Chapter 103: Limitless Love for Language

The Parisian home of French writer Gerard Macé flows from wall to wall like one of his texts: periods and geographies merge, art forms, books, and faraway crafts meet at an angle; the esthete and the ethnographer collaborate throughout. The result is not chaos but a singular clarity, a language all its own.

Gerard Macé is 76. Reading him is one of the most exhilarating experiences possible in contemporary French. Describing his writing is work for a graceful contortionist. Essays that are simultaneously poems, written by an erudite with a passion for humble details, where historical facts marry memory and fiction, all revolving around a core both concrete and dreamlike. His editors call him “an archeologist of imagination”, which gives an inkling of his fascination with everything from the Baroque to African and Asian cultures. The study of languages themselves accompanies his curiosity: Italian, Japanese, and Chinese are the tip of the iceberg of his love for words both spoken and written. His is in search for a common country that binds all of those who seek to express themselves through stories.

When you evoke your love for language, the starting point is often your grandparents. At various points, you mention your grandmother, who was illiterate, and to whom you’ve dedicated one of your poetry collections. Why is this important to you?

Because of that passage from a world without writing and without reading, in my grandmother’s case, to a literate world. It was while writing that I realized that I had experienced this. In writing, especially if it has a poetic virtue, you don't know what you're going to write in advance: you discover what mattered and yet was unknown to you beforehand.

So it was that while writing I noticed the importance to me of this passage from an oral world, or an illiterate world, to a literate world. I learned pretty well in school, yet it was a rupture compared to my family, who had not studied at all. Not an unfortunate one, insofar as my parents wanted me to study. It’s afterward, while writing about it, that I realized that there was something very potent there, which could have weighed on me, and which may explain my interest in oral cultures, in ethnographic accounts, in anthropology in general. I think that's where my interest in language itself comes from.

For me, if you want literature to speak to someone else, it must not be solely a personal story, contrary to what is done a lot today. And at the same time, to write is to take upon oneself the thwarted history and words of those who have gone before us. I believe in that very much. We speak for others too; we don't speak only for ourselves. We speak by proxy, we write by proxy. We write for all those who could not. That's my story, anyway.

Moving from family to a larger belonging, you once wrote, "There is another community than that of soil or blood, the community of people who remember the same stories.” It’s something we tend to forget. How did you have the intuition of this affiliation?

I think that it owes a lot to my reading of ethnographic stories, and then to my love of mythology as well. We share a lot of mythology, even if it's degraded, it’s lying around in our heads, and not only those of learned people. These stories are all over the world and there are many interested in them, who are professional readers or writers, but others too. And I think that all of this forms a community in today's world, which is very important: otherwise we have communities that are based solely on heredity, on genealogy, on identity in the worst sense of the word.

Stories, all of a sudden, allow us to recognize one another: for me, that is the miracle of literature. There is something in common that is established between people who do not know each other. It is the extraordinary merit of literature and of great texts and great stories. Whether it is Greek mythology or the Trojan War, Zen stories in Japan, or Chinese legends. I'm ready to accept all of this as if it were well known to me. It makes a foreign culture familiar.

I don't disavow anything that I have experienced or that has also shaped my sensibility. At the same time, I do not limit myself to that. It has led me to other things. I believe that the best we can do, from the starting point of what we are or what we have lived, is to widen the range, not abstractly but with sensitivity, to broaden in a sensible and intellectual manner.

It's not just reading; it's writing too. The two go together. It is the experience of finding oneself by no longer being oneself, that is to say, without narcissism; to broaden one's field both real and imaginary, to make the most of the experience of others while broadening one's own.

When I don't write, I read less. It didn't happen to me very often, but for a while now I've been reading less and the world around me holds less interest. Reading and writing are like a magnet, which attracts particles or dust from the surrounding world and makes them shine. Without it reality is less intense, less carnal too, less sensual or sensory.

Maybe there's another aspect that I forgot: early on, it's a way of isolating oneself. Behind the book, we are at peace. I don't know what else I could have done apart from this. Since the age of ten or so, I've always wanted to be a writer. I never considered anything else. Never. Ever since then, I read books, and then sometimes I added a chapter or I tried to continue the story, to add to it. The first significant thing that I sought to express was leaving the childhood home in Saint-Denis, a specific place left behind, the door closed, knowing that we won't go back there, what do I have to say? 

Another episode, which I remember well, was my grandfather's stories of WWI. I said to myself, “He's going to die and no one will hear them.” I didn't have a tape recorder at the time, so I started writing down a few pages. And it was there I realized that literature wasn’t that at all, that merely recording a testimony didn’t amount to literature, because it was very poor compared to what I had actually heard. My grandfather was deaf, which gave him that distinctive tone of voice, the time was the evening and we were in the country: it was my Iliad. Whereas if I simply wrote down what he had said to me, it amounted to nothing at all: all its riches had evaporated. That was a great lesson.

Languages, both oral and written and from different geographies have been at the center of your curiosity. And then there's another language, your own, the personal language which you have built up over the years. You once said, "A beautiful book is never written in a neutral or average language, its language belongs to its author."

For me, what is sometimes called style is not something that can be worked on. It's something that is a voice and therefore a bit innate. The term is probably improper because we are not born with it, but it is a mixture of sounds heard, of phrasing, of intonation, of more academic learning; it is a mixture of all that.

There are sentences that I couldn't write differently than how I wrote them. There is a kind of constraint, a phonetic, rhythmic, and often-musical constraint. At the same time, the meaning has to match all this, which is to say that sound and meaning have to be absolutely and inextricably mixed. Otherwise, all the stylistic effects, the sleights of hand, do not interest me much. It's brilliant, but it doesn't interest me. What is admirable in Proust, for example, is that it is at the same time deep, personal, and sensual and it’s a sentence that belongs only to him. An author is someone who can be recognized like you would a composer. There is a personal music every time.

First comes a lot of mental work. I write at the very last moment, which now happens on the keyboard and the computer. Before that my work is essentially mental. My memory still works, a little less well, but in the past I had whole pieces, whole paragraphs that I knew by heart and that I worked on in my mind, as they sought meaning. Writing came only afterward. 

In writing I’m concerned with concision, with economy. Any form of writing that is particularly demonstrative or discursive is not for me. I'm not interested in point-to-point reasoning. It does nothing for me. So I have often opposed writing and transcribing. To transcribe is to write as well as possible what we already know, what we already have in mind, and which is clear.

What I call writing is drilling, groping, like the insect in the wood: thrusting until you find open air. That’s something different; it’s the very definition of poetic writing. Poetry for me – as I practice it in any case – is not only a collection of poems. I try to treat poetically things also of an ethnographic, anthropological, or linguistic nature.

That's what's beautiful about writing: things that were there yet invisible suddenly come to light. That's what I loved in photography as well. In the developing bath where you plunge it, the image that slowly forms was already there. Otherwise, it would not appear. My writing resembles this: the image appears blurry at first and then comes into focus.

What feeds all this is one part pleasure and one part necessity. It has made my life what it is, and my life is better for it. It’s also a necessity for me because it makes reality that much richer. Otherwise it is duller, poorer, and makes less sense.

Photo: Courtesy of Gerard Macé