Nathan Devers is 23 years old, he is a normalien, associate of philosophy, author of
"
Genealogy of religion
"
(Cerf, 2019) and
"
Heaven and earth
"
(Flammarion, 2020).
He recently published his third book: “Espace smoker” (Grasset, 2021).
To discover
Michel Houellebecq: "A civilization which legalizes euthanasia loses all rights to respect"
FIGAROVOX. - Why talk about cigarettes, when you are done with it?
Nathan DEVERS. -
The ambiguity of my book is that you never know, precisely, if the narrator (I prefer to hide behind him!) Has really finished with the cigarette.
Smoking Area
tells the story of a die-hard smoker who, addicted to tobacco since his college days, quits his addiction overnight on a trip to New York. But the story ends at the very moment when the narrator has just finished smoking - as if it were a question of not lifting the veil: will he start again as soon as he returns to Paris? Will he respect his oath of withdrawal? The two hypotheses are equal. Ultimately, it is the very status of my book that I wished to be ambivalent, so that the reader never knows what to expect:
Smoking area
is it the story of regained health?
Does it have for horizon the return to hygiene and the harmony of the preserved body?
Does he collect the memories of a former smoker?
Or does it on the contrary blur identities?
Does it show that an addiction always survives the act that claims to get rid of it?
That despite the most stubborn resolutions, we never break with ourselves?
So as not to hide any longer behind my narrator, I readily admit having drawn on my memories to write this
Smoking area
. With one caveat: the challenge was not to write an "autofiction", that is to say to index the architecture of the book to that of my memory - but, on the contrary, to universalize the story. , even if it means romanticizing it: to offer, through the account of my relationship to tobacco, the typical portrait of the smoker in general. When the narrator, for example, quits smoking in New York, this episode certainly corresponds to an experience that I had. But the stake, for me, was above all to show that the history of the cigarette rests on a permanent pendulum movement between America and Europe. If America is the continent where tobacco was discovered, if the United States played a major role in the creation of the cigarette myth, and if New York City was closely associated with this myth,the fact remains that the native land of tobacco is also its tomb. I evoke, in
Smoking area
, the condition of smokers in the United States.
I describe the streets of Manhattan where sections of the sidewalk are reserved for them.
I depict the looks on them.
I analyze, above all, the new model conveyed by this metropolis: sports halls in all buildings, muscular, toned, almost sacred bodies.
The aim, with this chapter, was therefore not to tell "how I quit smoking in New York", but to restore the swan song of the cigarette - and the model of society that its curls conveyed.
The "cigarette break", in this regard, will have allowed the smoker to take some distance without really escaping.
Nathan Devers
How does the cigarette redefine temporality and spatiality?
Like all drugs, cigarettes meet a need: the thirst to escape the monotony of everyday life. From alcohol to hashish to cocaine, substances have always filled a desire for escape. The ecstasy they arouse, the intoxication they engender, make it possible to introduce the consumer into an “artificial paradise” as ephemeral as it is seductive. When the drug addict uses drugs, Baudelaire explained, he has a tendency to take himself for God. In the space of a few hours, he forgets his torments, his troubles and the grayness of his daily life. For a brief moment, it seems to him that the world is bright. As if the universe had been created for him. As if he occupied the center of it. Then, as soon as the drug stops working, this sweet chimera collapses as quickly asshe had appeared. It's the cold shower of returning to reality. It's the melancholy of hangovers. It is the resumption, inevitably disenchanted, of everyday life and its narrowness.
Unlike drugs, cigarettes do not create an artificial paradise. It does not trigger any drunkenness. It brings no illusions. And, even more: it does not convey any promise of happiness to its consumer. This is precisely what interested me about cigarettes. Tobacco is deposited in the place of our everyday life. He agrees to rock the monotonous rhythm. It is involved in each of our moments: at work as much as at pleasure, in stress as much as in friendship, in downtime as much as in moments of happiness. And for good reason: if drugs respond to a desire to escape, smoking is associated with the break. In this, the myth of the “cigarette break” is eminently paradoxical. On the one hand, the break is the signal of dissatisfaction. She expresses a need to forget thegrip of everyday life: if the worker takes his "cigarette break", it is because he is burning to flee, even for a few minutes, the boredom of his occupation. And yet, he knows full well that this brief escape will not last long. His cigarette is the stopwatch. As soon as it is consumed, it will be necessary to return to work. And the idea would not enter the mind of the smoker not to regain the shackles of his profession. The "cigarette break", in this regard, allowed him to take some distance without really getting away from it all. As I explain inHis cigarette is the stopwatch. As soon as it is consumed, it will be necessary to return to work. And the idea would not enter the mind of the smoker not to regain the shackles of his profession. The "cigarette break", in this regard, allowed him to take some distance without really getting away from it all. As I explain inHis cigarette is the stopwatch. As soon as it is consumed, it will be necessary to return to work. And the idea would not enter the mind of the smoker not to regain the shackles of his profession. The "cigarette break", in this regard, allowed him to take some distance without really getting away from it all. As I explain in
Smoking area
, it is the prodrome of an escape that is programmed not to happen.
In everyday life, the “cigarette break” is a parenthesis where dreams are consumed.
Is this why the cigarette does not interest literature, that it is always incidental to it?
Writers have very often been attracted by borderline experiences, by the unprecedented, the incredible.
Hence their curiosity for drugs, from Baudelaire to Beigbeder, from hashish to ecstasy, or for strong alcohols, from Antiquity to Apollinaire.
Cigarettes, on the other hand, are a trivial substance.
Compared to the various performers' stimulants, tobacco is a little gambler's drug.
Hence, it seems to me, the relative contempt that many writers have shown him.
Because, if the cigarette is omnipresent in literature, it occupies a figurative role. Like background music, it serves as a backdrop. When Aurélien is dumped by Berenice, he consumes an entire package in a single day. When Meursault arrives in prison, he feels frustrated by the ban on smoking. When Balzac wants to describe a cuckold character, he gives him a cigarette. When at the end of
Sentimental Education
, the two lovers meet again, Frédéric Moreau will roll a cigarette as a sign of nostalgia. When Italo Svevo delves into the psychology of a neurotic, he tells the story of Zeno: that of a man who spends his days smoking his "last cigarette" ... In each of these examples, the cigarette is imbued with the local color of the novel where it bursts into. As if it had no density of its own. As if she couldn't be the main character in a book.
Why did I decide to finally give him the leading role? Because things have changed. Because, now, tobacco no longer embodies a banal and innocent object. Because, in recent decades, cigarettes have taken on a different face. Because today it is perceived, not as an extension of our fingers, but as a substance that must be hidden at all costs: as a habit to be banned from public spaces. Because, in short, tobacco has become a drug in the strict sense of the term. Now, its consumers share the same bad conscience and the same dilemmas. This is why I wanted, for my part, to constitute the equivalent of a smoking area in the literature.
I would define smokers as the outlaws of modernity.
Nowadays, most die-hard smokers belong to the lower classes.
Their addiction often compensates for painful or oppressive living conditions.
Nathan Devers
Benjamin Griveaux had declared
"Wauquiez is the candidate for guys who smoke cigarettes and run on diesel"
, not without contempt associating cigarettes with a certain social category ...
This sentence by Benjamin Griveaux is very revealing.
In many ways, it is a testament to the role assigned to smokers in our society.
Griveaux designates them as men of the past.
As far as I'm concerned, I would define them as the outlaws of modernity.
Throughout part of the twentieth century, there were different ways of preparing tobacco: it was bought in a pipe or a cigar, it was prized or chewed ... This diversity of consumption patterns reflected that of the population. Depending on whether you preferred a pipe or a cigar, for example, you often betrayed your social identity. Then, the rise of industrial cigarettes homogenized smokers. From the boss to the worker, everyone shared in the act of "toasting one". Today, anti-smoking rhetoric and laws have created a marginalizing effect. In a sense, you could say that the smoking area has moved up the social ladder. Nowadays, most die-hard smokers belong to the lower classes.Their addiction often compensates for painful or oppressive living conditions: a tiring job, economic fragility, professional anguish… In many respects, cigarettes then become compensation for social unhappiness.
For this reason, the increase in tobacco prices, desired by Emmanuel Macron in 2017, seems to me to be the symptom of blindness in the face of the social question. We try to fight against tobacco without ever asking ourselves what problem it constitutes the cover-sex. We intend to transform it into a prohibitive, almost luxury commodity, without trying to understand the torments of which it embodies the symptom. However, many die-hard smokers will not agree to give up this substance, which they believe keeps them going. We saw this during confinement, where there was a "rebound" in tobacco "among the most vulnerable" (
Le Monde
, May 26, 2021).
Faced with such a situation, how should we react?
By fighting against precariousness?
Or by fighting the thermometer of this precariousness?
By considering the social question?
Or by encouraging the most fragile people to give up the symptom of this fragility?
Nothing is more contemptuous than the approach consisting in addressing the precarious, the victims of neoliberalism and the modernization of the world, to say to them: “Take care of yourself.
Nothing is more blind to the nature of their misfortune.
Nothing is more dishonest.
The words "smoking kills", written in capital letters, reminds the smoker of his mortal condition.
Nathan Devers
What relationship does the smoker have with death?
The whole question is there. I wrote
Smoking Area
at the same time as my first novel,
Ciel et terre
, in which I told the story of a man who, living in front of a cemetery, saw his life turned upside down, and so to speak paralyzed, by the spectacle of the graves. It was for me the opportunity to question the place assigned to death in modernity. And this same question, and this same obsession also inspired
Espace smoker
- where, in a sense, cigarettes are just a pretext to talk about something else: why do men knowingly make the decision to self-destruct ? Why are they playing with their life? Why do they agree to live together, from morning to night, with an object that risksshorten their stay on Earth?
Many have noticed it: the pack of cigarettes, today, works like a
memento mori
. The mention "smoking kills", inscribed in capital letters, reminds the smoker of his mortal condition - and it does so with all the more vivacity as it designates him as a doubly mortal being: a being who, not only is brought to die, but who dies every time he breathes. As such, the smoker has no choice but to look death in the eye. Death, not death. Because it is important to distinguish these two terms. Death is a time when we cease to live. Death is the process by which our finitude unfolds. Death is a mysterious deadline, impossible to predict or imagine. Death is a journey that one experiences from early childhood. Death is the business of a body. Death arises from the gap between man and his destiny. Death belongs to the future.Death is nothing but the flip side of birth.
This is why I wanted to explore the psychology of the inveterate smoker: to restore the paradoxes of this being who is passionate about breathing fire.
Balzac, on this subject, had a beautiful expression.
He spoke of
"smoking like a pyroscaphe".
Paradoxically, cigarettes give the smoker the impression that it helps them move forward in life, that they help them overcome pitfalls, overcome anxiety, and slip over resistance.
And, at the same time, it symbolizes the obstacle par excellence.
For the smoker, the condition of his access to reality is also the accelerator of his disappearance from the world.
These are the springs of this contradiction that I have tried to express in my
Smoking area
.
Aren't you worried about making your readers smoke?
Recently, a friend gave me a joke:
“your 'smoking area', he said to me, turns smokers into non-smokers, and non-smokers into smokers”.
It is true that, among the messages I received following its publication, I was struck by one thing: on reading my essay, those who recognized themselves in this self-portrait of the smoker had wanted to 'end with cigarettes - and, conversely, those who were foreign to this universe had felt like they were smoking by proxy. As far as I'm concerned, I don't believe that art is an incentive. But, if it was necessary at all costs to perceive it as an invitation, should it not push us to become, temporarily, the opposite of ourselves? And isn't it the mission of a book to invite its author and its readers to explore, together, the domain of their anti-identity?