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By Root 909 0

innocence. Technically speaking, that’s all it requires. There is a very beautiful word to designate a man who has discovered treasure; it is the word inventeur. Whether he stumbled on it by chance while lost in the forest or after fifteen years poring over old maps dating back to the conquistadores doesn’t matter. And this is exactly the same thing you feel when you write a poem: it doesn’t matter whether you’ve spent two years or fifteen minutes writing it. It is as though—and I know this sounds irrational—it is as though the poem already existed, has existed for all eternity, and that all you have done is discover it. Once it has been discovered, you stand at a certain distance. You have loosed it from the earth where it lay buried, dusted it off, and it shines, for all to see, a gleam of unpolished gold.

A novel is something very different; it entails a lot of grease and sweat; it requires a ridiculous amount of work to hold everything more or less together, tightening the wheel-nuts, stopping it from running off the road; it is, when all’s said and done, a piece of machinery.

I don’t disown my novels, I’m very fond of my novels, but it’s not quite the same thing; and with my head on the block I would argue (against Kundera, against Lakis Proguidis and all my friends, against all those who supported me when times were hard) that the novel (even in the hands of Dostoyevsky, of Balzac, of Proust), in comparison to the poem, remains a minor genre.

(I realize this is an old debate and one that doesn’t concern you personally; but, when all is said and done, this is what I spent my youth doing; it is the sort of conversation I used to have in Le Lucernaire with Benoît Duteurtre and Lakis Proguidis.)

I don’t know whether I had a gift for writing novels, I don’t know whether the question means anything, can one have a gift for something so complex?

I certainly had no gift for stories, I’ve always found telling stories a pain in the ass, and I have no talent as a storyteller (to use a word recently adopted in French).

As for style, I wish people would stop bugging me with this shit. Where do words play their most direct part, where do they gain power from how they are arranged? In poetry, first and foremost in poetry. Compared to a poet, no novelist has or can ever have a style. You try, oh, you try to achieve certain harmonies; sometimes you find, you’re delighted to find, in a sentence something that would not seem out of place in a poem (it often happened to Conrad, sometimes to Flaubert); but in general you keep your mouth shut about such moments, you let others discover them, you rely entirely on your future readers.

I had a gift for something, for one thing related to writing novels, creating characters. They kept me from getting to sleep, woke me up in the middle of the night, Bruno, Valérie, Esther, Michel, Isabelle. And now they are alive, yes, they won.

This can be disturbing about the novelist; he has the power, a power that is normally the preserve of God, to give life.

Lord Jim is alive.

Kirilov is alive (perhaps the most surprising example in all of literature, because he comes to life so quickly in a few short pages).

General Hulot is alive.*

And this is why actors, when they come face-to-face with a novelist, look at him so strangely; because they too try to give life to characters; they try with their own means, using their bodies, their faces. And they know, or they sense, that the novelist for his part, using different means, succeeds.

(Thinking about it, it is actresses who really look at me strangely; it’s perfectly understandable. When they haven’t tried, people always assume that it is more difficult to give life to a character of the opposite sex. In reality, I can tell you, that it doesn’t matter; the gender isn’t the issue.)

But in poetry it is not simply characters who come to life, it is words. They seem to be surrounded by a radioactive halo. They suddenly find their aura, their essential vibration.

Give a purer sense to the words of the tribe.

“Purity” is truly one of Mallarmé’s