2023-09-04 16:00:59
River and canvas – on Mississippi by Sophie G. Lucas
Fifteenth book by poet and documentary filmmaker Sophie G. Lucas, Mississipi, her first novel, crosses eras, dramas and societal upheavals to offer the family fresco of those who run behind their dreams. This genealogy mixes, with a remarkable rhythmic control, the small and the big History, in the vulgar language: the language of each and everyone, of which no one is the owner.
Like a flooded river threatening to overflow the present to fertilize the future, Mississippi, the gesture of the ordinary carries away two centuries of social anger in the flow of a lively writing, as changing from one chapter and therefore from one era to another as a faceted mirror: a sometimes rough writing which aims to embrace the real rather than to sink into a beguiling reality.
To fall into the category of first novels, as the publisher insists, the fifteenth book by the poet and documentary filmmaker Sophie G. Lucas is certainly not an ordinary first novel – an observation that is wrong, moreover, without questioning this such a debatable notion of the “first novel” which has become a kind of commercial sesame in the great machinery of editorial and media income, which likes nothing more than to consume virginity.
Reducing the notion of a first novel to a big annual debutante ball is foolish, and Mississippi, the gesture of the ordinary proves it if it were needed: even if they would be deployed for the first time in the long time of a novel, the rhythmic mastery which it testifies and its capacity to make sing the popular language were forged throughout the collections which preceded it, in an obvious continuity – let us quote in particular, at the same publisher (Éditions La Contre Allée), we are the people (2023), a poetic chronicle of social revolts, and the very noticed Witness (2016). Tribute to the great American objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff, Witness owes its first impetus to the famous Testimony : The United-States 1885-1890, written from court records: having “followed correctional trials at the Tribunal de grande instance of Nantes from September 2013 to January 2014”, Sophie G. Lucas was inspired by them to develop an assembly from the raw material that she had collected, punctuating and cutting up the sentences heard in order, little by little, to weave in them the portrait of an absent and long hated father whose tumultuous history she recognizes and the traits in the fragile speech of the accused – figure of the failing father that we mention all the more willingly that he strongly resembles the “man at war” of the last chapters of Mississippi, the gesture of the ordinary.
We might dwell here on the use of the word “gesture”, of course, which traditionally refers to a set of epic poems singing the feats of historical or legendary characters, and aims rather at edification than at narrative. ordinary lives. What is certain is that the presence of this paradoxical subtitle indicates that Sophie G. Lucas is clearly aware of the great freedom that the resolutely bastard genre that is the novel that has been invented invites to take. at the crossroads of all genres, giving the opportunity to recall that the said novel owes its name to the vernacular, the vernacular in which it is written: the language of each and everyone, of which no one is the owner, as claimed by one of the characters here torn from the banks of the great river Oblivion that is the story: “it says that I was already running away from a very young age, that it is a family thing, she says it makes her think of her father, my grandfather, I didn’t know him, she didn’t see him anymore”, the one who crossed the ocean twice to meet a river that would have “burnt his dreams, I don’t know what […]it’s called Mississippi, she uses this word wrong and through, she says Mississippian dreams, and I tell her that it doesn’t exist, that we can’t say that, and she gets angry and tells me says that we can invent, that we too can create words, it’s not because we’re destitute, and that I won’t have to talk to her like that, as if I knew and she didn’t “.
Contrary to the legend (from the Latin legend : “what should be read” as it should be read), the novel, intractable to standards, has no real meaning except by moving the lines, derogating from the general blackmail imposed by communication in order to displace the boundaries of individual and collective narration, invisible boundaries that condition our way of telling stories, even our own, and therefore condition our way of existing among others. So, capable of deploying an imaginary or a vision afresh according to a logic that is always specific but whose engine remains the language event triggered by writing, the novel can become an instrument of knowledge and, to use a formula of Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, aim to “write to the unconscious”.
If this formula so striking comes back to memory to read Mississippi, the gesture of the ordinary which deploys a form of family unconscious by giving voice and body to a line of unranked, often ramshackle cohort of ignorant decreed ignorant regardless of their relationship to trees and earth, henceforth doomed to weave their existences on the owing to dazzling worldly tapestries, it is because this formula by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel is immediately ambivalent: on the one hand, it invites writing to unconscious people who are unaware of themselves, those whom an imposed mode of existence has cut off from any tragic consciousness of reality, writing to them in order to call them back to the order of the living and to the power of words, a power more often endured than used within the narrow limits of the soothing reality imposed by social domination; on the other hand, but the two interpretations are obviously linked, “writing to the unconscious” can also designate the utopia of writing from the unconscious to the unconscious, under the guise of telling a story, in short, to open the dykes and the locks of the language – which can only happen, precisely, by letting the language produce events that are necessarily unexpected by chance in a story that is all the more productive for being worked on, orchestrated.
It is primarily in this that the first novel by Sophie G. Lucas itself makes an event, in the crowd of novels too often formatted, corseted, as sincere and talented as they might be. In reality, the elasticity of the novel genre, its bastardy (if the word insists here, it is also due to the fact that the course of the story is dotted with many children of unknown fathers), allows Sophie G. Lucas to pull it towards the epic, which might also bring us back to the “gesture” of the subtitle, this time without paradox: as in any epic since antiquity, the question is not so much to illustrate or to maintain a memory of the past than to answer a fundamental question: how did we get here? And there, what are we going to become, all together?
The questions of becoming and of origin mingle here, whereas the “coming from” (of the world of the ordinary) immediately complicates this “becoming”; by its construction in twelve cantos and three parts, the whole of the book might be summed up by the title of the most famous of the Tahitian paintings of Paul Gauguin, the deeply obscure and so luminous “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going ? »
Throughout the story, two metaphors compete with each other: that of the river and its tributaries in the family tree, and that of the tapestry, where the threads are tied and undone.
This is why the last song of Mississippientitled “2006” in reference to the tragic followingmath of Hurricane Katrina which devastated Louisiana in 2005, completes the loop begun in 1839 with the character of Impatient, hero of the first song who experienced a grandiose and founding epiphany by discovering the landscape of the banks of the Mississippi, the “great river”, as the Native Americans called it (mission-ziibi), in the heart of this America where the taste for adventure had led him following five years spent at war. Paid to try to save his life and not “die in the place of one of these wealthy sons”, Impatient, conscripted by substitution, was only able to leave his native village to “sell himself, consider one’s life less than that of a bourgeois, to defend oneself once morest it (but all the same), to seize it as an opportunity”.
The banks of the Mississippi and the elms of childhood that he found there in a landscape so much more grandiose gave birth to him a second time, Impatient, who we will soon learn was actually called Alexis Lansard, son winegrower, born September 19, 1808 in Ormoy, Burgundy. Returning to the country to get married, he discovered there in 1839 that his parents had failed to declare him to the Civil Registry, unlike his brother and sister. He does not exist. This inaugural scene confronts him with Julien Henriot, head of the Register, quite formal: “Julien Henriot sighs, turns his head, It’s not me, Impatient, it’s the Law. You are not in the Register, you do not exist in the eyes of the Law, you have not been declared, an oversight, an error”. An error, a hiatus conducive to the “Mississippi” imagination, the source of the story.
If Impatient is the imaginary double of Alexis Lansard, it is because there is no other way than the imagination to approach sensibly what it was like to be a man of the people in 1839, a man returned from America to resume work in the vineyard, whose unique trace has melted away until it disappears into the back of the historical tapestry: “What does a man of the 19th century look like? How does it move in his body? How does it marry the landscape? How does this peasant manage with his clogs, his wide-brimmed hat, his clothes stiffened by the thickness of the fabrics and the filth? These are the first lines of this first song. We will find them barely modified at the very end of the last song, which closes the epic six generations later, at a tipping point in the life of Odessa, born in 1968, as the author of the book (Odessa, although sure, being in turn an imaginary double, the imaginary double of the daughter of “the man at war”): this last song bears the title of the 2006 vintage, as we have said, the year which was that of the voyage of Odessa to the lands of Louisiana devastated the previous year by hurricane Katrina, lands of the poor to whom no one was in a hurry to help, at the mouth of the great river twice mythical in the eyes of Odessa.
However, this last song was written several years following 2006, as announced in its first lines, bringing up the very important question of the future, both collective and individual: “After that, Odessa changed its life. After that, made a cabin and land somewhere in the swamps (not the swamps of his childhood) (at that time they were already swallowed up by the rising waters, we are talking regarding a time to come). This following-that took years to invent. In this last canto, unlike most of those that separate them, we find (happily) the lively and jolted writing of the first canto, jostled with parentheses like so many restrained anger, and lingering, resurfacing from where?
The writing, meanwhile, might be sometimes fluid, sometimes out of breath in a race once morest death, sometimes it even seemed to be channeled by the dikes of compulsory education, throughout chapters which all carry a date in title, leading us from war to epidemic, from bloodbath (1871) to colonial episode (1946) from which only war might emerge once more and once more, in the world and at home, over a long line of fragments of life which stammered out the same central question, decidedly: “what are we” – and we can only remember here the fact that Gauguin, for his part, used the pronoun “that” rather that of the pronoun “who” inevitably enclosing in questions of identity, even if the social would return here, what are we in the world to count so little, wisps of straw carried away by the floods of history?
The fact remains that, throughout the story and even in this article, two metaphors recur, competing between that of the river, while the book seems to want to substitute the course of the river and its tributaries for the family tree that is far too static and ordered, and that of the tapestry or, more exactly, of the invisible back of the tapestry, where the threads are tied and undone. This second metaphor, lingering, takes an explicit turn in the middle of the book, at the moment when the story operates an unexpected and particularly rich reversal: “It is not you who will be remembered. It does not matter. You are the other side of the tapestry of your threads sewn with threads of gold. It is that, where ordinarily the life stories of illustrious men can move us by the brief appearance of ordinary individuals because of their more or less loose ties with the hero, Mississippi, the gesture of the ordinary on the contrary, leaves a place, small but central, to Antoine Lumière, born on March 13, 1840 in Ormoy, from whom he tore himself early to climb the rope ladder of success and pave the way for his famous sons Louis and Auguste.
In fact, the Lumière Brothers were the nephews of Impatient, alias Alexis, and his wife Françoise, but never met them, perhaps never heard of them, on one side of the sumptuous tapestry embroidered in gold which claims to illustrate the great story, to illustrate it as it should be read without ever departing for the edification of each and everyone.
MississippiSophie G. Lucas, Editions La Contre Allée, August 2023, 192 pages, 18 euros.
Bertrand Leclair
Writer, Literary Critic
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