Catherine Millet gives impetus to life
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“Beginnings”, by Catherine Millet, Flammarion, 316 p., €20, digital €15.
In 2014, after an article in the “World of Books” on A dream childhood (Flammarion), where Catherine Millet retraces her younger years, a reader had sent me an angry letter. How do you expect people to take you seriously, he protested, if you use the expression “masterpiece” all the time, as you do to praise the latest Millet? To this reader, I replied that he was right, this word should not be used lightly. It was so true, I argued, that since I started at the paper fifteen years ago I had never used it.
It will be understood that the sequence ofA dream childhoodwhich has just been published under the title Beginnings, could have aroused some expectation. If our reader has remained faithful to the newspaper (may he be thanked for it), let us reassure him: we will not speak here of a masterpiece. Besides, it could not be otherwise. What magnified A dream childhood, it was the way in which the author reconstructed the inner world of the baby: with tact and sensitivity, she showed how the child stuck to appearances before life put distances between his conscience and things. When opens Beginnings, time has passed, reality is already an obstacle, society imposes its constraints. A certain carelessness has been lost.
Aesthetic ecstasy, erotic abandonment
But, precisely, what makes this new book overwhelming is that it clings to the previous one, like an attempt to perpetuate the poetic bubble specific to childhood. He tells how Catherine Millet wanted to stay connected, despite the passage of time, to this primordial tranquillity. Enlarging childhood to the extent of its destiny, that is one of the definitions of holiness. At the boss of the magazine Art Presswhose notoriety goes beyond borders since she published The Sex Life of Catherine M. (Seuil, 2001), such a vocation was fulfilled thanks to two experiences which tended to merge: aesthetic ecstasy, erotic abandonment.
But what strikes you first, on reading these Beginningsthis is the insistence with which Catherine Millet summons the image of early childhood to retrace her beginnings in the world of art galleries and libertinism, during the 1960s. Barely arrived in her Parisian home, I shows him these pages which draw a self-portrait of the author as an infant, even as a fetus. ” Ooh La La, she exclaims, you’re going to knock me out of my position as an art critic, a specialist in lots of things that people don’t understand! They’re going to be like, “Oh, that girl who writes so authoritatively about artwork, she’s actually a big retarded baby.” »
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