El País, 22 août 2009
   La embriaguez de la escritura
   José Manuel Fajardo

   Para Pierre Michon, auténtico autor de culto, entre los límites de la escritura y el clasicismo, «la literatura tiene siempre algo de litúrgico». El escritor francés publica Mitologías de invierno / El emperador de Occidente.

   Pierre Michon publicó en 1984 su primer libro, Vidas minúsculas, cuando tenía casi cuarenta años. Una edad tardía en estos tiempos de obsesión colectiva por lo juvenil. Un texto que se transformó casi de inmediato en libro de culto en Francia. Desde entonces, ha ido publicando una docena de títulos que le han convertido en una de las figuras clave de la narrativa francesa contemporánea. Textos siempre escuetos, cuya brevedad tiene las virtudes de la destilación: transparencia en el estilo y fuerza embriagante. Como un trago de licor.
En España se habían traducido cuatro de sus obras (Cuerpos del rey, Señores y sirvientes, Rimbaud el hijo y Vidas minúsculas, todas ellas en Anagrama), y ahora la editorial Alfabia publica Mitologías de invierno / El emperador de Occidente, traducido por Nicolás Valencia y prologado por Ricardo Menéndez Salmón. Un breve volumen de 166 páginas con dos textos que son dos verdaderas joyas. Puro Michon concentrado.
   Hay algo en la fisonomía de Pierre Michon (Cards, 1945) que parece acomodarse a su estilo literario. Enjuto, de rasgos marcados hasta lo dramático, se percibe sin embargo en sus gestos y en su mirada un eco de humor e ironía. Su manera de hablar es pausada, pero los cigarrillos que encadena durante la conversación dejan entrever otros fuegos. Da la sensación de que una poderosa tensión interna lo devora, de que su cuerpo ha ido consumiéndose con cada libro que ha escrito. Cosa que no parece en absoluto disgustarle. Como un santo literario que se arrojara gozoso a la hoguera.
   Michon publicó El emperador de Occidente inmediatamente después de Vidas minúsculas, y en él narra el encuentro, en una islita italiana, entre el joven Flavio Aecio (que años después será el vencedor de Atila) y el viejo Prisco Atalo, un músico que durante un tiempo fue emperador títere, impuesto en Roma por el rey bárbaro Alarico, hasta que el legítimo emperador lo recluyó en esa isla. «Un amo del mundo que no dominaba nada», dice el relato.
   «Lo escribí», explica Michon, «porque Vidas minúsculas era autobiográfica y transcurría en la campiña del centro de Francia y tenía miedo de que me etiquetaran como un autor regionalista. Necesitaba escribir sobre un lugar que no tuviera nada que ver con esa región ni con mi vida. La historia la encontré en el libro de Gibbon sobre el Imperio Romano. Eran sólo diez líneas sobre el personaje de Prisco Atalo, pero no busqué más, no investigué nada. Ya tenía la excusa que necesitaba para alejarme del universo de Vidas minúsculas».
   En Mitologías de invierno, el otro texto que compone el libro, se cuentan algunas vidas de reyes y monjes de Irlanda y de Escocia, aunque la mayoría de los relatos versan sobre personajes que vivieron en diferentes momentos históricos (santas y obispos medievales, campesinos durante la revolución, antropólogos y espeleólogos del siglo XIX) en la región del Macizo Central francés. Una sobrecogedora región de grandes mesetas calcáreas (llamadas causses), horadadas por los cañones de ríos tortuosos. Michon los escribió por encargo y «eso, en cierto sentido, me hizo bien», recuerda. «Tenía que escribir, tenía una libertad total para hacerlo y me propuse tomármelo como un reto».
   La conversación tiene lugar en las oficinas de la editorial francesa que publica a Michon, a dos pasos del cementerio parisiense de Père Lachaise donde reposan los restos de grandes escritores como Wilde, Balzac o Proust, y también los de hombres de poder, como el dictador dominicano Trujillo, el mariscal Murat o el miembro del directorio, durante la Revolución Francesa, Paul Barras. Un capricho del azar que transforma al cementerio en espejo de piedra donde se refleja uno los principales temas abordados por Michon en Mitologías de invierno / El emperador de Occidente: la relación entre poder y arte. Cuando le señalo que su reivindicación de la literatura por encargo rompe con la idea moderna del escritor independiente enfrentado al poder, Michon me recuerda que «muchos escritores a lo largo de la Historia han escrito para el poder, pero a la vez incordiaban a ese poder en los mismos textos que éste le había pedido que escribieran. Los mejores textos se han escrito así, por encargo pero traicionando en cierto modo a quien los encargaba».
   En El emperador de Occidente se describe la relación entre el rey Alarico y el músico Atalo como una especie de combate, basado en la mutua admiración. Algo frecuente en los textos de Michon: «Mis personajes establecen relaciones ambivalentes, de amistad fuerte, de pasión y, a la vez, de antagonismo. Ya sea como rivales, ya como relaciones de padres e hijos. En Rimbaud el hijo, por ejemplo, está la relación entre el poeta y su madre, muy amorosa y a la vez muy tensa. Quizá ahí haya también algo de autobiográfico. Si pienso en mis relaciones familiares, ésa ha sido una manera de relacionarse a la que he estado muy habituado en mi vida, aunque ahora mucho menos».
   Una ambivalencia que en el caso del brutal rey Columbkill, de Mitologías de invierno, capaz de desatar una guerra para hacerse con un libro de salmos, mueve a preguntarse por las razones de que alguien que no duda en arrasar pueblos enteros sea capaz también de amar el arte. «Todos esos reyes guerreros, matadores, llevan algo dentro de sí que representa el apetito estético», responde Michon. «Algo que les hace descender de su pedestal de poder, algo que les falta y que les humaniza. La literatura y el arte, con su belleza, hacen mejor a la Humanidad, pero se levantan sobre un acervo de fatalidad. Los grandes pintores y escritores muestran eso: la belleza de la vida y también la muerte, la crueldad, la tragedia. Los hombres de poder suelen conocer la experiencia de matar o de ordenar matar, y quizá por eso pueden ver claramente las implicaciones mortales, trágicas, de una obra de arte». Una reflexión que le lleva al recuerdo del relato de Borges titulado Los teólogos: «Son dos teólogos, Aureliano y Juan de Panonia, que se admiran enormemente pero que se esfuerzan en enviarse mutuamente a la hoguera por sus discrepancias. Al final, en el Paraíso, Dios los confunde porque para él los dos eran uno solo. Es una historia admirable, de una ironía total».
   Si la Historia es uno de los pilares sobre los que se levanta la obra de Pierre Michon, no menos importantes son los textos en los que habla de las vidas de otros escritores. Eso ha llevado buena parte de la crítica a relacionar su literatura con la de esos autores y, en particular, con la de William Faulkner. Ciertamente, hay una pasión biográfica en Michon, pero las suyas no son biografías exhaustivas. No pretende contarlo todo. Suele elegir dos momentos precisos para acercase a cada vida: la infancia con sus orígenes familiares y el tiempo en que el personaje aún no se ha transformado en quien será, aunque existan ya augurios de ello. Rimbaud antes de convertirse en el poeta Rimbaud. Flavio Aecio antes de convertirse en el general Aecio vencedor de la batalla de los Campos Cataláunicos.
   Michon no tiene inconveniente en reconocer que su interés por las premoniciones tiene más de Borges que de Faulkner. «Me interesan los signos del destino», argumenta, «y ésa es una influencia borgiana, sobre todo de sus relatos sobre gauchos. En mis textos suelo hablar de Faulkner, lo admiro, pero no hay ninguna influencia de su escritura sobre la mía. No tienen nada que ver. Lo que Faulkner y Borges tienen en común, para mí, es la capacidad de hacerme llorar como una muchacha. No sé por qué. Hay algo en ellos que me emociona hasta ese extremo».
   Un pasaje de El emperador de Occidente, la despedida del joven militar y el viejo emperador exiliado, parece responder a ese código emocional. Aecio abandona la isla y desde su nave ve al anciano solitario. Salta sobre el puente del barco, agitando su capa a modo de despedida, y el viejo emperador le hace un leve gesto con el brazo. Y el lector siente en la escena una conmoción cuyo origen revela el mismo Michon: «Me acuerdo bien y eso que hace ya muchos años que lo escribí. Casi oigo el ruido de las tres filas de remos hundiéndose a la vez en el agua e impulsando la nave. ¡Shiiiiip!». Con los dos brazos, Michon reproduce el gesto de los galeotes, con tanta convicción que por un momento parece que estamos en el vientre de una embarcación romana y no en un despacho editorial parisiense, luego continúa: «¿Se acuerda de la película Satiricón, de Fellini? En ella se veía una galera con ese movimiento sincronizado de los remeros. Esa galera es la que tenía yo en la cabeza cuando escribí ese pasaje. La galera y también el adiós a mis abuelos paternos. La última vez que los vi partir, en un coche, me despedí de ellos exactamente con el mismo gesto que mi personaje. Cada vez que escribo sobre un tema tan alejado como la Antigüedad o la Revolución Francesa, me esfuerzo por incorporar de manera solapada cosas que yo he vivido. Para que los textos ganen en emoción, para emocionarme yo mismo».
   Y la conversación deriva hacia la embriaguez de la escritura. Ese estado de gracia en que el texto fluye casi sin intervención de la conciencia. «Es algo mágico», explica con mirada brillante, «sobre todo cuando se acerca el final del libro, como si el sentido del mundo se hiciera visible. Entonces, uno escribe no sólo con el ritmo de la lengua sino con el ritmo del mundo. Como si Dios existiera y hubiera puesto su mirada sobre uno. Claro que luego terminas de escribir y ves que las cosas no son así». Una constatación que le ha llevado a hablar del «invierno impecable de los libros», explica, porque la suya es una literatura que se mueve, metafóricamente, entre junio y diciembre, como si fueran dos dioses. «El calor de la vida y el frío de la muerte, pero un frío que es como la nieve, casi maternal. También preserva la vida para que pueda renacer. El momento de la escritura es el de la llama de la existencia, pero termina en cenizas. Sólo al ser leído vuelve a brotar el fuego de entre las cenizas del libro».
   En Mitologías de invierno, un obispo pide a un trovador que componga un poema sobre una santa, para convencer a los nobles locales de que respeten las tierras del monasterio. Le dice que para convencerlos tendrá que mentir, y le advierte de que «la verdad que pongas en el corazón de tu mentira será lo único que podrá absolverte». Cuando le pregunto si no es ésa acaso una buena definición de la ficción literaria, Michon, con una sonrisa burlona, responde que «ese obispo había comprendido todo de la literatura». Y para explicar su propia concepción de la escritura, evoca a Paul Nizan: «Usted sabe que Nizan era marxista y decía que hay que desconfiar de los escritores que quieren llevar el objeto literario a la temperatura de un dios. Evidentemente, hay que colocar esa frase en su momento histórico, que es muy diferente del que vivimos hoy. Pero lo que a mí me gustaría hacer es exactamente lo que le hacía desconfiar, elevar la escritura a esos extremos».
   Sólo que Michon, para elevarla, la hunde en el terreno. Como si escribiera en vertical. «Faulkner decía que sólo tenemos para escribir el espacio de un sello de correos, pero si se profundiza debajo de ese sello hay un planeta entero», explica. Y profundizando sobre las mesetas calcáreas del Macizo Central francés, Michon termina por convertir la Naturaleza en el gran protagonista de su literatura. Paisajes sobre los que superpone las pasajeras vidas de los hombres. Quizá por eso en su obra «hay siempre un cierto sentido sacro, como en los griegos antiguos que veían dioses por todas partes. Incluso si no hay Dios, si no somos más que un puñado de huesos, es maravilloso. Por eso la literatura tiene siempre algo litúrgico. En uno de mis textos cuento un hecho que me ocurrió realmente. En 2001, mi madre agonizaba en el hospital. Yo veía que se moría y no pude soportarlo. Me largué. Cuando regresé al cabo de un rato, su cuerpo todavía no se había enfriado. Me dije que tenía que rezar y de pronto me vino a la memoria un poema de François Villon, La balada del ahorcado. Y empecé a recitar sus primeros versos: ‘Hermanos hombres que después de nosotros vivís’. Ésa fue mi oración».
   Durante toda su infancia y juventud, Michon sintió la fascinación de esa escritura-plegaria, pero también la impotencia creativa. «Me aprendía de memoria poemas de Victor Hugo, de Baudelaire», recuerda. «Me encantaba su sonoridad. Pero ese tipo de literatura ya no se hacía. Así que durante quince años, a pesar de que quería escribir, estuve bloqueado. Tenía miedo de que se rieran en mi cara. Hasta que conseguí ajustar lo solemne y lo prosaico en una narrativa que de alguna manera aspirara a producir el mismo efecto que aquellos versos».
   Quizá ser un autor tardío explique por qué Pierre Michon eligió como referencia a Rimbaud, un escritor precoz: «Para mí Rimbaud es lo contrario de lo que yo soy. Como Evaristo Carriego para Borges. Lo fascinante en Rimbaud es que ese muchacho de 17 años tenía la mirada y la información literarias de un hombre de 80. Un prodigio que quizá nunca vuelva a repetirse».
   Hace veinticinco años que publicó su primer libro y uno de sus personajes dice algo que suena casi a balance: «Es un hermoso oficio el oficio de escriba». Frente a quienes presentan la escritura como un acto doloroso, Pierre Michon parece reafirmar la alegría de escribir. Se lo pregunto y su respuesta es contundente: «Es que yo sufro cuando no escribo. Entonces sí que estoy realmente mal».



   L’Indice, mai 1997
   Gravité des origines
   par Bernard Simeone

   Par-delà des qualités que résume imparfaitement une expression comme « puissance de l’écriture », ce qui justifie le prestige acquis auprès de la critique française durant les dix dernières années par Pierre Michon et Pierre Bergounioux est sans doute une commune gravité, terme à entendre dans toutes ses résonances, et d’abord celle qui évoque le lest, le poids intime, l’incarnation. Outre les vertus de leurs œuvres, que les lecteurs italiens doivent encore découvrir, ils représentent l’un et l’autre une rupture avec la manière dont s’expose aujourd’hui la spécificité non seulement du texte mais de la langue : une rupture violente en ce qui concerne le premier, apparemment plus impassible chez le second. Ils sont à la fois, plus que d’autres et de façon plus vitale, « fils » et « maîtres » de cette langue. Leurs proses, denses et brèves, donnent le sentiment d’un contrôle de l’écriture d’autant plus grand que les espaces explorés y sont insaisissables, que les motifs profonds y conduisent à des apories.
   Une première lecture pousse à dire ces auteurs « écrivains de l’origine », liés à la trace d’un monde rural condamné – dans sa forme - et survivant – dans ce lest, précisément, qu’il offre et impose à qui est issu de lui. La question de l’origine, avec ce qu’elle implique, en cette fin de siècle, de résistance à la dilution, à la superficialité, à la vitesse, est une question périlleuse, et peut engendrer, plus encore que la nostalgie régressive, l’emphase ou la déréalisation. Mais chez Michon comme chez Bergounioux, c’est de gravité, encore une fois, qu’il s’agit, qu’elle vienne, chez l’un, de l’extrême contention à laquelle est soumise une violence essentielle, constitutive, ou, chez l’autre, d’une conscience aiguë, hégélienne, du monde et de l’Histoire.
   Pierre Michon est né en 1945 aux Cards, dans la Creuse. Ici, date et lieu importent : cette naissance, dans une région française à la fois centrale et délaissée, d’un père bientôt absent, « dédicataire noir » des « Vies minuscules, et d’une mère institutrice, situe d’emblée l’œuvre de Michon sur une trajectoire de « vengeance » sublimée, comparable à celle de Ferdinando Camon : « Je ne crois pas avoir jamais écrit dans un autre but que celui de rendre justice à de très minces vies oubliées. » Le passage progressif de l’expression « vies minuscules » dans le langage commun reflète le puissant impact qu’eut ce premier livre, paru en 1984, et qui soustrait à l’oubli des vies auxquelles le monde refusa leur dû. À ce puits insondable d’existences apparemment vaines et sans traces, Pierre Michon offre la langue en sa splendeur et compose, en l’absence du père, sa propre généalogie, c’est-à-dire le « roman d’un homme incessamment fasciné par l’iniquité de sa présence au monde ». Mais racheter d’autres vies et leur mutisme, c’est aussi fonder sa propre écriture, et le livre s’ordonne autour de la question : qu’est-ce que devenir écrivain ? Tout comme « Vie de Joseph Roulin, en 1988, incarnera la question : comment apparaît et se constitue l’œuvre picturale, qu’est-ce que peindre au sein du monde ou contre lui ? Vu par le facteur Roulin, « minuscule » au voisinage de Van Gogh qui le peignit, le geste du peintre est-il « incarnation d’on ne sait quelle volonté forte qui des hommes fait des princes » ou « gesticulation d’un cinglé en pleine insolation » ? Maîtres et serviteurs, deux ans plus tard, à travers les figures de Goya, de Watteau, de Piero della Francesca, telles que de proches et obscurs témoins – modèle ou disciple – les perçurent, fera de cette enquête sur l’art et les noms glorieux une véritable polyphonie. Témoins encore, mais infiniment moins anonymes, seront Verlaine, Banville ou Carjat, dans Rimbaud le fils, publié en 1991, en marge du centenaire de la mort du poète, livre du tremblement et non de l’hommage. Suivront en 1995 la forme définitive du   Roi du bois et La Grande Beune, exprimant de façon plus immédiate encore l’énigme de la naissance à soi-même et l’érotisme des fondements. De livre en livre, Michon, dont l’écriture se fait toujours plus contrôlée, dense et tactile, aborde une matière vive, « primitive », par certains aspects brutale. Ce contraste entre l’instrument raffiné dont il use et l’obscure poussée de l’instinct, le magma noir dont émerge le désir des formes, constitue la marque de son œuvre : certainement, à l’horizon de la langue française, une des plus essentielles de ce temps, et des plus violentes, ce qui ne veut certes pas dire la moins fraternelle.

   (Traduit de l’italien par l’auteur de l’article.)



   The Times literary supplement, 4 octobre 1996
   Pluvial Périgueux
   par John Taylor

   Pierre Michon has specialized in novella-lenght « lives » set in various historical period. The first, Vie de Joseph Roulin (1988), was about Van Gogh’s friendship with a postman. A second, L’Empereur d’Occident (1989), was set in Roman times. Then came a collection of three stories, Maîtres et serviteurs (1990), evoking Goya, Watteau and an impoverished disciple of Piero della Francesca. Finally, Michon brought out Rimbaud le fils (1992), an incisive portrait of « the considerable passer-by ». Full of plausible fictional scenes and based on careful research, these terse penetrating stories examine the torments of orphanhood and poverty, the struggle for self-acceptance, the pursuit of pleasure as a desesperate response to death, and the quest for some form of dignity, social position, or even spiritual transcendence. They also amount to « oblique autobiographies », as Michon has admitted ; they chart the daily anxieties and technical drudgery of a writer’s or an artist’s career. The celebrated achievements are mentioned only in passing, and miraculous flashes of creativity are situated within a life graphically depicted in all its banality. After composing Une Saison en enfer, for example, Rimbaud simply turns his face to wall and sleeps « like lead ».
   Michon’s new novella, La Grande Beune, which is set in 1961, is more obviously autobiographical and, in this respect, recalls Michon’s first book, the moving Vies minuscules (1984). His use of a first-person narrator (who is twenty years old) seems to indicate that he is transposing into fiction his own experiences of provincial ennui, unrequited love and exploring prehistoric caves. The narrator, a school teacher, has been assigned to a rain-drenched town in the Dordogne on the Grande Beune river, not far from Lascaux. Michon depicts his relationships with taciturn carp fishermen, a wry old woman inkeeper, a divorcee who sells newspapers and cigarettes, her schoolboy son and a plucky student girlfriend from Périgueux. The school teacher tries to seduce Yvonne, the alluring tobacconist, herself caught up in a clandestine, sadistic affair with a fisherman named Jeanjean.
   The dreamlike conclusion – as all the characters fall asleep and the river « continues to flow » – explains all. It is man’s physical and metaphysical relationship to this cosmic flux that haunts the author even more than the psychology of amourous attraction. The story is essentially structured around isolated scenes in which the teacher grasps how the present can suddenly swell with past millenia ; the teacher’s pent-up desire ; Yvonne’s inexplicable walks out of town ; the strange whiplash-like mark on her neck one day when she returns ; the way Jean le Pêcheur scrutinizes « le noir profond... cherchant sens dans chaque flaque du grand bayou » : all are set against the backdrop of vast cycles of geology, biology or civilization. The present can thus be apprehended as a time- and sign-laden totality ; and it is this totality – as opposed to a plot – the Michon formulates in this highly condensed novella.
   Michon is at his most elliptical in Le Roi du bois (published simultaneously with La Grande Beune), a compact, equally rain-drenched tale. This is a sardonic self-portrait of Gian Domenico Desiderii, a swineherd who rises to become assistant painter to the artist Claude Le Lorrain, « ce vieux fou » ; he ends up serving him for twenty years. As the story opens, however, Desiderii has given up painting for good. He is now « connetable et videur de pots » for the duke, Charles de Nevers. « Où est-elle, la grande espérance qui fit que je peignis, du soleil sur la tête et dans l’âme ? » wonders the narrator in a voice more ingenuous than the disabused, crusty tone which otherwise informs this pastiche of the pastoral genre. The tale ends darkly and abruptly (« Maudissez le monde, il vous le rend bien »), leaving us to ponder Desiderii’s trajectory, cynically self-prolonged beyond all hope and despair.



   The New York Review of Books, 5 mars 1998
   Louisiana Story
   par Roger Shattuck

   Masters and Servants assembles five narratives about painters and the life of painting by a contemporary French writer not previously translated into English. With one exception, each story approaches a celebrated artist through a peripheral, even obscure witness : for van Gogh, the postman Roulin, a neighbor and friend whom he painted ; for Piero della Francesca, the humble disciple Lorentino, mentioned by Vasari. Pierre Michon offers no introduction or frame for his tales. His supple prose, dappled with chiaroscuro effects is used in straightforward chronicles. But his writing can at any time lift or lower into semi-hallucinatory effects that recall Arthur Rimbaud’s assaults on conventional perception. A paragraph will suggest Michon’s style.
   In the fifth story, a boy swineherd – probably invented – sees an elegant young woman descend from a coach and lift her voluminous skirts to urinate in the shrubbery. And he overhears her prince in the coach mutter “a word reserved for the lowliest tarts”. The boy, become a man, recalls the scene as a Visitation that opened the world to him and allowed him eventually to become almost a prince.

   I don’t know if what I experienced that day may be called pleasure, I was still little. I visited the spot where she had lifted her skirts; I went to the spot where the carriage had stopped, the little consecrated place where I calculated that the prince had been; I looked at the edge of the woods, the exact tree underneath which the girl had pissed for her prince. I lowered what I could imagine of a white hand, I said aloud the word used for the lowest whores: I tapped my two fingers. In this light the trees were immense, numerous, tireless. So we are made that here, in this light, flesh takes on a greater weight. God, who sees everything with an even eye – we do not envy such even sight ; we envy the sight of those who pause patiently to consider what they will soon devour, while all around them the world explodes. Sitting there on that road in the bright sunshine, where a prince who perhaps had been only a marquis had, for a moment, smiled, I began to cry, loudly, in great sobs. I would rather have burned. An insane elation took hold of me that perhaps was pain, anger, or the disturbed laughter of those who suddenly find God along a road. It was the future, without question, this bucket of tears. Just as easily, it was God, in his curious fashion.

   Michon’s characters inhabit a universe crowded with real objects, which are also powerful signs. The world revealed by this incident converts the swineherd to the understanding that life can explode and that he can devour the pieces in order to create a new life. The unnamed boy now takes up with a group of French painters accompanying Duke Charles during the French occupation of Mantua. The most frightening of them turns out to be Claude Lorrain, who tames the swineherd and starts him on a brief career as painter. He ends up a “prince” among servants and thieves.
   The Watteau section is told in the voice of the curate of Nogent, who provides an “ordinary” face for the famous portrait of Pierrot as Gilles. The curate reports vividly on Watteau’s talents and crotchets and on his rages over his misfortunes, primarily concerning women he wants. Watteau’s rants match those of Rameau’s nephew in Diderot’s dialogue. Michon allows his intense fictional narrative to fill in seamlessly around known historical facts. This is a work of concentrated love, which lifts from its subjects the garments of traditional art history and recostumes them in a more palpable layer of imagined circumstances and feelings. Michon’s brevity and concentration ultimately reveal two complementary forms of vision : the transfiguration a painter works upon his materials by the spark of insight accompanied by patient work ; and the slow discovery by an underling of the marvel of that transfiguring vision in a princely painter. Particularly in sensuous scenes like the above, religious contemplation hovers behind the action like a figured bass.

   I did not know Michon’s work before Masters and Servants appeared. It offers a matched and varied set of what I do not hesitate to call prose poems. They survive in English because of the nearly flawless translation by Wyatt Alexander Mason. Mason is also Michon’s dedicated champion, who persevered until he found a discerning publisher. At least two more books by Michon deserve publication in English. His writing springs from no new school or ism but from the very taproot of French language and literature.
   Starting late and coming almost from nowhere, Michon demonstrates the independence of voice that marks a true writer.



   Harper’s Magazine, June 2002
   Notes from underground. The future, and deep past, of French writing
   by Roger Shattuck

   Over the past twenty-five years, a team of French historians have been reclaiming their allegedly lost national past. In its ambition, their enterprise is comparable to that of the Dutch engineers who, in the early twentieth century, reclaimed the Zuider Zee for human habitation and agriculture. In seven enormous illustrated volumes of essays, averaging around 800 pages, more than a hundred eminent historians examine a panoply of symbolic “ memory sites ”, from the obvious (La Marseillaise) to the obscure (the year of special training, called la khâgne, for a few elite students competing to enter the Ecole Normale). Les Lieux de mémoire, the French title of the series, is translated as Realms of Memory for the recently published three-volume, English-language version.
   In the second sentence of the opening “Présentation” (a sentence that does not appear in the English-language edition), co-editor Pierre Nora declares: “The rapid disappearance of our national memory seemed to me to call for an inventory of the sites where it has chosen to manifest itself.” Is France, then, losing a sense of its own past? If so, one would expect limited support for such a historybased series. Consequently, the cordial intellectual and commercial welcome accorded this state-subsidized blockbuster would appear to refute its own thesis. Pierre Nora, while planning and executing this reclamation project for the disappearing past, has also been engaged in undermining the Third Republic’s patient restoring of history. Nora’s preface to the English-language edition makes no effort to hide his subversive goals. “The originality of Realms of Memory consists in the effort to decompose that unity [of the French nation and of French history], to dismantle its chronological and teleological continuity.”
   In other words, one finds a serious contradiction at the heart of this enormous publishing project. Do Nora and his colleagues wish to reclaim a coherent history for the beleaguered entity called the French nation? Or have they become a set of highly placed, institutionalized sappers resolved to deconstruct any unified view of the French past in favor of a set of microspecialties and local perspectives? I regard both Les Lieux de mémoire and the recast English-language version (fluently translated by Arthur Goldhammer) as evidence of professional ambivalence toward the discipline and the scope of history. These authors demonstrate their devotion to rediscovering and redescribing “what really happened” in the past - but only in small chunks, in case histories. They avoid unity and continuity. Analysis, for them, trumps synthesis.
   One of Pierre Nora’s bluntest statements about his project appears in his preliminary essay, “Between Memory and History”: “Les lieux de mémoire, ce sont d’abord des restes.” Goldhammer translates: “Lieux de mémoire are fundamentally vestiges.” Nora writes a beautifully modulated pulpit prose. In this sentence, however, he puckishly picks up the term restes, familiar to any reader of cookbooks. Let me propose a different translation: “Memory sites are first of all leftovers.” Nora has allowed himself a flicker of self-mockery before he regains his accustomed solemnity. Restes, or leftovers, hardly suggest a concern with the big picture that emerges from the events of history. These seven volumes of leftovers offer us many feasts of knowledge, but in separate booths, as at a fair.

   I have begun this review with what may appear to be an extended digression. Realms of Memory deserves a review of its own. I include it here because The Origin of the World, a new short novel by the contemporary French author Pierre Michon, embodies so powerful a sense of the past, a past contained precisely in sites and customs and in ordinary people’s behavior and attitudes, that it challenges Nora’s initial presupposition of “the rapid disappearance of our national memory.” Writers such as Michon cannot stop remembering; he lives through memory. In his historical narratives, the past is summoned up as a pervasive presence that shapes even his prose style and vocabulary. In Michon’s stories about contemporary life, the past lurks in every detail of landscape, architecture, language, and convention. He, like the rest of us, would be absorbed by the essay-length monographs Nora has collected about the 1931 Colonial Exposition and the notion of “a generation” in cultural history. But Michon would laugh at the thought that the historical imagination in France has sunk so low that it needs to be pumped up again by a seven-volume public-works project for deserving historians. History has other ways of showing its vitality.

   The uncertainties of a career just beginning had brought me to the Lipari Islands. I was young and headstrong, the world was the arena where I could parade my insolence; I snorted at everything; my untried freedoom seemed to have no limits I could not brush aside. I am the son of Gaudentius, commanding general of all cavalry in Scythian territory; to my father’s lofty office I owe a childhood of gilded imprisonment like a perpetual vacation, molding my character by both overindulgence and by the constant danger or death. My father dealt with borderland Barbarians, no longer satisfied by armed combat alone; he turned me over as hostage to those with whom he formed an alliance, as a living token of his good faith. Son of a prince, I was raised among princes, as long as my father kept his word; had he betrayed his word, I would in a moment have known the edge of a sword. My life was suspended from my father’s honor.
   [My translation]

   These scenes from the decline of the Roman empire do not seem to belong to any recognizable voice. Not Plutarch’s. Not Augustine’s. Not Gibbon’s. Yet the accumulated clauses seek to probe close to the era they describe. The past here takes on the immediacy of living history, archaic yet convincing.
   The passage quoted above comes from Michon’s semi-legendary narrative, L’Empereur d’Occident. Now in his fifties, with nine books published, Michon lives in the provinces and appears to scorn the conventions of a Parisian literary career. He writes novels that are too short, too densely written, and too personal to find a large readership. Yet a volume of admiring essays, as well as many articles and reviews, has been devoted to him, and a second title of his has now been published in English. His sense of the past as immanent in the world around us gives an unsettling tension to his best writing.
   In one of Michon’s most recent collections, Mythologies d’hiver, the opening stories are set in the Dark Ages. The first tale recounts the conversion of King Leary’s three daughters in Ireland by St. Patrick. All the characters move formally, like figures in a stained-glass window brought to life. One of the daughters, Brigid, insists on seeing our Savior with her own eyes.

   No one sees Him without being baptized, said Patrick. He spoke of the river Jordan, of the angels on the bank, of the redeeming water, of John and the Master. The daughters ask to be baptized. Once again they strip off their clothes to enter the waters of the stream, utterly serious, their eyes closed. Patrick tucks up his garments and makes the necessary gestures over that stunning flesh. Brigid opens her eyes, the sun has changed place, it is almost noon. I do not see Him, she says.

   Even as the settings of the stories become more modern, Michon records only the schematic, archaic movements of men and women dedicated to a calling. In the last story, Edouard Martel, one of the founders of the science of speleology, sits under a trellis near the gorges of the Tarn River and inscribes on a map the names he will confer on the places he has discovered – underground places. For Martel and for Michon, geography and history tend to settle into the earth. The ground, the soil itself, is alive beneath our feet. More upward-aspiring authors such as Petrarch and Goethe and Stendhal seek out great heights in their imagination: If we could only fly! Michon is obsessed by the depths. Plausibly, God Himself exists underground.

   In The Origin of the World, an unnamed narrator arrives by bus in the little town of Castelnau in the Dordogne region of high plateaus and deep ravines close to the prehistoric underground sites of Les Eyzies and Lascaux. The Michelin regional map number 75 locates Castelnaud (with a final d) on the Dordogne River. Michon moves Castelnau (without the d) twenty kilometers away, to the banks of the smaller Beune River, quietly opening the space for fiction and for legend.

   I arrived at night, in something close to shock, in the middle of a galloping September rain that bucked in the beams of the headlights, in the pounding of the long windshield wipers; I couldn’t see the village at all, the rain was black. I took a room Chez Hélène, Castelnau’s only hotel, perched on the lip of the cliff beneath which the Beune flows: that night, I couldn’t yet see the Beune, but leaning out the window of my room, I was just able to make out a hollow in the darkness behind the hotel.

   From the dusty display cases in his elementary classroom the narrator learns about the treasures found in the caves and grottoes of the region. The fishermen in the bar talk about their pale mysterious catches from deepflowing streams. And in the local tabac, where he buys cigarettes and a daily newspaper, the narrator becomes spellbound by a taciturn, statuesque shopkeeper in her thirties. Her son, Bernard, is in his class. In the narrator’s overheated imagination, Yvonne yields herself completely to him, and he guts her brutally like a fish. But reality follows a different course. At appointed times she ventures out across wet fields in high heels to visit a local lover. The narrator encounters Yvonne one evening returning to the shop. She is unable to hide a bleeding wound on her cheek and neck, evidently inflicted by a whip. They stand speechless at the edge of a wood.

   The queen was at the bottom of the field, high-heeled like a crane, naked beneath her furbelows, like a scaled fish. Her hips were moving. I thought about what had made them move even more a little while ago. I thought about her vivacity, her cruel elegance; the arrogance of beauty; the shame that crushed her high-pitched voice; the sound of her cry. I tried to imagine her as Bernard’s mother. The dry bulrushes caressed her ankles, ran her stockings, cut. I felt this in my stomach. Beneath the shadows, beneath the coat, beneath the skirt, beneath the nylons, the earrings, the pearls and the Sunday best, beneath Milady’s braids and gathers, hugging the dark stockings, lay this dazzling daylit flesh where at its whitest I imagined, twenty times over, beaten, received during intense thrusts and punctuated by sobs, the heavy, unanswerable phrase that remained forever redundant, forever jubilant, suffocating, black, the absolute authorship she wore on her face.

   Yvonne has been indelibly marked, branded by her owner. “Authorship” in the last line is an audacious translation of “écriture” (writing). The principal strand of the story comes to a standstill here, but life goes on. The narrator consoles himself with a girlfriend from a nearby town, and the action moves underground – literally. Their weekend visits to local caves inspire an evocation of our paleolithic ancestors who discovered and decorated these subterranean galleries, “the men who were the gods of these reindeer.” They explore a nearby cave that belongs to Jeanjean, Yvonne’s lover. He guides them with flashlight through endless passageways to a huge room whose walls, when flooded by installed lighting, turn out to be blank, unpainted, unclaimed. “As you can see,” Jeanjean says dramatically, “there’s nothing here.” Somehow the narrator is not disappointed but impressed by the unblemished, undecorated walls:

   It was extraordinary. It was bare. It was the cupola of Lascaux at the very moment when the old bachelors had entered it, antlers on their heads, and in the torchlight their hearts had leapt in their chests; when the impeccable expanse of white limestone had been unveiled for them alone ...

   During the following days, the narrator acts severely, almost cruelly, toward Yvonne’s son, Bernard, his pupil. Toward the end, he confesses the motive behind his unfair treatment, at the same time realizing that the hopelessness of his plan is due to a failed understanding of the place that has shaped Yvonne, of its history:

   Whithout question I was waiting above all for Yvonne to ask me about these injustices, for her to come to see me. But she wasn’t one of these mothers who bothers with such conventions, who believes that the future of each of us differs according to our scores on a quiz; her love for Bernard was of a much older variety, she didn’t even need to look at my pedantic little marks in red ink, she was from the age of the old bachelors as well: she never came.

   The fishermen in the bar bring back a catch of mysterious scaleless leather carp. What is happening? No one seems to know. The waters of the Beune rise ominously. At the end, a great sleep falls over Castelnau. The River Beune flows on.

   The Origin of the World is a slender book in length, but not in style and language. In a 1999 interview, Michon stated that a novelist is not bound to invent all his characters. There is already a superfluity of lives in the world, and he cites the philosopher Occam’s principle of parsimony (“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily”) to justify a novelist’s using real people as characters. But this parsimony in creating characters does not apply to the use of language. In an earlier interview, Michon acknowledges the expansiveness with which he deploys words: “I cannot write without singing.” Michon’s prose tends to slow down in order to oblige you to hear its rhythms and also to see and touch and smell what is happening beneath it. He strives simultaneously for an opaqueness that calls attention to the verbal coloration of the prose and for a transparency that reveals a “real” sensuous world. In Renaissance painting, such a fusing of surface and depth emerged with the development of glazes-layers of varnish that one both sees and sees through. In his best narrative and descriptive passages, Michon gives the effect of a painter building up his glazes. Out of flatness he creates high relief.
   In a book of literary essays, Trois Auteurs (1997), Michon tells us that it was William Faulkner who opened the doors of literature for him. Michon also speaks with respect of Proust, Melville, and Balzac. And from the Symbolist poet Mallarmé, Michon borrows his definition of prose: “There is no such thing as prose. There is only verse with differing degrees of rhythm.”
   But for some readers familiar with the twentieth-century French novel, two additional voices will be audible through Michon’s prose: that of Alain Fournier, in particular his Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), a schoolboy fantasy of escape to a bucolic paradise; and that of Jean Giono, in particular his early Alpine novels of farmers and shepherds whose closeness to the land and to nature gives them a corresponding closeness to the supernatural, to the transcendent. All of these authors, starting with Faulkner, use the coils of their prose style to build up a sense of palpable landscape laden with legend.
   “ I was in an obscene fable.” The narrator of The Origin of the World lets drop this comment just after he has spotted across a meadow four or five schoolboys who carry a dead fox tied to a pole, following local custom, and just before he encounters the disfigured Yvonne on her way home. He also links his plight to “the arrogance of beauty.” Does the title of the book help us to get to the bottom of these implied obscurities? “The origin of the world” alludes most evidently to the association of the region of France with the ancient appearance of man from the darkness of prehistory into the flickering Paleolithic Era of cave drawings, rudimentary tools, and the magic of the hunt. From these caverns emerged the affirmative impulse that would finally become recorded history.
   But Michon also knows, as do visitors to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, that in 1866, late in his career, Gustave Courbet painted for a foreign patron a composition with the same imposing title, The Origin of the World. The painting appears to illustrate Michon’s epigraph for his novel, taken from the Russian novelist Andrei Platonov: “The Earth slept naked and tormented like a mother whose bedcovers have slipped away.” Courbet’s nearly lifesize painting offers a fully detailed close-up view, cut off at thighs and breasts, of a beautifully formed nude woman lying supine with legs spread. Such a depiction of sexual parts is utterly literal and in no way brutal. Because one sees no facial expression and no gesture, the picture can strike one as either natural and affectless or as brazenly lascivious.
   Michon’s narrative, never affectless, is increasingly laced with real and incipient ruthlessness, malevolence, and violence. Only after the eruption of violence releasing the “black honey” of Yvonne’s blood does Michon draw down over his suffering characters the veil of sleep. Courbet implied that the origin of the world lies in the sheer copiousness of sexuality uncomplicated by darker impulses; Michon’s short fable obliges us to recognize, within and beyond sexual fantasy, strains of cruelty directed toward beauty, suggestions of dominance and violence closely associated with pleasure. The core of Michon’s universe is as dark and implacable as the caverns of Lascaux. His narrative skill consists in laying out before us haunted landscapes and high-relief characters who unheroically yet steadily push back against the blackness. They acknowledge cruelty and resist it. Not a glimmer of Rousseau’s optimism appears in Michon’s writing. He works with the uncompromising perspective of Swift – and of Faulkner – confronting evil.
   Have we, then, two generations after Camus, and one generation after the minimalist tactics of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “new novel,” come upon a major new French writer? Perhaps. But Michon is unwilling or unable to take himself seriously enough to put together a full show – say, 200 pages of continuous narrative. His first, longest, and most autobiographical novel, Vies minuscules (1984), assembles convincing family portraits and a string of disastrous situations. They do not, however, redeem the book’s hackneyed theme: the trials of a young writer in search of his vocation. The author remains fascinated by Mallarmé’s image of the blank page taunting the paralyzed poet. Michon’s brief no-nonsense book on Rimbaud favors another autobiographical theme: the phantom influence of an absent father. One can find Michon’s finest work in the five semi-legendary stories about painters published in English as Masters and Servants (Mercury House, 1997). These oblique treatments of Watteau, Goya, Van Gogh, and others radiate a true magic.

   The Origin of the World, Michon’s second book to be translated into English, contains much of the same magic in the form of a novel brought vividly to life and then left suspended in the suggestiveness of its sometimes subterranean setting. We shall, I am sure, be hearing more from Michon, not only because he has a remarkable and devoted American translator, Wyatt Mason, who confers on the books full citizenship in English, but also because the pressure of imagination that sustains Michon’s writing has not flagged. That imagination draws its force in great part from a sense of the past, particularly the past embedded in the mountains, plateaus, rivers, and caves of the French landscape. With Michon among us, history will not soon disappear.

   Roger Shattuck is the author most recently of Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. He is University Professor Emeritus at Boston University.

   Discussed in this essay :
   The Origin of the World, by Pierre Michon. Translated from the French by Wyatt Alexander Mason. Mercury House, 2002. 96 pages. $18.
   Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Volumes I, II, and III, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman and Pierre Nora. Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer. Columbia University Press, 1996, 1997, and 1998. 2,042 pages. $43.50 each.