Reims is the second volume of an autobiographical tetralogy, In the land of still childhood. The first volume, Orléans, described a family nightmare. The second continues it, this time in a business school.
We didn’t expect it: Yann Moixwe had read two novels, Jubilations towards the sky et Anissa Corto – and we took this bad joke for what it is: a pretext for artificial lyricism. Reimsit is exactly the opposite: this confession, both truthful and pathetic, of a young man haunted by self-hatred, sexual frustration and failure, is delivered with unusual force.
Yann Moix ©Arnaud Meyer / Leextra / Éditions Grasset
The Sordid Brothers
Moix has just failed the competitive exams for major scientific schools; he therefore finds himself at Sup de Co Reims. He judges the school mediocre; and he sees himself as defeated, mired in the provinces while he dreamed of Paris: “Reims reminded me of a dry cake. The streets were deserted. Lifeless avenues, plunged into fatigue, stretched into infinity. The avenues were crying. The trees were dying. The passers-by looked like ghosts; the cars drove silently, installed in death. […] Reims lived up to its reputation for war and ruins. »
With a few students as shady, depressed and obsessed as him, he forms a putrid little cluster, each grain of which will produce bad wine. The portraits of these woodlice are not unworthy of Otto Dix, like this Garabédian, stuttering, stocky, enhanced by a look oscillating “between that of a serial killer and that of a lost doe”. Or this Gillon, who runs away from classes, gets up when day falls, spends his nights going around in circles, getting drunk and masturbating: “He immerses himself[ait] in the press. Addicted to the news, he needed to know everything in a timely manner. His transistor was on day and night. He waited for the news flashes by stamping his feet, as if the world were a suspense series, with its actors, its twists and turns, its happy endings, its tragic hiccups. » Or this Caillette, a cheapskate incapable of throwing away: “His trash filled condensed milk packaging boxes which he stacked along the wall. The smell in the single room was pestilential. An exhalation of dead shrimp ravaged the atmosphere. He kept everything. An antique copy of Figaro was immediately archived, a mailbox leaflet piously put aside on the pretext that it would later serve as a “draft”. Caillette was amassing; he hoarded. He was making money. »
Simplistic Phrères
In the midst of these sordid brothers, Yann Moix looks for hope among the simplistic Phrères, those of the Great Game: René Daumal, Roger Vailland, and perhaps especially Roger Gilbert-Lecomte – who appears in the epigraph: “I was alone like a god, – to burst with tears” –, or other Rémois, Caillois and Bataille. Everything is not finished, therefore: there are still the books.
There is laughter, too, always directed against oneself. Questioned, in an oral competition, on the expression “I am”, Moix brilliantly discusses, for twenty minutes, on “being” in Heidegger: “Distinguishing the two periods, clearly separated by this hiatus which constituted the Kehre, I was luminous, precise – dense. » The examiners’ judgment is final: “You have nothing to tell us about “I am” in the sense of “follow”? »
Finally, after three years of this life of a cellar black man, here is Paris, where he has not finished with self-hatred…
Yann Moix did not convince us as a novelist; as an autobiographer, he surprises and moves us. Perhaps, moreover, he excels too much in autobiography to succeed in the novel. Still, he found his purpose, his form, his ideal in the first. What could he compose, now that he has finished his tetralogy, that could achieve such force? We are curious to find out.
Literature
2024-03-11 19:59:32
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