Hélène is on the threshold of forty years, a well-paid job, two daughters, an affectionate companion to whom she has been linked for some time. Apparently she reached the goals she had set for herself when, as a nerd teenager in a small town in Eastern France, she understood that she wanted to reach the top, abandon what appeared to her as the mediocrity of her parents, narrow space of the province. Yet, the employment of her in a firm of consultants who work with local administrations, engaged in the implementation of the great reform that has merged several departments into the macro-regions, proves to be more frustrating every day. For the young woman it is the first sign that something is starting to go wrong, but it is no longer the burnout that had surprised her in Paris with a prestigious assignment but too heavy to bear on a personal level, to the point of forcing her to return to the area of Nancy. This time it’s the whole house of cards built around her career, her spasmodic pursuit of success that seems about to collapse, putting her in front of far more disturbing questions than those she has to deal with every day in the office between slides and powerpoints. Her meeting with Cristophe, a love of youth remained in his hometown where he sells dog food, will seem to open new perspectives in her life. Or just force her to really deal with herself and with her deepest desires.
Con The popular song (Marsilio, translation by Margherita Botto, pp. 456, euro 21) that Nicolas Mathieu will present today in Venice as part of the International Literature Festival «Crossroads of civilization» – at 3 pm in the Santa Margherita Auditorium – the writer who won the Goncourt Prize (with And the children after them, Marsilio, 2019) returns to investigate French society through the myths and wounds of the province. Born in 1978 in the Vosges region, Mathieu gives voice this time to the suffering of cadres, to the way in which the spirit and vocabulary of management has contaminated the public sphere and existences themselves, offering an unedited key of great interest, both on literary level than more explicitly political, to look at the great crisis that is affecting France.
The leitmotif of the novel is a passage by Michel Sardou, “Les Lacs Du Connemara”, which seems to describe a state of mind and a social condition at the same time. What does this song represent in France and for you?
In my country it is known by everyone, each of us has heard it at least once. And it has the particularity of being played in popular festivals, at weddings, in discos, but also in the most exclusive circles. It is the song that closes all the celebrations of the Hec, the best French business school, which trains the country’s economic elites. So it represents something that is common to us, but it also signals the existence of a border, because it is not heard in the same way in these different strata of society. The novel is also deeply interested in what unites the country, what forms its shared basis, but at the same time can divide it. Between Christophe and Hélène, in their history, something like this is also played out. In my eyes, and for the characters in the story, this song is above all like a Proust madeleine. It brings out all kinds of memories and reactivates dormant sensations and opinions every time I listen to it. It’s also both an epic and a popular form: kind of the idea I had in mind for building the novel. Finally, including in the book a song by Michel Sardou, despised by the intelligentsia, after winning the Goncourt, was also a way of stating somewhat provocatively that this “legitimation” hasn’t taken me too far from my foundations.
His narrative horizon always includes the world of work. If in the first two novels it was about the end of blue collar work, in this case there is Hélène’s job as a consultant. What does the role assumed by these private studios, which have a growing influence on public administrations, tell us about French society?
I have frequented various professional environments and I have seen these consultancy firms operate almost everywhere by selling intellectual services, often with an uncertain profile, for their weight in gold. Even beyond this aspect, what I wanted to address was managerial ideology, its power, its stupidity, how it contaminates language and how it is perceived and proposed, i.e. as a neutral expertise, while it is of something clearly ideological. This way of thinking about things, through the prism of performance and organization, has contaminated the public sector and the political field itself. And I believe that the coming to power of the macronists represented the triumph of this ideology.
The novel makes us share Hélène’s anger, her frustrations, depression, defeats. Where does her malaise come from?
Hélène is a force in motion. Since childhood she wanted to break away from the parental world, study, earn good money. She was ambitious and eventually succeeds. But when she reaches forty, she wonders if the plan that she has achieved (a good job, family, a high salary…) really coincides with her deepest desires for her. If she hasn’t let herself be captured by ambitions that are not hers: a sort of desire from an brochure that the world of social media has instilled in her. She apparently has it all, but to herself she thinks, “Is this really all?” You are crossed by a great feeling of emptiness, like many people who belong to the so-called “creative class”: those who sell their gray matter for years and end up giving up everything at a certain point to become a carpenter or pastry chef. And then, as a woman, she let herself be possessed by duties that have the upper hand on her, such as those relating to the family that weigh on her much more than on her partner. This feeling of being robbed of her time, of her life, misled into her desires, makes her so angry. Anger is a very denigrated feeling, a sad passion as Spinoza says. Yet I think it represents a very powerful lever, a fuel that irrigates our actions, even if we run the risk of losing ourselves by indulging in it. And then, it is perhaps the first word of Western literature: «Sing, o muse, the wrath of Achilles» (inIliad).
The biographies he describes indicate the difficulty of combining work fulfilment, “success”, and happiness, emotional well-being. In the book, these elements seem to be placed at a crossroads, but in different directions. How are things?
Personally I ask myself this question: what is a successful life? What is an existence worth living? It’s very difficult to answer. Generally we try to keep everything together: professional life, personal life, taking care of children, being there for those who love us, developing ourselves, satisfying our pride, our impulses, loving, using our body as much as possible, measure ourselves with our limits, with those that impose us, with the passage of time. A task that on the whole I believe is beyond our strength. We are content to do our best, and those who are most likely to be happy are also the ones most likely to be happy.
The search for success, growing up in the provinces, social belonging: elements that put some characters in contradiction with the family context from which they come. You seem very interested in the forms of this “transmission” between one generation and another: what attracts you to this process?
Distancing from the original environment is a burning issue for me because it is an experience that I have personally lived and that never ceases to torment me. It is a betrayal we are ashamed of, wanting to become more than our parents, more educated, richer, less submissive. And that same shame then arouses restlessness, malaise. Because we never really integrate into the environment we aimed for, a thousand things remind us of our initial difference, and ultimately we end up staying in the middle. Which is both a difficulty and an opportunity: from there, you can see everything very well.
It’s just a sinister background noise, but in this slightly bored, slightly angry province, affected by the crisis but not in such bad shape, the shadow of Marine Le Pen is looming. Does the success of the far right have anything to do with the moods of these areas?
Obviously, to explain Le Pen’s consensus there are deindustrialization, economic and social problems, the fact of being cruelly exposed to the effects of globalization, the abandonment of the popular classes by the Socialist Party, immigration and racism, and many other reasons . But there is also something more symbolic: the feeling of being neglected, despised by Paris. The impression that the well-to-do doesn’t give a damn who lives here and will continue the same way anyway.
Finally, an obligatory question: what is the relationship between the country that emerges from «Connemara» and the social anger that is now being expressed in the squares of France?
The novel ends in May 2017, when Macron comes to power. And you can feel the tension between the two sides of the country: those with higher or lower levels of education, big cities versus smaller ones, those well equipped for the world as it is, and those exposed to its most cruel evolutions. Many today have the feeling of being subjected to the law of an elite that calculates, manages, orders, but doesn’t care about the fate of people, their bodies, their heads, their hearts, what happens in their lives. This social rage is that of a people who have the impression that they are governed against them, to the advantage of the richest and ignoring their opinion. No doubt Christophe and his father, his friends, would be on the side of the demonstrators. As for Hélène, would she choose the part of the world where she gravitates today or the part of the world where she comes from? The question remains.