L’urgence et la patience by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Abstract

accablés par les silences qui ne sont que des mots que l’on garde pour soi-même que ce livre s’adresse. Rompre le charme est le huitième roman de Sthers. Ou bien serait-ce le premier? Sthers arrache du plus profond d’elle-même le livre sur la mère, le livre interdit qu’elle n’avait jusqu’alors jamais osé, le dernier livre peut- être: celui par lequel on devient écrivain. University of Cincinnati (OH) Étienne Achille TOUSSAINT, JEAN-PHILIPPE. L’urgence et la patience. Paris: Minuit, 2012. ISBN 978-27073 -2226-5. Pp. 112. 11 a. Looking back at Toussaint’s literary output over the last 27 years, one can discern a theme of opposition throughout his works: despair and elation, presence and absence, public versus private space. Toussaint’s Spring 2012 exhibition at the Louvre, “La main et le regard,” which seeks to represent the act of reading through various visual means—paintings, photographs, videos, or brain scans— follows a similar tack. This is also true of Toussaint’s latest work, L’urgence et la patience, a collection of new and old essays that explores literature in both a personal and universal manner, alternating, much like his novels, between serious reflection and lighthearted anecdote. Quoting Baudelaire, Toussaint argues that literature is a “rêve de pierre” (24). It is unfettered, like a dream, yet terrestrial and heavy through the rigorous work its form demands. “Un livre doit apparaître comme une évidence au lecteur, et non comme quelque chose de prémédité ou de construit. Mais cette évidence, l’écrivain, lui, doit la construire” (26). It is this focus on the craft of writing that is most revelatory in L’urgence et la patience. There is no difference, he contends, in constructing a hotel or a character; both are made of words. For Toussaint, writing is a mixture of the title’s two elements—the patience to spend hours working through thorny prose to be able, later, to revel in moments where everything flows smoothly and perfectly. This is not inspiration , however. Urgency results from hard work when “tout est juste, chaque image, chaque mot, chaque adjectif pris à la volée et renvoyé sur le terrain, tout trouve sa place exacte dans le livre” (44). But for this to happen there must be a great distance between the writer and his subject. Whereas Toussaint has done research to prepare his novels, for example consulting an equine veterinary manual for La vérité sur Marie, he believes that great literature is produced when the writer recedes to the bottom of the ocean, far from surface reality, as this same novel illustrates . Similarly, although he worked daily on his first few novels, he now only writes “porté par un élan” (22) for periods varying from several weeks to months. It is when one is in this creative cocoon that words flow and writing becomes a musical line with a natural rhythm. Toussaint learned of writing’s musicality from reading Beckett: “C’est la lecture la plus importante que j’ai faite de ma vie” (97). Discussing a Beckett sentence that particularly struck him, he writes: “Je me rends compte que c’est dans sa forme, et nullement par son sens, qu’elle m’avait ébloui” (95). However, not all is serious. While Toussaint devotes three of the book’s eleven chapters to Beckett, he admits that his knowledge of Beckett’s texts is “très approximative, incomplète, lacunaire” (97), and cannot precisely remember the conversation when Jérôme Lindon introduced him to the iconic writer, “Ah, comme mémorialiste” (89). The chapter on Proust is mostly autobiographical, 1304 FRENCH REVIEW 86.6 discussing the various chairs where Toussaint has (re)-read À la recherche. We also learn minutiae. He wrote the final part of La salle de bain in his underwear. Toussaint has used five Mac laptops, prefers Uni-ball eye pens (micro or fine with tungsten carbide ball), and A6 format notebooks from Muji: “Je croyais aimer la littérature, mais c’est l’amour de la papeterie que j’ai, ma parole!” (37). He formats his texts in a miniature...