Les lettres, Monsieur – A Pierre Michon Thread

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Serment_du_Jeu_de_Paume_-_Jacques-Louis_David.jpg

Michon's paragraphs swirl up in lists, descriptions, inventories, explanations, arguments, a congeries of associated matter, and then come back down to single sentences. The effect is very appealing.

oh that sounds very very in my zone.

Thanks v much for this thread! I read Small Lives last week and it blew me away, and also turned out to be a singular reading experience, because I slowly realized that the familiar place names were not a coincidence, and the whole book is set within a few miles of where my parents live, in small villages that I've been going to for over 30 years.

How stories are handed down, created, forged, recovered, and create real meaning and tangible impact on the land and lives as they go through this process.

I really need to read Les Onze. That opening quote in the OP is splendid.
I have excellent memories from Vies Minuscules, while I don't remember much from Rimbaud le Fils (though I read that in a plane, not the best).

This reminds me to add some more notes from Les Onze. It's a very curious book, not as strong as any of the others of his that I've read, but with an odd force and bravura to it. Creating entire histories is of course what fiction, or more emphatically what the novel does, and this is a very potent example of it... an entire reality, modulated and shaped by what Michon perceives to be the forces - not mystical or magical forces as such, but a mixture of aesthetic and hereditary and commercial influences operating in tectonic ways that have the equivalent force and mystery of the mystical or magical.

more long posts. sorry.

Was lending Les Onze out and although I've forgotten a lot of the notes I wanted to put down, there were a couple of things I just wanted to put a pin in here.

There's a curious force at play, to which Michon... or the curious, garrulous narrator, whose agenda is never quite clear... only refers twice to my recollection. It's first captured near the beginning, where Michon is assembling the painter Corontin out of fragments, glimpses in artworks, moments in history. He's caught him initially in the frescos of Tiepolo (the 'magician' Tiepolo) at Würzburg, 'brought over' from Venice in Tiepolo's 'great Mozartian cloak' to appear as a pageboy in the wedding procession of Frederick Barbarossa.

The narrator:

But time is pressing me to rejoin the other, the grim, ageless man who resembles the cobbler Simon – so I will not listen to those Germanic sirens; nor the others, the more tuneful, higher, Venetian ones, the siren Venice herself who in 1750 was like that beautiful young girl our grandmothers spoke of, whom they all had known, who was here below like an apparition of new, insatiable joy,, who had danced all night, who danced on, and who in the morning, having drunk in one draft a tall glass of cold water, had fallen dead. No, no Venice, no young women, no romance; because all that, youth fairness, wine of magic, Mozartian cloak, Giambattista Tiepolo the father with his four continents under the cloak, all those moving, living forms mean nothing more than this, tossed out to end up in a painting that repudiates them, exalts them, bludgeons them, weeps for that devastation and inordinately delights in it, eleven times, through eleven stations of the flesh, eleven stations of wool, silk, felt, elevent forms of men; all that makes sense and is spelled out clearly only in the page of darkness, The Eleven

You certainly want that last bit in the original French:

... onze fois, à travers onze stations de chair, onze stations de drap, de soie, de feutre, onze formes d'hommes; tout cela ne prend sense et n'est écrit en clair que dans la page de ténèbres, Les Onze

What are these sirens though? What's going on here? Michon analyses the mechanisms of my which history is transferred, how it's paid for, how it's transacted, and how art is part of that transaction. Although Michon has plucked Corontin out of a moment in history, in art history, he, or the slightly feverish narrator, throws up their hands to block out the romantic, or the nostalgic perhaps. This is done to reassert the belligerent and matter-of-fact, 'incontrovertible' (as Michon says) reality of the painting, Les Onze, a full stop to this book, the only thing that truly coheres the event in this narrative.

Those grandmothers telling those stories about the young woman that died after dancing all night... In Vies Miniscules the stories that wrap around objects and people, that are passed down as an inheritance, have complex influence. In Nine Passages on the Causses (see above itt), where monastic chicanery, local power politics, and the guesses of scribes create stories that are passed on and down through history, mutating at the service of the tellers and the listeners, yet always retaining something resistant to that service, that mutation.

Later, detailing the family background of the painter Corentin, in the Loire valley, these forces appear again.

I wonder, Sir, if it is really useful to tell you all this, these family histories and these noble ancestries, so prized by our era; if it is necessary to go back so far, to these pale existences that are only hearsay after all, hypothetical causes, when for two hundred years, before our eyes, we have had the indubitable existence of _The Eleven_, that definite block of existence, irrefutable, unchanging, the solid effect that does perfectly well without causes and that would do perfectly well, too, without my commentary. They are sirens, still singing in Combleux on that Loire shore in the flights of herons, as they sang in Venice and Würzburg, only more mezza voce, the role of the maestro no longer played by Tiepolo, with his spirits of the air, but by a savage old man with his battalions of Limousin Calibans. They call to us with all their might, mezza voce. They circle over the river, over the dredgers' pulley, and we stay there, heads raised, listening to their circular song as if it were the inextricable story of the world itself that they were revealing to us. They beat the Loire sands, they tell stories as naturally as washerwomen beat their laundry, they trace signs in the air, let them drop to the water and relaunch them, and that great meaningful gesture they make suddenly with the flight of a gray heron skimming over the reeds, can you read it? These sirens prefer signs in the air to the tangible stretchers and tangible painted surface, four by three meters, called The Eleven. They want to prevent me from speaking of The Eleven, they turn my ear toward the din of their washing, the old clothes of two poor dead girls that they beat in the Loire like washerwomen beat their sheets. Ah Sir, you have to be clever to resist them. Because they tell stories, Sir, and so do we.

(I wish I had chosen 'Because they tell stories, Sir, and so do we' as the tag line for this thread). Again, I'm curious about this anti-historical, seductive force and its power in Michon's writing. It almost feels like, although immanent in the Loire landscape, it is in fact a force with which Michon battles in his writing. He truffles out, and is ruthless towards, the elements that make intellectual history and spiritual experience *tangible*. Of course, those elements in themselves have a paradoxical ontology, or to put it another way, 'they tell stories, Sir, and so do we'.

The second element I wanted to capture and put a pin in, before I relinquish the book temporarily, was the question of negritude. Of course, negritude as a concept, as an intellectual movement, is highly significant in French cultural history. Here Michon uses it as a concept to capture the experience of Limousin labour that landed Loire wealth used to dredge and fortify the river. This made me a bit jumpy when I was reading it, but I don't know enough about that period of French history, or this specific moment, to be able to say whether the application of negritude to Limousin labour is justified. My instinct says not – in fact I can't see how it could be unless they were actually black slaves – and I meant to return to it, although my limited googling didn't really find anything to support its use here.

Part of what he's doing, as with his _Abbés_ stories, is to show what comes out of hard labour transforming the land, of being knee deep in muck and sludge, and what comes out of that labour, how it turns into gold, into love and marriage, and envy, and art. The relation of clay to fire, a cthonic inheritance to history and culture; again, that *tangible* elemental force behind what we see in the Louvre behind the bulletproof glass. If his use of 'negritude' here is purely to form another version of things being spelled clearly only on 'the page of darkness' (and I don't say it is that, but I suppose it might be)... that I think that would be in poor taste and badly misjudged.

But as I say, there's very little to go off here, especially if you're as ignorant as I am about the detail, so I will hold my judgment until I can do a bit more reading.

Really enjoying The Eleven. Art making at a proximity to power.

It reminded me of Hermann Broch's 'The Death of Virgil' at times (both in subject and in the shape of much of the prose).