mercredi 14 novembre 2007
219. Richard Lea du Guardian
Par Léo Scheer, mercredi 14 novembre 2007
Je ne me souvenais pas que c'est le même Richard Lea du Guardian qui avait écrit ça le 21 septembre 2007. Il va falloir suivre le Guardian.
"In Paris, the row of this year's rentrée littéraire is of unusual ferocity. Marie Darrieussecq, the acclaimed author of Pig Tales, finds her latest novel, Tom est Mort (Tom is Dead), the subject of a breathtaking accusation of "psychological plagiarism" launched by an author published by the same small company, Éditions POL.
This month's edition of the La Revue Littéraire carries an extraordinary article by the novelist Camille Laurens where she describes reading Darrieussecq's latest "dizzy with grief" as she found echoes of her own work, especially her 1995 memoir, Phillippe, which recounts the death of her own son.
"Even though no phrase is quoted exactly," she writes, "many passages from Philippe ... are easily recognisable: a phrase or an idea, a scene or a situation, but also rhythm, syntax, always modified a little but manifestly inspired by my personal ordeal and by my writing about that ordeal ... So I can put it like this: I had the feeling, in reading it, that Tom est Mort had been written in my room, with her arse on my chair or sprawling in my bed of grief. Marie Darrieussecq has invited herself into my house, she's a squatter." It's almost painful to read - her anguish is so raw, her bewilderment so acute. But then it seems as if she's arguing that there are books that shouldn't be written, or books that certain writers shouldn't be allowed to write.
Darrieussecq immediately declared herself "slandered", suggesting in Libération that the article sprang from a hidden "hatred" she had no inkling of during the 11 years they shared the same publisher. Philippe is an autobiographical account of the death of Camille Laurens' son at birth because of a medical mistake, she says, Tom est Mort is a novel about the accidental death of a four-year-old, told 10 years later by his mother.
"Of course, certain situations and feelings coincide," she continues, but "so many other novels, from William Kotzwinkle to Kazuo Ishiguro, go back over these inevitable moments of maternal mourning".
For Darrieussecq, nothing should be off-limits for fiction.
"The novel, for me, is neither a pastime nor a source of entertainment," she continues, "It's a serious art which demands sacrifices. And I expect some effort from my readers, some intelligence." And as for the suggestion that some experiences must be lived through to be described? "Since when must you justify yourself with an experience from your life to write a novel?" she asks.
It's an expectation that even Darrieussecq finds hard to resist, as Elisabeth Ladenson noted in the London Review of Books. Attacked as she is for presuming to intrude on an area which Laurens feels she has marked out as her own, Darrieussecq offers the observation that "dead children haunt all of my books since the beginning", and speaks about her mother who also lost a child.
The founder of Éditions POL, Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, is almost as outraged as Darrieussecq, taking Laurens' article almost as a personal assault. He rejects entirely Laurens' suggestion that only the author can judge when a robbery has occurred. "The relatively small output of my publishing house allows me to read and re-read the manuscripts I publish," he says. "If I had felt for a moment in Marie Darrieussecq's book something like an imitation, a copy of Camille Laurens, I would never have published it. I'm astonished that Camille Laurens has not credited me with this intelligence." Then he coolly adds that he is not going to publish Laurens any more.
All of which makes me think that something like this could never have happened in Britain. It's not just the vicious nature of Laurens' attack - an anguished polemic which puts even Tibor Fischer's hatchet job on Martin Amis into the shade - it's the seriousness of both sides, the assumption that literature is something important, something one can call "a serious art" without fear of contradiction or ridicule, something that's worthy of more than gossip and sensational journalism. But then again, with Le Figaro reporting that sales of Tom est Mort have doubled since the row broke out, perhaps it's more a case of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose ..."
