I think a lot of new these days. We say that this is another way of not writing. Maybe. Except that I wonder. Since the beginning, I took the party to follow my characters at the heart of September 11, as near as possible. In other words, I do not give them an overall perspective on the event. Not interest me nor war, nor even the reconstruction, at least for the news. The idea was to stick the characters, what they saw, lived, met, to avoid some pitfalls that I spotted among others: the glorification of the characters to begin with, because it seemed that what would each disembodied victims or survivors. In a conference last week, I spotted three processes: the heroism, always because let's be honest, this is the strategy most common among both critics and writers in the tendency to press hard on the incommensurability of the event, as it was impossible to tell, to invent, and the latter strategy, which goes with the other two, which is to exonerate the state, the country, the army, the victims. I thought it was going with the binding of critics and journalists on the blue sky, as if when it's so beautiful, it was impossible for something to happen. "Out of the blue" totally unpredictable. Three strategies, therefore, working the event, give shape, color. And determine the look that you wear, the verdict: victims become martyrs, basically.
I chose with the new, so keep me closer to my characters, to avoid making heroes. I wanted to explore them through the event in its intensity before it really takes shape, before its form, its meaning has been determined, crystallized by the speech. It seemed, and seems always a good idea. Especially through the new form: my texts, very short, after one, two characters in a very precise moment, as fragments of perception as long as they live.
is a question of scale, "said BG after my lecture: the novel, fiction, to an event of this magnitude can not help but to rebuild it by characters, by their point of view. In other words, I might add, it is to see the event with the human, and not from above. Be at the bottom of the towers nearby, and not over in a helicopter could only see because it is too far away to really feel.
What is the problem?
Complex. I Again, this may be a ruse, a way of procrastinating when I feel the end of the project (yes, I finish, if I'm honest, I can only see: the thing forward, surely, is form. There is still work to do, but I do not think I can add another character, another voice, this fresco). I know my tricks for not writing, to torpedo the writing.
The question, cons, is this: am I against time? The code should be published in fall 2011. 10 years after the attacks, my point of view, keeping as close to the "trauma" (I am wary of this word, He directs the play too, he played) that my characters live, does he not against the tide? Should I not suggest anything other than this precise moment in their history, this moment of the event? Am I not, myself, now forcing the event, the trauma, to crystallize, as if there was no life, future after September 11th?
how much I love Siri Hustvedt handles the event in Sorrows of an American : it is there in the horizon of the book, but not central, because all around, life continued, and other tragedies were added to one. The characters, from time to time, turned their gaze to the absence of the towers, then resume their march.
This is not what I do. My characters are, and remain, September 11, 2001. Even those who tell the post are still there. Do not offer an overall picture is there a way to perpetuate forever, the shock of the event? Wanting to avoid the glorification, am I went to throw myself into the lion's den of incommensurability?
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