Faced with the enormity of life

En revenant sur la dévotion viscérale, quelques mots du trésor britannique BS Johnson, intégré (dans le récit, pas dehors, c'est important) en postface dans les dernières pages de son deuxième roman de 1964, Albert Angelo, histoire de son héros éponyme, architect manqué en anglais dans le texte, enseignant médiocre, sur la sienne, de dévotion: on trouvera difficilement plus éclairant et plus réjouissant sur la valeur de l'expérimentation, sur la page, dans les flux, pour transporter, transmettre une expérience plus riche, plus juste, plus vibrante du réel, des êtres, ou plutôt, comme il écrit, de la vie, de "ma vie". Ce qui m'émeut le plus, je crois, c'est la manière dont Johnson explique, en son nom, comment, en fait, il procède avec son bardaf d'expérimentations luminescentes, transparentes (il en accumule beaucoup, beaucoup dans ce premier roman, des passages du bâton de la narration incessants jusqu'au trou dans la page) plus encore que par devoir, parce qu'il n'a pas le choix, quitte à dissoudre son autorité d'auteur, jusqu'à tester la patience de son imprimeur et les finances de son éditeur;
ce qu'il dit:

"-Im trying to say something not tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth about me about my experience about my truth about my truth to reality about sitting here writing looking out across Claremont Square trying to say something about the writing and nothing being an answer to the loneliness to the lack of loving

-look then I'm

-again for what is writing if not truth my truthtelling truth to experience to my experience and if I start falsifying in telling stories then I move away from the truth of my truth which is not good oh certainly not good by any manner of

-so it's nothing

-look, I'm trying to tell you something of what I feel about being a poet in a world where only poets care anything real about poetry, through the objective correlative of an architect who has to earn his leaving as a teacher.
this device you cannot have failed to see creaking, illfitting at many places, many places, for architects manqués can earn livings very nearly connected with their art, and no poet has ever lived by his poetry, and architecture has a functional aspect quite lacking in poetry, and, simply, architecture is just not poetry.

(...)
_(The poetry) Is about the fragmentariness of life, too, attempts to reproduce the moment-to-moment fragmentariness of life, my life, and to echo it in technique, the fragmentariness, a collafe made of the fragments of my own life, the poor odds and sods, the bric-à-brac, a thing composed of, then.

-Tell me a story, tell me a story. The infants.

(...)
-And also to echo the complexity of life, reproduce some of the complexity of selves which I contain within me, contradictory and gross as they are: childish, some will call it, peeing in the rainfall gauge, yes, but sometimes I am childish, very, so are we all, it's part of the complexity I'm trying to reproduce, exorcise.

-Faced with the enormous detail, vitality, size, of this complexity, of life, there is a great temptation for a writer to impose his own pattern, an arbitrary pattern which must falsify, cannot do anything other than falsify; or he invents, which is pure lying. Looking back and imposing a pattern to come to terms with the past must be avoided. Lies, lies, lies. Secondbest at best, for other writers, to do them a favour, to give them the benefit of innumerable doubts.

-Faced with the enormity of life, all I can do is to present a paradigm of truth to reality as I see it: and there's the difficulty: for Albert defecates for instance only once during the whole of this book: what sort of paradigm of the truth is that?

-Further, since each reader brings to each word his own however slightly different idiosyncratic meaning, how can I be expected to make my own-but you must be tired.

(...)

-And another of my aim is didactic: the novel must be a vehicle for conveying truth, and to this end every device and technique of the printer's art should be at the the command of the writer: hence the future-seeing hiles, for instance, as much to draw attention to the possibilities as to make my point about death and poetry.

-A page is an area on which I may place any signs I consider to communicate most nearly what I have to convey; therefore I employ, within the pocket of my publisher and the patience of my printer, typographical techniques beyond the arbitrary and constricting limits of the conventional novel. To dismiss such techniques as gimmicks, or to refuse to take them seriously, is crassly to miss the point.

(...)
- Go elsewhere for their lies. Life is not like that, is just not like that.

-But even I (even I!) would not leave such a mess, such a mess, so many loose ends, clear up the mess, bury the loose ends, the lot.... (Albert Angelo, "Disintegration", 167)

Evidemment, quatre décades plus tard, croyez ou non l'actualité, mais le débat n'a pas refroidi d'un fahrenheit, et on est toujours ébahi d'entendre des voix s'élever contre les parti pris dévoués, engagés dans ce qu'imposent leurs histoires, de certains écrivains amoureux de leur oeuvre - et le pire c'est qu'on n'ose plus s'attaquer aux machineries, mais aux horizons, soit disant vains qu'ils desservent.