2023-10-08 20:10:05
Dear Laure Murat,
I am armed arrival to your latest book Proust, roman familial. A priori, I had heard enough about Proust last year, on the occasion of the centenary of his death, and the family novels of the wealthy classes made me sigh. Defensive sighs, of course. But what do you want, sighs.
So I opened the book armored, and then I came out disarmed and, incidentally, moved. In it, you explain how your reading of Proust saved you. Twice. Once, when you become disillusioned with the aristocratic background from which you come – a “world of pure forms“, you write – and a second time making you realize that homosexuality was a force of subversion. You accepted being a lesbian to your family, which was equivalent to a break with them. You knew it. By saying the truth, you were leaving the stage.
Your desire to know, and to say, saved you from the refusal to know characteristic of your environment. All your life, you have wanted to formulate “which goes without saying“. To the imperative of silence, it goes without saying, you opposed language.
But we must be even more precise: where your environment favored mastery of the French language, quotations or eloquence, you, for your part, favored exact and indocile sentences, which take the risk of articulating non -said. Those who put their elbows on the table. Sentences that have less ambition to shine than to sparkle.
“Déciller”, I have used this verb twice, which comes up a lot in your language. To unravel means to make someone see what they did not know or wanted to ignore.
I looked up the origin of the verb, and initially, the word talked about birds.
To unpick was to unstitch the eyelids of a bird, after it had been trained.
In this case, we imagine the kind of training, we guess the bird, and then we read the texts which flew it away.
Your sentences seemed to me to have this poetry, this melancholy too, of the bird whose eyelids are unstitched. They put into motion what seemed frozen. They disturb the obvious. And then they disinhibit.
Reading you reminded me that writing (and in the best case, speaking) meant taking the risk of formulating what has not yet been formulated, even if it meant groping, even if it meant stuttering, even if it meant having to get back to it like a baby bird hopping around again. Reading you gave me a little courage for this. And then to continue The research.
So since what goes without saying is better when written, I’m writing it to you: thank you!
Blandine
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