Tiphaine Samoyault’s literary soap opera

“A human sum”, by Makenzy Orcel, Rivages, 624 p., €22, digital €17.

THE DEAD AND THE WORDS

Here they are, the miserable humans. And even all the misery of the world brought together in a single character, who speaks to us from death, from where life seems to become clearer but also enters into another, cyclical temporality, without beginning or end, when speech is flow, whirlpool, river that carries us away, “river run”said Joyce with the striking neologism that opens Finnegans Wake (1939), without beginning or end.

The voice that speaks to us is that of a young woman born in a small town in the south of France (the ” town “), in an environment not devoid of material goods but apart from that poor in everything, without culture to transmit, without love, without a name, without anything. Under the influence of a braggart, racist and dominating uncle, the family sinks into a time that is almost dead and without language, where people express themselves through rape and beatings. The girl flees to Paris for her studies, promising herself never to return, yearning for a new life. She is caught up in the beating of the cannibal city, the weather is different, and the violence she suffers is of a different nature. She will remain a stranger until the end. She throws herself under a metro at Gambetta station. She starts talking.

Makenzy Orcel’s book is however much more than a novel of miserable education, of social naturalism, a very black picture of contemporary France. The author’s ability to put himself in the place of others and in the reverse side of the world, to speak up for the excluded, is the form of his literary commitment. In The Immortals (Zulma, 2012), he gave voice to prostitutes. Animal Shadow (Zulma, 2016), first volume of a trilogy whose A human sum is the second part, made hear the voice of an old black and dead Haitian woman who went up the river of her life and her history, of the history of her country, her word taken alike in the whirlwinds of water and time, but inhabited by beliefs and legends.

Makenzy Orcel does not seem to believe in realism in literature. He exaggerates, invents and gives everything mythological proportions

A human sum supports the voice of a young, white, dead Frenchwoman, much poorer in world than the previous one. She seems born in bad weather and can only connect to life through her grandmother’s phrases, in which she wraps herself like a blanket, and through her stories and memories: “I would have liked to live in that time, because even the enormous difficulties she evokes were quickly forgotten thanks to this magic that she imprinted on each moment, and which made it simple and beautiful. » This representativeness of literature, this ability of the novel to speak for others, has it not shown its limits? Could the suspicion of appropriation be exercised? Not here, because there is no overhang. Makenzy Orcel never places himself above those he gets to talk about. He listens to them with attention, sometimes flabbergasted. He is in solidarity with their word but he does not take it away from them.

You have 43.04% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.