A while ago I started reading Les Jardins statuaires, by Jacques Abeille, which I have heard and read so much about. The idea of statues growing out of the ground seemed a bit strange to me, but I must say that I am a bit of an idiot, and by reading interviews with the author I came to understand that it was a metaphor for creation: for Jacques Abeille, a book is not the product of a meticulous professional's work, but the modest shaping, by the author, of an imperious inspiration, of something that came out of nowhere, that asks to be born and cultivated.
"I know very well that Flaubert is a great writer. But there are other ways of writing. The legend that the unfortunate Edgar Allan Poe maintained around his Raven, by showing that everything was calculated, is false but Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry relayed it. Here is the French taste. I am a stranger to it. This little philosophical tale was supposed to say that the work of art comes out, and that the artist is content to control its momentum. It is a somewhat Aristotelian idea: the sculptor must release a virtuality that is already in the marble. Obviously, there was for me, on the horizon, a rehabilitation of the inspiration compared to the work."
The novel takes place in a kind of dream Europe, without a precise era, or which mixes several, and reminds me in this of Junger's On the marble cliffs – and actually also of the interactive fictions of my friend Eric, for example Les Heures du Vent, of which it is not clear whether it takes place in the Middle Ages, in the XIXth century, or in a distant archaeofuturistic future. This seems to be a sort of discrete tradition in the contemporary novel; if I believe Saint Wikipedia, Dino Buzzati in The Tartar Steppe, and Julien Gracq in The Opposing Shore, two novels I have not yet read, feature the same kind of world. One could also evoke the atmosphere of some of Borgès' short stories.
Ironically, and in parenthesis, these authors are considered as giants in France while they are largely closer to the literature of the imaginary, as they say, than to the "littérature blanche" of the NRF – in a country that has always despised the imaginary and its writers. Volodine is an exception, and a recent one, while Serge Brussolo continues to win second or third zone literary prizes.
Jacques Abeille :
"If I join my time, it is in the feeling, inherited undoubtedly from my obscurity, that there is in France a repression, a prohibition, a condemnation of the imagination. A very subtle intellectual, Gaëtan Picon, who is little talked about today, wrote essays on literature and pointed out an incredible fact: you have the right to have imagination if you are South American, if you are Irish, if you are Czech. There are fans of Alice in Wonderland or Gulliver's Travels everywhere. But the French writer must be plausible. Everyone, even the greatest, must go through this constraint, and it is inadmissible to escape it."
All this is finally what I have tried to do myself with The Liberation and other things that I have probably written or simply imagined in my life. A dreamed, eternal, archetypal Europe, in which all the eras and all the aspects are cumulated and mixed, and it is probably the inevitable mental universe of any westerner with a minimum of culture. It is enough to visit a museum to float in this feeling of eternity.
When I say dreamed Europe, it is not a way of speaking; for Jacques Abeille the dream is central in his work:
"I persist in believing that surrealism is inexhaustible, but it is still something else. I think of surrealism in terms of dreams: dream activity seems to me the great reservoir of what I write."
When I was younger I wanted to be a writer and make up stories – the problem was that I couldn't find anything interesting, relevant or new to tell. It took me accumulating hundreds of dream stories to realize that many of them featured the same settings, the same issues, and that they were ultimately sequences, in no particular order, of the same story or a few strange but very real stories that my mind has been telling itself for decades, now, at night. And that there is no need to look any further; the inspiration, the originality, the relevance is there.
You don't write Balzac based on your dreams, of course. It ends up with Lovecraft, Volodine, or Jacques Abeille style stories. But after all, you don't have to write like Balzac... And it must be a great, great satisfaction to be able to draw a reasonably coherent and communicable story from the scattered ruins of our night life, which are not our dreams, but the memories of our dreams, those we have access to.
The dream narratives that seem to me to be the most telling and fascinating, today, among those that I wrote down between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five or so, are those that feature archetypal rural landscapes, with their castles, villages, ancient ruins, etc. I visited more of them in my dreams than in my real life, as if in spite of my perfectly urban life as a late twentieth century man, my mind was fundamentally populated by this kind of landscape.
Sometimes I simply walk there, alone or with friends. Sometimes they are the backdrop for a change of life, for a new stage full of promise, as when I am hired by a squire for some work on his estate. This is almost the beginning of Les Jardins Statuaires after all, and when I opened it, I was already, so to speak, on familiar ground (an expression which, by the way, is the french homophone of "unknown land"), in the same dream that an unknown number of men are having at the same time, and which we should perhaps begin to consider as part of reality.
