Literature

Pure intimacy

5 reading minutes

written by Arthur Billerey · June 30, 2020 · 0 comment

A good time, an ordeal, or just thinking that you suddenly feel like you're really living your life. Watching the changing color of the sky, the sun flooding Damascus one afternoon. Signing books in Vevey with Chappaz, Corinna Bille and Georges Borgeaud. Load up two cows and three calves for butchery and shake the butcher's firm hand. Promising, desperately promising newspaper articles. Shitting under an olive tree in the southern Peloponnese. Measuring time by putting logs on the fire. Tucking your head into your shoulders and feeling the rain on your forehead. In other words, to pass and only pass on this Earth, scratching on the paper of a diary the weft of our comings and goings, the narration of our wanderings, the segment of our trajectories, the tale of our secret attractions and that of our disgusts - this is what this special issue of the magazine Literary Moments, which highlights moments in the lives of Swiss diarists over more than three centuries, from Henri-Frédéric Amiel to Douna Loup.

Récemment, un éditeur m’a dit que cinq pour cent des lecteurs lisaient la préface d’un livre. Pour être à contre-courant, parlons de la préface avant de plonger tête la première dans la vie des autres. D’emblée, le lecteur qui ouvrira ce livre sera informé par Jean François Duval du processus éditorial de ce numéro. Ce qui est très utile, et payant, pour tous les curieux qui veulent connaître l’élaboration d’un tel chantier, les motivations à l’origine du projet ainsi que les doutes rencontrés en chemin. De la sempiternelle question qui hante encore d’irréductibles gaulois du milieu du livre suisse: «Qu’est-ce qu’une littérature romande à l’heure où la jeune littérature romande est de plus en plus “métissée et polyphonique”?» à la dénomination du journal intime lui-même: «Faut-il l’appeler journal? Feuillets? Notes?» Une question cardinale sort du lot de cette aventure: «Qu’est-ce qui relève réellement de l’intime?» Et pour tenter d’aller plus loin, on pourrait se demander qui se cache derrière les courbes de telle ou telle plume. Ou ce qu’il est important de narrer, en tant que diariste, de la course folle de nos atomes. A quelle fréquence s’évertuer, le soir ou le matin, à noircir un cahier pour y fixer le temps qu’il fait, une rencontre, ou allez savoir, l’accident du jour?

Once you've thrown these questions on the fire, you'll have the opportunity to dive headfirst into several intimacies. In Henri-Frédéric Amiel's immense diary, in Monique Saint-Hélier's emotional journal, in René Groebli's loving photo diary or in Corinne Desarzens' whirlwind journal. And what's so charming, along with the intimate, is the gaze. The way these diarists look at their times and the hazards that run through them. Like the diurnal movements of the sky. Like that storm on Sunday September 12, 1869, in Charnex:

«(Five minutes later.) Complete invasion, only one corner remains clear, the entrance to the Valais... Here it is extinguished. The limits of heaven and earth have disappeared. I can believe I'm in a balloon. Yet the rain is soft and soulful. The threat was more terrible than the blow. Even the storm retains a kind of musical suavity and paternal benignity. The lion's paw is velvety. Perhaps this gentleness is the character of autumn? September no longer has the fury of July. Age attenuates, tempers, softens the rages of another season. The elements also seem to become more self-controlled and suppress their savage outbursts.»

Plusieurs diaristes réunis, c’est forcément une bouquet de voix, de personnalités, d’égo et d’impressions. Chacun a sa perception des choses humaines. Il y aura donc fatalement des journaux qui plairont, d’autres qui rebuteront, d’autres qui réveillent. Si certains s’inscrivent dans une histoire littéraire commune, partagée comme le pain, c’est le cas du poète Alexandre Voisard qui doit répondre à Alain Bosquet lui posant la question de définir (en moins de dix mots) sa poésie. Si certains partent de l’individu pour aller au-delà, le franchir, le dépasser pour finalement rejoindre une mécanique d’ensemble, universelle et quasi astrale, en parlant des autres, du temps qu’il fait, de la découverte d’un nouveau livre, etc.

If some naturally blacken the paper to invent, to write a piece of narrative in a corner, to compose a poem to fix an episode of the day or better, to speak of the reality of existing, as is the case with this poem by Jérôme Meizoz at the end of the review, others, on the contrary, turn in circles and only follow the centrifugal movement of their own acceleration, constantly returning to themselves, this only point of departure and arrival, without ever reaching anyone. Still others tell their own stories, tell them a little, and make a few confessions, as is the case with the Dolce Vita by Roland Jaccard, who talks about his work, lost flower girls, his neuralgia, his writing - in short, his daily life in the eighties.

To each his own newspaper. To each his own voice and style. For the diarists featured in this issue undeniably have a literary verve, a known and recognized quality of writing that makes this special issue a bedside book from which to pick and choose, at random, such an attentive and singular look at the passing days. And for those who, after all these varied diaries, after all these introspections, want to read something else and no longer expect anything from the intimate, there's still Michel Tournier and his Diary, à lire sans modération, pleinement tourné vers l’extérieur au moyen d’une écriture du dehors.

«Boxing
The rest is reality
and you
you are fiction
the mirror told you this morning.
At the time
you would have gladly
broken
but even
bloody fingers,
boxer,
it would not be enough to prove
that you exist»

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