I arrived on this island behind an island, according to the lapidary formula of George Bernard Shaw, almost at the same time as the three envoys of the Troika in September 2010. The context, course and horizon of my stay and diplomatic mission in Ireland were then fixed: in time of distress – historical, moral, economic – the poets are needed. Amid the economic and banking crisis, culture gives meaning to the people. Just as for France, ideas and poetry are an essential part of the Irish identity. Writing shapes that identity as it gives form to the traumas: war, religion, famine. Bankruptcy.
A few days later, as I was going to my office on Kildare Street, I saw this cement mixer emblazoned with the words Anglo Irish Bank; massive, immobile, no ghost driver at the wheel, which barred the entrance of the Dáil. The same picture on my phone was a day later on the front page of Le Monde. At the time, Colm Tóibín relayed the thoughts of his fellow countrymen that Ireland was feeling occupied again. Colonised by Europe. When I met him a few weeks later at the Pen Club where he was awarded the annual prize, he told me about other matters: New York, where he spends half his time; Spain; writing; our mutual friend Edmund White.
I met some of the most interesting writers in town. As I just mentioned, I smoked a cigarette with Tóibín outside Dún Laghaire’s yacht club; two years later, I was now sitting at the top table with John Banville (and his lovely daughter) when he received his award. Apparently, I had climbed the social and literary ladder!
I did attend the small ceremony on the occasion of the presentation of Seamus Heaney’s archive at the National Library (it was three steps away from my office). I watched the warm manuscripts; the poet said a few words. The main thing, he said, is to be present when what is done is done and to forget oneself.
Waiting. Confidence. Hope. I keep preciously the smallest possible correspondence with Heaney: one exchange of letters. In my letter I asked him to enlighten me about the sentence of TS Eliot about “the man who suffers and the mind which creates”. The Nobel Prize winner replied – oh humble, generous, sensible man! – the task of the poet is to transform the I in It. Then I went to the poet’s funeral Mass at the Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook.
I completed three books during my stay in Dublin, written in as many different places: home (at dawn), coffee shops (Cup, Fixx and Fallon & Byrne’s basement) at lunchtime, and, well, my office in Kildare Street, when in winter outside is dark and my lamp is warm and bright next to my head.
They were an essay on the artist Marcel Duchamp and the World Wars: Duchamp Déchets (where I quote John Horne, the great Irish specialist of the first World War in France), now in bookstores, on the occasion of the artist's retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris; a new fiction, Qui va là!, coming out in French in January, a mysterious story of ambiguous love between people injured and exiled. Maybe, it's rather a story about violence: violence against women and the violence of writing (I know nothing about my last fiction); and finally an essay on Jacques Derrida's traumas, Exclusion, Circumcision, Decision.
I met Derrida when I was 23 years old and teaching for a year at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Then I did my PhD under Derrida on Jean Genet’s politics – for 15 years, the writer was involved with the Palestinians, the Black Panthers, the Red Army Fraction, and immigrants all over the world. My work was an investigation of the many issues raised by the writer: a reflection on origins, violence, secrets, debt and inheritance, the legacy of the monstrous or the monstrous as inheritance, friendship, mourning, and death.
And, at the same time, a long and patient destruction and deconstruction of the fictions offered by the writer in response to these questions (see: The Last Genet, a writer in revolt, transl. David Homel, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010). I came to the conclusion that the dream of the man who invented humanism is to become monstrous.
It seems to me that all three countries where I have worked have a colonial past and memory: Israel, Canada, Ireland. “Every nation is a wound,” wrote Genet. Irish people are resilient and resistant. Travelling and suffering are the ingredients to becoming a writer, said the Marquis de Sade. A traumatic childhood is a plus, added Banville, with a laugh.
During my stay in Dublin, I spent three months in a B&B ... neither seen nor heard. Canal. Dark winter days. Isolation. I did almost nothing in my attic room. I read a few chapters of Kafka's biography, which John Banville had recommended to me, about Metamorphosis. Also a few pages on "Eternal return" in Heidegger's Nietzsche.
Everything changed during my stay in that B&B – the clients (every day or so), the staff (shifts) and even the painting on the wall (when I came to breakfast one morning I noticed with astonishment that the wallpaper had been changed overnight) – but me. And when I came back home, I was a new person. As if the vast void and silence in me had given space for interior freedom. Then I completed the three books I mentioned above. But the story of the boy in the attic is another story, which I will tell you another time…
Ten books that influenced me
1. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767)
The infinite birth of the narrator (who never dies); the art of digression; humour and satire. I love it so much because I believe literature is about being born, or going out of Egypt, that is to say, out of the house of slavery.
2. Marquis de Sade, La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795)
France is celebrating the bicentenary of the death (in an asylum) of the philosopher and writer. Written in Picpus prison in Paris, its windows facing the mass graves of the French Revolution’s Terror, here is Sade’s favourite female character, Eugénie de Mistival, planning to kill her mother with the help of her libertine teachers, Dolmance and Saint-Ange.
3. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1957).
While I lived in Dublin I went to all Beckett's plays either at the Gate, the Beckett Theatre in Trinity or the Gaiety. I saw (again) Endgame with my eldest son in the Gaiety for Christmas. I had forgotten it was such a powerful play on master/slave relationships (ie colonial). But Endgame remains my favourite: so funny and desperate about a couple.
4. Mary Darrieusescq, White (2003; transl. Ian Monk, 2005).
Snow, ghost, coldness. What JMG Le Clezio did with Desert, Darrieussecq is doing with White. Antarctica's vast, glacial whiteness is a metaphor for the isolated regions of the self; and how love overcomes the spectra.
5. Flann O Brien, The Third Policeman (1940/ 1966).
I like posthumous and secret work (like, for example, Rousseau's Confession, Casanova's Story of my life, or Duchamp's Given.) Plus the writer used a pseudonym; and the narrator is an orphan whose name we never learn… It is considered the first postmodern fiction, a radical and involved metafictional fantasy… Also, Flann O Brien's work gave its name to the publisher where my Orphans found a home (see below), Dalkey Archive, and I am so grateful to them!
6. Pierre Guyotat, Coma (2006) (transl. Noura Wedell, 2010).
A poetic exploration of trauma and renewal from the most intense of our living writers.
7. Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (1996).
I was living in Ranelagh, down the street from where Seamus Deane’s wife still lives in that marvellous and hospitable home. A fiction about both a boy’s coming of age and the troubles in Ireland. ‘’Hauntings are, in their way, very specific. Everything has to be exact, even the vaguenesses.’’
8. Patrick Modiano, Un Pedigree (A Pedigree, 2005)
The story of Modiano’s own childhood up until his 21st year. Postwar, abandon, Paris and traumas without an inch of pathos. Our new Nobel Prize!
9. Anne Enright, The Gathering (2007).
Memory, death and shock. An unreliable narrator struggles to remember her dead brother Liam. Physicality of writing is combined with remarkable intelligence; and a lot of irony about sex and other human relationships.
… And last but not least !
10. Hadrien Laroche, Orphans (transl. Jan Steyn and Caite Dolan-Leach, Dalkey Press, 2014).
A forlorn traveller is taken in by three suffering orphans: one is orphaned by history, another, by pathology, a third, by philosophy. In the midst of their pain, madness and humanity, they give the visitor food, and shelter and humanity. In this triptych, I examine the relationship between a writer and his words: suggesting that, perhaps, I am the orphan of my own work. “And we wander, indeed, such as orphans” (Hölderlin).
