With his new work,
Le Ciel Ouvert
, Nicolas Mathieu has taken and recomposed texts first published on social networks to cast them in a new form and give them a new color: a collection of micro-stories, micro-impressions, punctuated illustrations by Aline Zalko.
The 2018 Prix Goncourt lays bare in a singular way, with a pen that is both lyrical and precise.
“At the end, with small, sensitive, pointillist touches, à la Seurat, it is the portrait of a love, from its birth to its end, but it's not just that.
If love is a common thread, we also have travel, solitude, love for parents, love for children, melancholy, the feeling of time passing... We are going to disappear, those we loves too, and if we don't write it, it becomes very heavy,” confides the author of
Connemara
and
Their children after them
.
Interview with a man who says he lives in the past future, “with the feeling that everything is decided in advance, that “it will have been”” – something which is not unrelated to his vocation, both poetic and political, to writer.
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Madame Figaro.
– The story of this book is special
: it was born from texts published on social networks.
tell us.
Nicolas Mathieu.
– For six or seven years, I wrote very regularly about events, situations, things that affected me.
Instead of keeping a diary or notebooks, I produced these blocks of text that I posted on Instagram and, little by little, it came to constitute a whole love story, with its beginnings, his wanderings, his falls, his daily life.
Because initially, it was indeed a way of showing my love to a person, out in the open precisely, because it was impossible in real life.
It was a secret correspondence, but one fraught with the way people looked at it.
Readers were asking for all of this to be available somewhere.
However, I had met the publisher Emmanuelle Lê, who directed a collection of books at Flammarion mixing texts and images – she did one with Annie Le Brun, another with Mona Chollet.
The idea was to compile these writings so that they are not lost, so that they escape the flow of social networks - because by piling up they end up disappearing -, and to make a book where we would find lyrical expression, the intimate, but where people could recognize themselves.
Why did you add drawings
?
The fantasy was to mix illustrations and poetry as in certain collections by Éluard, for example.
I wanted an object that you could find in a library but also slip into your pocket, that wasn't too expensive, in short a beautiful book that wasn't a coffee table book.
The drawings are similar to the stained glass windows of a cathedral, they produce with these “bricks”, sometimes dark – and this is the whole meaning of the quote from Victor Hugo in the opening: “I belong without return to this dark night that “we call love” –, a sort of radiance, of light… I had spotted the drawings of Aline Zalko on the covers of thrillers published by La Table Ronde and her work, her colors made me really want .
I felt that there could be a real play between the image and the text.
You confessed to being “addicted” to social networks. What relationship do you have with them today
?
I consider them a “pharmakon”: both remedy and poison, it all depends on the dosage.
It's a space where I like to express myself, where I can put down what is going through me, a space which also provokes these texts.
Without this place, it is not said that they would exist.
The narcissistic satisfaction of people reading immediately also plays a role.
It fills voids, gives pleasure, inhabits solitude.
Many of these texts deal with the moments I spend on trains, in hotels, on tours.
Social media also keeps me company!
The relationship I have with them is therefore ambivalent.
Yes, there is exhibitionism and narcissism, but not only that.
Without them, this book which is very close to my heart, and which is not at all an opportunistic act, would not have existed.
The rhythm is different from that of your novels…
I'm not so sure.
In truth, I have the impression that working on these very dense blocks ended up influencing my novel writing.
The basic unit of the novel is perhaps, for me, the paragraph.
With Flaubert, it is the beautiful sentence, with others, it is the page or the chapter;
my own atom, my unit of construction, is the paragraph.
These texts served as a laboratory for me, a workshop.
Many elements were taken up in
Connemara
, for example, without it being a conscious process.
You have to imagine that I am on a train, that I feel a strong emotion, which could be a surge of love or exasperation, and that this is translated into a text because it absolutely has to come out.
We are overcome by feelings that overwhelm us, stories that exceed our strength and writing allows us to sublimate them, that is to say, to find an exit from above for everything that haunts us.
By putting things into words, it makes them admissible, practicable and shareable.
What was only one's own becomes common, personal emotions condense into a literary object.
Deep down, I'm a formulation machine.
Whether they are intimate texts or political texts, as long as it is not written, it remains nebulous.
I don't know exactly what I'm thinking or feeling until I put it down on paper or on the screen.
I consider social networks as a “pharmakon”, both a cure and a poison
Nicolas Mathieu
How is this book also political for you?
It is immediately collective, because once these sensations are written, we can transmit them and people can project themselves into them, people can say to themselves: “But that’s crazy, it’s me who speak."
Often, whether it is these texts or my novels, people come to tell me that I found the words to express what they thought, lived, felt.
This is one of the functions of literature, to formulate things for others, and it is obviously a political matter.
Then, when we are overcome by very powerful affects, we experience life with such intensity that we can no longer bear the fate that has been done to us.
What do you mean by that
?
When you are madly in love, or deeply desperate, or seized with extreme melancholy, you understand how intolerable having to take the RER in the early morning to go to work for eight or ten hours is;
how unbearable the misery of social organization and the constraints imposed on us are.
This is how we access other levels of consciousness... Annie Le Brun calls this lyrical insurrection: we experience intensities, forces of being which make us, on an individual scale, revolutionary.
Everyone in their corner can say to themselves: “My God, I only have one life, I must escape demands that have no meaning, I must exist rather than not.”
We are so caught in the throat by obligations of all kinds, time which is always lacking, children, the debt system – everything we owe and which strangles us… So much so that the slogan, Basically, it comes down to one sentence: “You only have one life, defend it.”
The Open Sky,
by Nicolas Mathieu, illustrations by Aline Zalko, Ed.
Actes Sud, 128 p., €18.50.
Press Department