“Those of the interior”: the novel of a child of rural France

Théo Veillon is a journalist at

Le Figaro

Those from the inside

“

”

FIGAROVOX.

- Your novel takes place in rural France, why did you choose this space?

Is there an autobiographical dimension?

Theo VEILLON.

-

I grew up in the Monts du Lyonnais, between three neighboring farms spaced several hundred meters apart.

I did not know "rural France" in its opposition to an urban France.

The city was the exception for me.

At 17, studying in Lyon, I discovered city bus lines, tight sidewalks, crossings on pedestrian crossings, metro transport.

My change of scenery was as visual as it was practical.

I gradually realized the imbalance of possibilities offered by the city compared to the countryside.

I sealed my nostalgia for my teenage life to the spaces in which it took place.

And this novel was born.

The main character looks a lot like me.

At fifteen, I had his daily life.

I had his way of seeing, of being with others, of dwelling on details while trying to

through, even if it meant regretting it.

To build the novel, I assembled several possible experiences in the countryside at this age, in order to tell what I call a typical summer in the 2010s. My summers between 13 and 17 years old took place in the same way.

From Primary to College, we were a big bunch of about the same age.

From high school, the group was scattered and natural social reproductions (or microtransfers) began.

Some have stopped studying, done CAP, others have gone to Bac Pro or agricultural high schools.

I went to a general high school 20 kilometers away.

Daily life changed radically.

The only moments of meeting with the band became the balls and the summers.

Our dates were always the stage.

But the more we advanced, the more the group crumbled and, at the end of my high school, we found ourselves at two not knowing what to do, while all the others were working, or had left who knew where.

From my point of view, this moment of rupture is extremely decisive.

For a young person who is developing, it is a major transition stage between two high points of childhood: we are already nostalgic for what we have experienced, what we have become accustomed to, we think that the better is behind us, and yet we do not know that we will live more overwhelming experiences in high school and that in the end, leaving will have been salutary.

It is in this in-between, between a world that he leaves and another that he discovers anxious, that Josselin opens up to new experiences, and that great questions arise.

“Literary criticism should be born out of a debt of love,” says George Steiner.

I think the same of the novel.

Theo Veillon

Who did you particularly want to introduce to this world?

“Literary criticism should be born out of a debt of love

,” says George Steiner.

I think the same of the novel.

I wanted to show my admiration for the environment in which I grew up, as well as for the people who made it up.

This is not a statement that can be tossed around in the middle of a solemn speech.

It seems to me that only fiction can bear the level of emotion that this debt contains.

I wanted to express my gratitude to the country where I was born, and where very intense human experiences took place.

This novel is then addressed to all those to whom I have not succeeded in faithfully transmitting my nostalgia.

Among the reasons for this impotence, there is the impossibility of describing the supernatural feeling that binds a being to a setting.

If a theory should arise from this novel, it is this: the decor impregnates the man.

Growing up, I began to perceive the difference between living environments.

I came to the conclusion that the equivalence of places is a chimera and that a setting implies its own possibilities.

I'm not trying to idealize one in relation to another, I say: look at the possibilities of this setting, look at what lives there, it's unheard of.

I invite the reader to watch.

It seems to me that literature is used for that.

When we attend a nightclub party in town, we remember a country ball, and we understand the violence of reality.

Having roads, instead of sidewalks, changes everything.

The existence of a moat rather than a building is magical.

A bus shelter on the edge of the departmental road causes painful gagging.

What I am saying is that the place has a capital importance in the perception of the world of human beings.

No infrastructure is trivial.

It is an ancient truth, I repeat it today with my own words.

Finally, since I have been living in Paris, the existence on the same territory of worlds as different as the metropolis and the village has perplexed me.

's impossible for me to believe that

this place, the countryside, exists at the same time as the one where I am.

I can't see myself two weeks earlier in the fields and on the roads, the difference is so profound.

Imagining these two worlds meeting is literally impossible.

Every time I come back, it takes me a few hours to get used to it.

I seconded Josselin's wonder in light of mine today.

I wish that the most people can receive this astonishment.

The novel is this means of bringing two worlds that differ in everything together for a time.

Did you want to report on the cleavage between center and periphery that Jérôme Fourquet deals with, for example, and brought to light thanks to the "yellow vests

"

The difference between town and country has taken shape in public debate in recent years, and my feelings have been reinforced.

But a novel about the countryside cannot limit itself to expressing this split.

If he gives the impression of doing so, it is a simple consequence of his fidelity to reality.

On the other hand, what I wanted to show, if I can say so, with a “sociological conscience”, it is the diversity of the inhabitants of peripheral France.

Diversity first of all between the former "dominant" milieus (peasants, workers, craftsmen, civil servants, etc.).

Diversity then allowed by the living environment and the highways.

Came to agglomerate with the old balances of neo-rurals of various professions.

Several types of families and individuals live together without knowing each other.

“Peripheral” France brings together both winners and losers from globalization.

Often there are two, one or two villages apart, one or two blocks from housing estates.

There are also people who don't fit into either category.

What interests the novelist is the life it creates, the relationships, the relationships and the interactions.

I wanted people who don't know the campaign to find out about it.

This is something that newspapers or essays can hardly capture.

For example, that Josselin can go from Gaëtan's farm to Laura's villa is unheard of.

Can you imagine living this at fifteen, the intensity of dreams, fantasies, imagination and questions that result?

For me, the campaign is that.

It is this abundance of lives, backgrounds and settings that fascinated me as a teenager, and will always fascinate me.

The relationship between these people, which cannot be reduced to their standard of living, is improbable.

We would be surprised at the encounters that take place there.

Previously, paths were influenced by tradition or habit, for better or for worse.

Work was not only a value but a sacred value.

Today, the new horizon takes the contours of independence.

In view of what?

Nobody knows.

Theo Veillon

Some of your characters seem to dream of elsewhere, of big cities or abroad.

Do these desires define a part of the current generation according to you?

One of the feelings that defines my generation is undeniably helplessness.

Previously, paths were influenced by tradition or habit, for better or for worse.

Work was not only a value but a sacred value.

Today, the new horizon takes the contours of independence.

In view of what?

Nobody knows.

A considerable number of young people find themselves in possession of independence without this being accompanied by projects.

The civilization of individual rights comes up against the question of why?

My character who wants to go to Australia, Clément, only wants it out of dismay.

It is an "idea" that he has put in his head but which is unfounded.

In truth, he seeks novelty because nothing and no one offers him a satisfactory horizon.

What would seem natural to his parents is absolutely not for him.

He is very pragmatic, and much less contemplative than his friend Josselin.

In this pivotal moment when the band crumbles, overcome by weariness, he understands the impasse in which he finds himself: I will finish my professional baccalaureate, I will have the diploma in my pocket, what am I going to do? TO DO?

Josselin does not reach this level of questioning.

He lives in the moment until he hurts himself.

His curiosity and thirst for experience are not those of Clément.

In truth, he will stay and settle down.

Clément, it is the mature mind that prevents misunderstanding from jumping in his face.

Josselin, he will seek all the possibilities offered by this life until he finds the reason.

His awareness will come later and will inevitably be more violent.

What the novel says is that the "discreet" are those who go perhaps furthest in the search for meaning.

With his departure for Australia and his confusion with bosses, Clément does not risk so much, finally.

Josselin digs into what he has at hand.

Without trying to flee, he plunges his fingers into the sensory experience.

Several times in the novel, he reaches this presentiment of a deep meaning of things that Clément lacks: that perhaps, behind each experience of reality, hides something truly unique, truly beautiful.

Your novel recalls the texts of Christophe Guilluy and Nicolas Mathieu.

Are they influences for you?

Books like

by Christophe Guilluy or

by Pierre Vermeren show me that others than me are aware of the importance of this territorial difference.

It gives me confidence.

The data from their trials legitimize my analyses.

What is expressed in them by a "demonstrative" form is expressed in me by an indescribable emotion that art supports.

These books encouraged me to bear witness to what I had experienced in my own way.

We talk about the same realities, but I do it from the voice of people, trying to capture the dynamics of their daily lives.

Their children after them

by Nicolas Mathieu, like

by Marion Brunet, encouraged me, for their part, to tell of “my typical summer” in the countryside.

I wanted the readers to receive a different point of view on the same reality, and not to believe that the unique rurality novel had been written.

I believe that the multiplicity of points of view is the basis of our vision of reality.

The realistic novel must know how to provoke this.

One of the aims of literature seems to me to be to combat the impoverishment of the gaze.

The end of the world must roughly correspond to the moment when everything has only one name.

In recent years, some French people have really "discovered" what was happening in another part of the territory.

Literature has this power.

In my novel, the heart of France is not deindustrialized but agricultural, the point of view is not omniscient but internal, we are dealing with a learning novel rather than a naturalistic story.

Finally,

is more “tightened up”: the village is smaller and almost all the actions take place there.

The novels of Nicolas Mathieu and Marion Brunet led me to

the points which had seemed decisive to me in my experiences as a teenager: the architecture, the decorations, the inner thoughts, the differences in resentment.

It is good that all these novels exist.

Théo Veillon,

, Books, “Novel”, August 2022, 256 pages, €19.90 Books