le tiers livre, web & littérature

Daewoo « French Voices Award 2016 »

François Bon — 2017-02-28T07:20:02Z

• Daewoo vient de paraître en Argentine, dans une traduction de Sol Gil et Nicolás Gómez, chez l'éditeur EXTREmCONTEMPORÁNEO. Suis bien sûr très fier, et aussi qu'ils m'aient transmis quelques exemplaires de ce beau livre (Mécanique est aussi paru au Mexique et en Argentine, mais j'ai jamais reçu). D'où cet échange, dont j'ai écrit les réponses directement en anglais (excuses d'avance) avec Milena Heinrich, de Telam News Agency.

• Mais bonne nouvelle transmise il y a quelques jours sur mon Facebook, l'attribution du prix French Voices 2016 à l'éditeur de la Nouvelle-Orleans, Bill Lanvender, Lavender Ink / Dialogos, et à la traductrice Youna Kwak (poète elle-même, et j'aimerais tant lui rendre la pareille...) pour le livre à paraître début 2019. Raison de plus de mettre en ligne et échange.

About Daewoo as a novel – interview with Milena Heinrich

1) At the beginning of the book explain why to call "Daewoo" as a novel and say that it is the attempt to reconstruct an experience. How did the reconstruction of this experience operate from the literary point of view ? Does that element imply a certain degree of fiction ? Why argue that it is a novel ? And more specifically : how did "Daewoo" come about ?

It's a novel because it's essentially built at my table, with a computer and an Internet access. I don't use categories as fiction or non-fiction : writing is an experience by itself, and its main stuff is what we do with it in our own brain. The chosen form, a diary and interviews, are both fictional, used because they create a strong illusion of reality.

2) It says that "if the workers no longer have their place anywhere, let the novel be memory." How do you think literature and memory are articulated ? Does literature have the power to officiate or guarantee memory ? Does it give you some kind of role in that regard ?

Sure, in all ages, the function of narratives and stories deal with memory, and arts of the memory. But the task of the writer stays subjective. We don't choose what has to join into, or stay in the collective memory. Just do our own job, which is to obey. The law is the reality, and the law is the syntax and composition.

3) The novel is published in Argentina twelve years after its publication in France. In the light of the passing of time, what does it represent in Daewoo ?

No idea about that. This book has been written as a live inquiry. But the status of the work (as a concept) remains strongly and permanently as an issue in our society, a permanent look from the society on or about itself. We are dealing today about a society without work, this is somewhat new, but a new face of the same old question. Factories closed or deserted, or simply demolished, are a permanent and sad event nowadays too.

4) We speak of novel but "Daewoo" also seems a chronicle on capitalism, the consequences of the economic order, the emotions (the anguish of those workers), the work, the working class... And it can also be read as an ethnography that recovers the voice and gestures of its protagonists and tries to disarm a collective history to tell it as a kaleidoscope. I wonder then motivated by the reading of the book : what is a testimony ? What is a testimony ?

I don't pretend to any testimony. My work is to deal with reality. Which is a concept of high complexity and a plurality of dimensions. What concerns money, power games, economic flows, territorial policies are some of these dimensions. Which are partly abstract and invisible too. Balzac and Karl Marx have educated us in this way. The field of literature can't be reduced to nice stories between nice fellows.

5) If we think of it as an ethnography, in which the researcher implies his field, "Daewoo" is the expression of a researcher who is involved with his subjects of study. What does Daewoo mean to you ? (I think of some passages of the narrator that talk about their own feelings of anguish / sadness). And in this case, does Bon narrator dissociates with the more personal Bon, who was there listening and collecting the words of those women ?

That the narrator is a part of his narrative, we learn that primarily by Marcel Proust. The narrator, as the writing of the inquiry itself, is obviously one of the gearwheels in the novel mechanism. Other questions are old moons. In the first beginning, it's not a planned book : this social drama, the sacrifice of a modern and viable factory, established in a valley dominated by the ruins of steel industry, was incredibly documented. This is a new fact : how the reality produces it own documentation, it hasn't ceased to increase these last years. Literature, as a gesture, doesn't have to invent this documentation, but to knock it over, to find again a little germ of the oldest human story. We had first decided to produce a theater performance, a truck, some benches, and to play it with four actresses in this valley itself. To play the existing facts, statements, words taken from this compact and massive documentation during the original struggle of these women. My first file in my computer has been made of my own notes about this performance in progress (which we have done, with Charles Tordjman as director, at Avignon festival, and a large tour, obtaining a Moliere prize). The most difficult event has been the day, before the coffee machine of the Nancy's dramatic center, when I told Charles : “These notes are a book by themselves, I've to handle them as a story.” I refused all this time to produce the text of the play by itself : the play is included in the book as an echo. Fictional interview of a character is a classical tool if you need an actor to talk right or acurate. In another field, some pure datas may appear as a specific field for imaginary. Another very disturbing fact came at the publication, once confronted to the real persons, which has been out of reach for us before : when you hear real stories that are already in your book, but you didn't know them.

(6) It is a fragmented book, made up of pieces, with different genres. How did you think the structure of the novel ? Does it respond to an attempt to renew literary genres ?

Nothing new here. A symphonic and fragmental composition, there are dozens of books, Proust included, to show us the way. Henri Michaux for exemple (which has often traveled in Argentina, and met Borges in 1935, both of them perfectly unknown). The use of the dialogue comes mostly from Nathalie Sarraute. But, in a totally different sense, what we've learned about narrative is that the story is firstly the story of the narrative by itself. The linear composition is directly my own path to take a grip on a fragment of a very complex, even if limited, and ephemeral reality. The main question in this book has been what deals with time and temporality. For example, during two years (even if it's a permanent tentation), the use of violence to answer another violence. Destroying your working tools, confining your boss. Another question is the change of the society by itself. Internet was at his beginning when I achieved this work, it was so easy to hack a lot of archives. What relies work to other components of the society : education, police, illicit economy ? How a society deals with suicidal (the suicidal recalled in the book has a real source), or depression caused by a decision taken at the other end of the world, only due to financial approach. What signification takes the end of a factory when the use of it productions remains with a dimension of desire (television set) or utility (microwave owen) ? What does it mean for a young woman alone with his child, to find a new job as dog cleaner ?

7) In reference to the previous question, and at the risk of sounding excessively broad, what is literature for you ? What do you think about when you think of literature ?

Literature, for me, as the simplest view, is language as reflection. Maurice Blanchot learned us that way. It's not about what you think. It's about how you sing and dance in the fire of reality. Daewoo has been my first book written essentially wit Internet tools. If I learned something for this book, which has been, with the enquiry and the theater adventure, a very tough period of my life, it's how you permanently have to walk through the real, face it, make words and sentences whose the unique law is this reality. The experience of web literature, which is my main path today, takes his roots in what this book changed for me then.

in english | Daewoo, a novel, how and why

François Bon — 2013-12-09T10:30:00Z

Après la publication de Daewoo, en septembre 2004, Guy Walter, directeur de la Vill Gillet à Lyon, avait rassemblé plusieurs auteurs dans une publication bilingue à direction du public américain, incluant une présentation inédite du livre par l'auteur, et un extrait.

Les voici en ligne, à l'attention des visiteurs anglophones de passage. Je lirai d'ailleurs la version française de cet extrait samedi 4 septembre, à Leicester, lors du colloque Social divisions in France and francophone world.

Photographies : déménagement de l'usine Daewoo à Fameck, novembre 2003.

François Bon | Daewoo, an introduction

One of our debts to American literature is a short fragment from William Faulkner (to the effect that “my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it”). It makes us understand that the chief difficulty is to find that little postage stamp, to recognize and accept it, before digging down to write.

I've always loved to read. Maybe it's connected with having been nearsighted as a child and living in a tiny village with the sea for horizon. A novel is a dream, which reveals an otherwise inaccessible world.

I always try to have a project on the side. To work on my adolscence and the 1960s, I spent years putting together a biography of the Rolling Stones. Right now, I'm working on the 1970s, and some American friends are helping me trace the career of Led Zeppelin in your country.

If we chose our dream literature ourselves, it would fall flat. “Kill your darlings,” Faulkner also said. Twenty years after my first book, I find myself the author of a series of books that I did not choose to write. Prison. Mécanique. C'était toute une vie. In each case there was a death to honor—to be faced, because otherwise living becomes impossible, or at any rate it becomes impossible to write around the absence.

This was the case with Daewoo, very much so. First came the layoffs, then the sudden closing of the plant, and then I happened to read a couple of sentences in a newspaper, sentences pregnant with silence : “It made me crawl into a shell. I was on tranquillizers for months.” And that was it. You can't go and ask the worker who uttered those sentences what they meant for her love life, her dreams, her insomnia, the empty hours of her day. They weigh on us, those few words, like dead weight, and our job is to give them their full amplitude, to put into them what we would put into them if it were a question of our own nights, our own children, our own lives. And then there are the other words that go along with these, the words of the homogenized language, the language of money, of the chamber of commerce, of industry : “Here as in other, similar towns, one finds an increase in the rate of suicide and divorce, as well as in the number of cancer cases.”

My friend Charles Tordjman, the director, and I borrowed a car from his theater and went to see for ourselves. Because the factory was so close. Because the invisible world had come knocking at our door. We bluffed our way into the empty factory. The assembly line was wrapped in plastic, like one of Christo's art objects. All the signs, names, and faces were gone. When I returned a few weeks later, a truck with a crane was lifting the big sign with the name of the factory off the roof and putting it down on another truck, which hauled it away. To where ? That day I walked to a supermarket near the plant. bought a large notebook, and sat down for three hours in the cafeteria to write down everything I'd seen and heard.

Not all that much, to tell the truth. It's a small town, a very small town, with its “Nails 2000” store (the year was 2003) and its “Future Driving School.” What to do ? Ask people what this upheaval meant to them ? No : write so as to extort from reality the symbolic violence that has been erased, rubbed out. I wrote in empty stairwells, in uninhabited apartment buildings. In hotel rooms. The full force of the violence had to be restored : I invented voices to get at what I didn't understand in the words—each preceded by an arbitrary phrase. I said I'd recorded them on a Sony MiniDisc.

It's literature's job to convey the symbolic violence that reality erases. That is also part of what William Faulkner taught us.

How's life ? (an excerpt)

When they invited us to be on How's Life ? our friends said, “Yeah, lucky you.”

And others said, “Like they're gonna care about your stupid stuff, they're gonna look down on you, you won't even see it coming …”

Three of us went. All expenses paid, supernice hotel. If I told you we weren't nervous, I'd be lying. Everybody polite : smiles, little pats on the arm. People to stick mikes on you, fix your hair, offer you orange juice and coffee. The rich guys, they were down the other corridor. With their own makeup, their own orange juice. That was the idea of the show : you weren't supposed to meet ahead of time.

Three against three, the moderator in the middle.

You've seen her on the tube a hundred times without really noticing. In person she's not as big as you might think. She talks to you, a couple of sentences you think are meant for you, but while you're thinking of how to answer, she's already onto somebody else, repeating the same thing. So that was the idea : the rich and the poor.

And guess what : we were the poor.

The word had just gotten out about the end of Daewoo. The first company plan, and our first occupation, when we held the guy hostage. So they called the union and said they'd rather have girls who weren't involved. Like, regular girls, you know ?

I'm in the union, but we told them I wasn't.

The rich guys were three men, and they picked young ones on purpose. One had never worked a day in his life because he didn't have to. “I could get used to that,” I said to the guy. On camera.

The TV people had shot a couple of short films. To show how things were where they lived, how things were where we live. Their kids getting driven to school in the car, you know, but like we're on foot because the school is the one you see from the apartment building : stuff like that. When they film you taking your kids to school with their hair all combed and dressed up nice, what's not to be proud of ? What difference does it make if three million people are watching or one : it's you, taking your kids to school.

They weren't about to show you the kind of rich people you read about in the papers, they didn't want that, it had to be rich people like you and me : so you see this guy coming home at night after his workout, and he pours himself a drink in a living room with a TV as big as a movie screen. And after that, in the other film, it was Evelyne's husband, and they'd asked him to fix himself a drink, his cocktail and three bottles in that bar he built himself. Yeah, go ahead and smile. He was nice, too, Evelyne's husband, he offered the film crew a drink.

And the rest, you know, it was all like that.

Fill up the old Renault at the supermarket in one, in the other some German car where you turn on the radio with the push of a button. That was for openers. Them sitting around on a patio, us milling around the factory lot in the morning at the starting whistle because nothing is going on inside the plant, they said because there were no supplies, but we went to work anyway just to make them pay us to the end.

After that I have no idea. It's a world where everything is shiny, the lights are very bright, and it's always straight ahead, no turning back.

Some of the questions you could expect : them with their nicely shaved cheeks, born with silver spoons in their mouths and not about to cough them up, and us, from another world.

What got to me, you know, wasn't the clothes or the glitz or anything, it was our faces, the difference you could see : that you carry so much baggage around with you, that says who you are and what you do.

They might have asked, I don't know, what would you do if you could live for three days the way they do, and vice versa. But no, they made us talk about cooking, and she wanted us to say things about our love life. Our habits, and like what we did in bed, why not ? The guy with the BMW, he was against marriage. That was their philosophy. We dreamed of going places, and the guys on the other side, they'd already been and were bored. And really they were all right, those guys, the girl from the show told them three times she would have preferred guys with claws, small-minded guys. We don't make our enemies.

She had us talk about what pissed us off. That we could do. We knew what got to us. They were more, like, noble : when you're not pissed off at your boss, you can get all high-minded and talk about how you hate dictators and stuff.

Like they were saying : see, those girls, they fit the part.

I felt damp and said to myself, You're sweating, don't let them see. I thought : my friends are watching, my mom's watching, I gotta get out of here.

When the three guys talked, they pointed the cameras at our faces to see what we were thinking, how we were reacting. They showed our legs, and you know what else ? the chain on my wrist and Josiane's rings. You didn't see the guys' ankles or whether they were listening when we talked. Or the smiles, or the whispers : the redhead, she's hot, no ?

What did she want, the girl from the show ? For us to all get up at once, three guys and three girls, and hug in front of everybody and say stuff like, We're sorry, we had the wrong idea about you, the world shouldn't be like that …

One of the guys explained that it was basically our fault, that you have to be ready to move, to go live in Nice or Germany, and in my head I was like smiling, for them life was so simple. Finally Josiane said we didn't give a damn about the money, we didn't care about eating or paying the rent either, what mattered was freedom and self-respect, but the girl didn't let her finish her sentence : she announced that next week there would be something or other about sexuality. We figued out that the three guys were planning to take the girl from the TV out to dinner (well, anyway, it was Josiane who figured it out, she went and took a look down the other corridor : Josiane always has an eye or an ear out), but we weren't invited.

Before going back to the hotel, we went out for a drink, three women, like grown-ups, in Paris : big deal, right ? The next day in the train, we didn't talk much.

You feel things because of who you are. You brood. The hard thing is time passing. All the simple things that used to be your life, the little fun things you bought yourself, something to wear, a movie.

With this in your head, that there's nothing certain about starting over.

You don't say that to anybody else.

The day after the show, I saw Sylvia and asked her what she thought. She hadn't watched, is what she told me.

Fine, going on TV to talk about Daewoo, to talk about who we are—what were we supposed to do, say no ?