obsesses me the most is the idea of escaping from the bunker that imprisons every one of us. Of conveying who I am by deciphering the hieroglyphics that hamper my vision. The enigmas that exasperate me. By managing to trigger something in the reader’s thoughts. The manipulation through writing that would create a communicative field and force people to move outside of stereotypes and normalcy.
— For that, Paulin, you’ll need an accessible language.
— Not necessarily accessible from the start. I present my language in the dizzying circles of a fabulous merry-go-round. Magic carousel that sometimes spins against the wind. It’s a moving polyhedral mass. Changeable. I loathe the Procrustean bed.
— Okay, so you already must have conducted some linguistic experiments, since you seem, as far as I can tell, to accord great importance to writing. To the formal.
— Obviously. The writing process is the work. You might say it’s equal in density and scientific weight to the literary work. That’s why I’m against writing that’s presumptuously neutral and objective, and against the unoriginal. As to the formal, it’s equally inseparable from the whole of the work. It neither precedes nor comes after it. It is during. Throughout. From one end to the other. It is neither an envelope nor a garment. It’s a certain expansion of creation within a given space and at a given time. As such, it would be fundamentally artificial to pose the old question of form and content. The traditional approach that separates matter from spirit. That would amount to imagining a prefabricated model. Exhibited in a store window. However beautiful, it’s being worn by a wooden, rubber, or plastic mannequin. Without life.
— In this, you’ve opposed yourself to anything that seems too normal, too traditional … huh! I suppose you could say, anything too classic.
— A bit of that, yes. For example, for the Spiralist novel, style would play the role of barometric register. Endowed with infinite variability. Capable of indicating the most unexpected atmospheric variations. From that point on, the word attains its greatest autonomy. Inflated with meanings. Swollen with allusions. Amplified by the cross-references it implies. The word, freed of the tutelage of the sentence, gains in depth and breadth. And what’s more, it gives the impression of speed. A facility of acceleration. The word must fully enjoy its associative virtue. Inserted with precision into a sentence, the word becomes a sort of slave and thus loses its nerve, its lifeblood. Often, in a work nourished by the imaginary, the transparent amounts to a reductive element, an impoverishing factor. A narrow corset that suffocates fiction. The word, lacking the necessary space, atrophies. In desiring to tame the word, even the most well-constructed sentence turns it into a dead sign, because it’s reduced to a single meaning. Whatever the word, it’s always emptier in the middle of a sentence than it seems to be in reality. But when left to roam on its own, written or spoken, the simplest word acquires the richness of the swinging single with a world of partners to choose from. Whereas, in the context of a sentence, it once again becomes the pallid spouse stuck in the heart of a family with the mother of his children hanging on. Thus it often happens that I enclose a single word between two periods, so as to make it new, more powerful. Faster. More evocative. Richer. It’s a new kind of sentence. Created with the help of a lexeme that plays the strange role of the un-stable kernel, perpetually popping. I call this an undulatory sentence. Like a stone thrown onto the surface of a lake, it sets off interior waves that make innumerable connections with the lived experience of the reader or the listener. It is the very basis of the Spiralist language.
— Paulin, I predict some pretty serious outcry against these concepts of yours — you’ll be accused of hermeticism. Or of madness. Even more so because they give off a strong odor of sulfur.
— Not a big deal. I won’t die from whatever reception I get. Time is on my side. That’s good enough for me. I own my dissidence.
— So you’ll stick to your guns, despite everything.
— Yes. Come hell or high water. I’m betting everything on the Spiralist aesthetic. It could help resolve most of the problems in art. Particularly that of language.
— Okay, Paulin, so you’re talking about the crisis of language that’s facing contemporary literature.
— Of course, Raynand. It’s a part of the more general crisis.
— Strictly speaking, how does this crisis appear in the literary realm?
— Through a certain inadequacy … a phase shift.
— Paulin, I just don’t know what you mean by that.
— I’ll explain. Certain words. Certain expressions. As a result of being brooded over. On everyone’s lips. On everybody’s tongues. Soaked in drool. They end up being veritably eroded, left with nothing more to say. Having become insipid flakes of sawdust that pass ridiculously from one mouth to the next. Empty speak. The preferred style of whores and demagogues. Inflationist and idiotically anecdotal writing. These days, more than ever before, we’re raising the question of language. Tragic. Painful. Faced with intellectual consciousness. How can the distance between speech and gesture — between word and act — be eliminated, or at the very least reduced? How can the dichotomy that so often affects speech and action — positing one against the other — be resolved? In my humble opinion, Spiralist language — endowed with mobility, capable by its functionality of suggesting an ambience, of sensing the temperature — could, by dynamiting intuition, offer a chance to avoid the trap of figurative sterility. It’s time to liberate literature from the dictatorship of dictionaries and grammar books.