Il nous l'avait dit: la caverne s'ouvrait au fond.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, I, 4.
He had told us that the cave would open at the end.
Origin and Palimpsest
The Origin of the World “So, starting on June 26th, it will be on display again for the first time after more than a century in hiding.” This is what art critic Philippe Dagen wrote in 1995. Le Monde, 1 after the ministry had settled the rights from Jacques Lacan's estate for Courbet's paintings. A year later, Michon's La Grande Beune, which initially also The origin of the world which should be called, and Michon's second part of the book seems to be amused by this origin in the reversal of "fin du monde":
Depuis le début de ces vacances ma visite quotidienne au tobacco était comme entrer dans une chausse-trape qui faisait que mes jambes et mes mains tremblaient avant même de pousser la porte. Yvonne dansait le grelot. It is available to each other and is heard with pleasure; elle était ivre d'elle-même ; Elle me jetait par en lingerie ce regard enjôleur, mais impersonnel, fuyant, qu'ont les femmes ensevelies dans leur propre chair au point de ne plus vous voir ni vous entendre, leur annonceriez-vous la fin du monde ; elle faisait des rires de fée, soudain rougissait et s'arrêtait, comme giflée - février et mars jouaient d'elle à quatre mains.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, II, 3.
Since the beginning of this holiday, my daily visit to the tobacconist had been like stepping into a trap that made my legs and hands tremble even before I'd pushed open the door. Yvonne danced to the bell. She was afraid and pursued her fear with relish; she was drunk on herself; she cast me that enchanting but impersonal, fleeting glance from below, the kind women have when they're buried in their own flesh, so that they can no longer see or hear you even if you were to announce the end of the world to them; she laughed like a fairy, suddenly blushed, and froze as if slapped—February and March playing four-handed on her.
Pierre Michon was born in the northwest of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, in the Creuse department, which was previously partly identical to the Limousin department. The Limousin is the starting point for his revolutionary play. Les Onze (2009), just as the prehistoric-present-day Département Dordogne/Périgord noir encompasses the vast mythical narrative space of Les deux Beune (2023) educates. The children who bring their finds to the teacher are, in a sentence, with resounding words, made transparent back to prehistoric times:
C'étaient eux encore une fois, with petits élèves, with sempiternels nabots, this humanité bruegélienne, vieillotte, affairée, naine, affublée de caftans et de touloupes ; c'étaient Annie, Madeleine, Micheline, Jeannine ; Jeannot, Pierrot, Jean Pierre. And Bernard, avec sa natte du Mékong. Ils apprenaient en versant des larmes les accords verbaux ; The bifaces are similar to the women's noms ronflants, which are écoutaient en penchant un la tête sur le côté, Saint-Acheul, Le Moustier, La Madeleine ; limande, coup-de-poing, feuille de saule. Les noms que j'avais dans la tête aujourd'hui, l'ourlet, la fente, les fesses, je ne pouvais les leur dire. Ils passaient. The air is faster. If you don't have enough of a difference, you will have the courage to rejoin the ancestors with the pannier d'œufs for the voyage. This sont-être des petits enfants que les pères flèchent dans l'au-delà.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, II, 5.
There they were again, my little pupils, my eternal dwarfs, this Bruegelian humanity, old, busy, dwarfish, decked out in caftans and sheepskins; there were Annie, Madeleine, Micheline, Jeannine; Jeannot, Pierrot, Jean-Pierre. And Bernard with his Mekong mat. They learned the verbal chords through tears, they brought me hand axes, which I gave sonorous names, which they listened to with their heads tilted slightly to the side: Saint-Acheul, Le Moustier, La Madeleine; flounder, fist strike, willow leaf. The names I had in mind today, hem, slit, buttocks, I couldn't tell them. They drifted by. They seemed to float. They disappeared quickly, running quickly to the ancestors with their baskets, filled with eggs for the journey. Perhaps they are small children, flung into the afterlife by their fathers.
Hermann Parzinger writes in his history of mankind before the invention of writing, The Children of Prometheus"Although there are sparse indications of the beginnings of artistic creation almost everywhere, the qualitatively and quantitatively outstanding flourishing of Ice Age cave painting in southwestern Europe remains unique worldwide; it represents the first major appearance of humankind in a world art history encompassing all times and places." 2 Here in southwestern France, we can find the first man-made images in areas of the cave that were not used as dwellings; as Parzinger emphasizes, they are probably "related to cultic-religious ideas." 3At the same time, important conclusions can be drawn about the nature experience of prehistoric humans, vivid depictions of animals that stand for an understanding of nature as an animate being, and alongside bison and horse, reindeer, deer, ibex, mammoths and fish now appear in the illustrations. 4 The story takes place here, between Les Eyzies and Montignac. Hydrologically, there are four Beunes. 5The Grande Beune is a tributary of the Vézère, the Petite Beune (which becomes the Beune de Puymartin in its upper reaches) later receives, among others, the Beune du Paradoux, and another stream, La Beunote, is a tributary of the Grande Beune. 6 From a linguistic-historical perspective, Beune means the river itself, from Gaulish. °bedo, °bedum, “canal, ditch”.
Just as the Périgord noir got its nickname from its very dark holm oak forests, the blackness is also present in La Grande Beune Very present, like black rain and black clouds, the poachers' black night and black honey, black scars and black nylons, black blood and black ink, for instance. And caves.
On montait et descendait entre des pierres effondrées, on se glissait dans des failles, on piétinait dans des dolines où des résidus dormaient, on ne comprenait rien.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, I, 5.
We climbed up and down among collapsed rocks, crawled through cracks, stepped into sinkholes where remains slumbered, and understood nothing.
In 1979, UNESCO included the 14 sites in the Vézères Valley as "sites préhistoriques et grottes ornées de la vallée de la Vézère" in its catalogue of World Heritage as one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe, a central place of prehistoric art; here, only the cave paintings of Lascaux from about 20.000 years ago, which Georges Bataille describes as the beginning of art, as the birth of humanity in the transition from homo faber of instrumental action to homo pictor – who opposes useless-seductive signs to useful life. 7 This explains, among other things, the fascination of writers such as Rouaud, Malraux, Quignard, Chevillard, and Trassard for the cave paintings of southwestern France. 8 Jean Rouaud follows this line when he asks himself what need gave rise to the paintings:
C'est la plus belle énigme de l'histoire du monde. Pas la plus mystery, la plus belle. A litanie of splendours: Lascaux, Rouffignac, Niaux, Pech-Merle, Font-de-Gaume, Altamira, le Roc-aux-Sorcières, Chauvet, Cussac, devant quoi on reste bouche bée, médusé. Ceux-là, qu'on imaginait en brutes épaisses tout juste descendues du singe, qu'on habillait de peaux de bêtes et qu'on coiffait avec un clou, ceux-là en savaient also long que nous sur la meilleure part de nous-mêmes. Quant à comprendre ce qui leur passait par la tête, comment on en vient à s'enfoncer sous terre, en rampant parfois, pour peindre des merveilles qui échapperont au regard de la petite multitude du temps, il nous reste à l'imaginer. The paleo-circus, this serait donc the history of the premier coup de pinceau. There are still some rest in the past. Quelques milliers d'années plus tard, en bord de mer, ils inventaient the premier site en ligne. Well. À Carnac.
Jean Rouaud, Prehistory.
This is the most beautiful enigma in the history of the world. Not the most mysterious, but the most beautiful. A litany of splendor: Lascaux, Rouffignac, Niaux, Pech-Merle, Font-de-Gaume, Altamira, the Roc-aux-Sorcières, Chauvet, Cussac, before which one stands open-mouthed in wonder. These people, whom we imagined as fat, ape-derived beasts, dressed in animal skins and styled with a nail, these people knew as much as we do about the best part of ourselves. What went through their minds, how one comes to go underground, sometimes crawling, to paint wonders that escape the gaze of the small masses of time, we still have to imagine. The Paleo-Circus would thus be the story of the first brushstroke. But our ancestors didn't stop there. Several thousand years later, by the sea, they invented the first online website. But of course. In Carnac.
In 2008, the Lascaux cave, discovered in 1940 and whose prehistoric wall paintings were infested with mold, could have lost its UNESCO World Heritage status. Around the time Michon's young teacher began his service in the region, in the early 1960s, Culture Minister Malraux closed the site to visitors; in the 80s, a replica of the cave was opened to tourists right next to it. And Pierre Michon doubled the volume of his book. La Grande Beune from 1996 with six further chapters La Petite Beune, so with the tributary, to a new book: Les deux Beune (Verdier, 2023). A remarkable literary event: Michon, whose few short texts have been the subject of much commentary, presents here a continuation of his work that, in many respects, could necessitate a revision of the interpretations of the last almost three decades. Of course, the genesis of Michon's books is far more complex; the books are not "finished" or published at the time they are written.
If you are looking for a course, then you are writing, it is a course for the edition and not for writing. Je n'ai pas écrit ces textes dans l'ordre de leur publication. Par example The Emperor of the West a été écrit avant la Life of Joseph Roulin, La Grande Beune long before Rimbaud the son. I don't have enough of my manuscripts to make it very arbitrary, but I don't have to pay anything plus the améliorer. Que je ne pourrai pas les finir, tout simplement, puisque comme je vous l'ai dit, la plupart de mes textes sont inachevés, bien qu'ils passent pour achevés. C'est donc qu'ils sont achevés à mon insu.
Pierre Michon, “12. Cause toujours,” in Le roi vient quand il veut.
I can tell you first that this approach, as you describe it, is one of publishing, not writing. I did not write the texts in the order of their publication. For example, The Emperor of the West before Life of Joseph Roulin written, La Grande Beune long before Rimbaud the sonI dispose of my manuscripts very arbitrarily when I think I can no longer improve them. That I simply can't finish them anymore, because, as I've already told you, most of my texts are unfinished, even though they're considered finished. That means they're completed without my intervention.
Michon's concise work resists analysis and commentary as the eel slips from the fisherman's hands, noted Thierry Clermont in his review of the doubled version. 9 And it's not a sequel, according to Clermont, but rather a reflection of the first part, which took place in September 1961. The nameless main character from La Grande BeuneThe young teacher on his erotic quest, in the second part, now in February/March 1962 of the following year, is given the name Pierre, perhaps because of the fundamental references to stones in the first part, but of course Pierre (Michon), born in 1945, is roughly the same age as his fictional character in the early 1960s. Sébastien Omont differentiates the writing styles of the two parts of the novel: “Where La Grande Beune While her father unfolded a splendor fraught with longing, his younger sister must ultimately bring herself to at least partially come to terms with the world as it is. The style is rougher, less grandiose, perhaps less perfect, and yet Pierre Michon proves himself here as well to be a great writer, linking themes with the power of metaphor to simultaneously tell of success and lack, absurdity and creation. 10
In a certain way, Michon manages to conclude the hunt without taking away its atmosphere of the obsessive and the mysteriously dark; in a 2001 interview, he himself stated:
Le travail d'accumulation des savoirs, la lecture, la documentation, ne sont qu'un artifice pour faire résonner plus haut l'appel du monde, un piège pour le faire approcher. Et la confection du piège dure bien plus longtemps que la prize du gibier. Nous aimons mieux la chasse que la prize, comme disait l'autre.
Pierre Michon, “Le monde qui appelle”, in Le roi vient quand il veut. 11
The work of acquiring knowledge, reading, and documenting are merely a ploy to amplify the world's call, a trap to bring it closer. And setting the trap takes far longer than catching the prey. As someone once said, we prefer the hunt to the capture.
Reviewers have described the expanded book as a diptych, analogous to the theme of painting in Michon's work, and besides continuing certain threads and motifs (the cast of characters and the landscape remain the same), the second part does vary considerably, for example with a stronger focus on Jean the fisherman, the omnipresent rain now gives way to fog, the hunting imagery is partially replaced by fishing, and new elements are added, such as the carnival (which revisits the masks from I, 1 and I, 6): "They wanted us to have the leisure to celebrate a feast as the olden days had done, to eat the fabled pigs, to tap the fabled barrels, with a mask on our faces that would make us comparable to the gaunt, vague, and fickle world that February and March hold in their iron clutches. For it is carnival." 12Upon the appearance of La Grande Beune Patrick Kechichian had the special time structure Pierre Michon's work is characterized as follows: "Pierre Michon's books seem to come from an immemorial time, from a very distant and seemingly exiled space. Dates and places can certainly be mentioned, but only to describe the unmoving depth of memory and the layers of time, to show that the landscape, as well as the characters who emerge from it, are dependent on this memory, or vice versa." 13 From the very first pages of the book, the archaic nature of "old times" seems to permeate the present in the French provinces:
Je mangeai ces charcutailles de haute époque; à la table voisine les propos se faisaient rares, les têtes se rapprochaient, alourdies par le sommeil ou le souvenir de bêtes descendues en plein bond, mourant ; ces hommes étaient jeunes ; Leur sommeil, leurs chasses, étaient vieux comme les fabliaux.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, I, 1.
I ate this platter of meat as if from olden times; at the next table there was less talking, heads were close together, heavy with sleep or the memory of the animals that were brought down and died in mid-leap; these men were young, their sleep, their hunts were as old as the fables.
If you select La Grande Beune in detail with the first part of Les deux Beune Comparing them, one can certainly find changes, such as this new second sentence, which adds two "corrected booklets" like the relationship between the first and second part here:
The grues passaient and my elements learn to conjugate. Entre deux cahiers correctés à la grande table d'auberge, j'allais faire un pinball, me confronter au Big Indian emplumé qui vous défiait au fronton.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, II, 2.
Cranes flew by and my students were learning conjugations. Between correcting two notebooks at the inn's large table, I went to the pinball machine and faced the feathered creature. Big Indian, who challenged you at the gable.
Like the painters Goya, van Gogh, Fragonard, Watteau or the fictional Corentin in Michon's work, the first painters of mankind are representatives of artists, shamans, "learned as a bearded man and pious as one of the Mohicans" (I, 4), early seekers of meaning and interpreters of the world like the writers:
Et les hommes qui étaient ce dieu des rennes, après les huit jours de charivari, de sang, de vive force dans les goulets, d'écorchage, salaison et boucan, ces petits jours d'avril qui leur permettraient le reste de l'année de ne rien faire, regarder, parler, de s'emplir le ventre, de jouir de leurs femmes et d'aimer les petits enfants qui en sortaient, les hommes dit-on, et il semble que c'est vrai puisque le carbone 14 a date tout cela sans réplique comme l'aurait fait un barbichu, quand ils étaient las des enfants et des women, the palabres sous une hutte sang de bœuf with leurs grands chapeaux pleas d'andouillers et de plumes, les hommes descendaient dans les grottes et faisaient des patures. For all men who have access to the main plus déliée, the esprit plus prompt or contourné, the cœurs célibataires qui allaient la nuit chercher sens dans les flaques des Beune, ne l'y trouvaient pas et ramenaient à la place des pierres opaques qui font sens, des mots et des combinaisons de pierres et de mots qui font sens, et de ces combinaisons du pouvoir […].
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, I, 4.
And the men who were these reindeer gods, after eight days of their carnage, the blood, the violence in the chutes, the skinning, the salting, and the noise, those few days in April that would allow them the rest of the year to do nothing, to look, to talk, to stuff themselves, to enjoy their wives, and to love the little children that would come from them, the men, it is said (and it seems to be true, for carbon 14 dated all this without argument, as a bearded man would have), when they grew tired of the children and wives, of palavering in a hut stained with ox blood, with their large hats adorned with antler pieces and feathers, the men descended into the caves and painted pictures. Not all men, only those who had a more skillful hand, a quicker or more cumbersome mind, the more solitary hearts, who searched for meaning at night in the puddles of the Beune, did not find it there, and instead brought back opaque stones with meaning, words and combinations of stones and words with meaning, and who drew power from these combinations; […].
Hunting and trapping
The part and the other part of the night are pris à deux mains. Je troussai skin. When the two of them are lifted up to the waist and the weight is on them, you can see the grotto to the blanche. C'était du lait.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, II, 6.
On both sides, I grasped the dark blue hem with both hands. I pulled the hem up. When she had pulled her skirts up to her waist and then moaned, I saw the white grotto in a flash. It was milk.
It ends with the white of the blank page and the unpainted canvases. Les deux Beune"We are in the cave, with the big monsters on the walls." 14 Thus, the painter Goya was in Michons masters and servants During the tour, he was shown that he inspected the royal Spanish palace El Pardo to paint the vaulted ceilings. The cave he visited in La Grande Beune (1996), on the other hand, was empty, unpainted, or so we had thought for a quarter of a century.
C'était impressionnant. C'était now. C'était la coupole de Lascaux à l'instant exact où y entrèrent les vieux célibataires, andouillers dessus, quand dans les torches leur cœur bondit ; When you are ready to use the impeccable étendue de calcite toute blanche, moelleuse, lisse, à peine grenue mais avec a grain tout de même qu'ils effleuraient du bout des doigts, ce mondmilch un peu grenu donc et calmement débordant de candeur, ce grand drapé tendu, servi comme sur un chevalet entre un liseré tout droit de quartzite plus black et un plafond bulbeux, pesant, secret.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, I, 5.
It was impressive. It was naked. It was the dome of Lascaux at the very moment the old bachelors in their antlered hats entered it, their hearts leaping in the torches; when the immaculate surface of white, soft, smooth, barely grained, yet granular calcite was revealed to them, which they touched with their fingertips, this slightly grainy and calmly overflowing moonmilk, this great, taut drapery served up as if on an easel between a straight edge of blacker quartzite and a bulbous, heavy, mysterious blanket.
Now, with Michon's update from 2023, it turns out: there had indeed been prehistoric paintings in a cave, which were frantically erased by Jean with his modern-day Kärcher, white.
Perhaps it's a misunderstanding: The origin of the worldCourbet's scandalous depiction of female genitalia is not to be understood as an erotic or obscene representation. The objectified, dispassionate portrayal of female anatomy also defies moral boundaries. The painter observes and affirms: realism in its radical form. 15 The origin of the world, this was also the originally intended title of La Grande BeuneHowever, Pierre Michon's young teacher is so enchanted by Yvonne, the saleswoman in the tobacco shop, that she becomes a dreamy obsession from their first encounter:
This woman, with her arms in her eyes, bienveillante and peine étonnée, considérait patiemment mon silence. Elle attendait ce que je voulais. Je parlai dans un rêve, d'une voix niet pourtant. Elle se détourna, son aisselle apparut when elle leva le bras vers son rayonnage, et la main franche, suave, baguée, s'ouvrit sous mes yeux avec dans son creux le package rouge et blanc de la Marlboro. J'effleurai cela en prenant le package. Pour voir encore ce gesture peut-être, la monnaie dans la paume, les ongles peints se réunissant, se défaisant, j'achetai aussi le saint fléché de la carde postale. Elle souriait tout à fait. « Do you want an envelope? » dit-elle. Bien sûr que j'en voulais une. The voice is also general, the words are spoken and spoken like a don.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, I, 1.
This woman, her lips slightly parted, friendly and barely surprised, patiently observed my silence. She waited to see what I wanted. I spoke in a dream, yet with a clear voice. She turned away, her armpit revealed as she raised her arm to the shelf, and her open, sweet, ringed hand unfolded before my eyes, the red and white Marlboro pack nestled in its cup. I touched it as I took the pack. Perhaps to see that gesture again, the money in the palm, the painted fingernails coming together and coming apart, I also bought the saint with the arrow on the postcard. She smiled broadly. "Would you like an envelope?" she asked. Of course I did. Her voice, too, was generous; the words came like a gift.
Verdier's book cover cleverly and elegantly alludes to Gustave Courbet's scandalous painting of female genitalia. Michon has a tendency to universalize desire, thereby blurring the lines between the subjective and erotic and the anthropological, with its historical depth.
Assis sur la bille de hêtre, je remuais mille autres pensées autour de son corps. Je pensais à this part du monde que nous ne voyons pas, mais dont nous savons qu'elle existe, comme existe le sexe de la femme.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, II, 6.
Sitting on the beech trunk, I stirred a thousand other thoughts about her body. I thought about the part of the world we cannot see, but which we know exists, just as the female sex exists.
Michon's revolutionary text as well, Les onze, ends with Lascaux. The fictional historical narrative, which exists only in literary form, overlays the commissioned image of the revolutionaries onto the cave painting:
Et puisque nous y sommes, vous et moi, c'est soudain devant n'importe quelles bêtes divines que nous nous tenons ici, pas seulement les chevaux mais toutes, les bêtes cornues, les bêtes qui aboient, les autres bêtes rugissantes qui se returnnant soudain bondissent sur le roi dans les chasses de Nineveh, les grandes menaces frontales qui nous ressemblent et ne sont pas nous. Celles qu'on a peintes au beginningment de tout, avant l'Assyrie et Saint Jean, avant l'invention de la charrerie et de la cavalerie, bien avant Corentin et le pauvre Géricault, au temps des grandes chasses, au temps des Gibiers idolâtrés et redoutés, divins, tyranniques, sur les murs profund des cavernes. C'est Lascaux, monsieur. Les forces. Les puissances. Les Commissaires. Et les puissances in the language of Michelet s'appellent l'Histoire.
Pierre Michon, Les Onze.
And since we're on the subject, you and I, here we suddenly find ourselves before all the divine beasts, not just horses, but all of them: the horned beasts, the barking beasts, the other roaring beasts that suddenly turn and leap at the king in the Hunts of Nineveh, the great frontal threats that look like us and yet are not us. Those that were painted at the beginning of it all, before Assyria and John, before the invention of chariots and cavalry, long before Corentin and poor Géricault, in the time of the great hunts, in the time of the deified and feared, divine and tyrannical wild animals on the deep walls of the caves. That is Lascaux, sir. The forces. The powers and principalities. The commissioners. And the powers, in Michelet's language, are called history.
In her review, Raphaëlle Leyris leniently reminds us that this is a writing by a man of a different generation, depicting gender relations that have since changed. 16 The erotic dimension and the scopic conquest of the desired body are written by Michon from the perspective of a predator, a hunter, as Jean-Claude Pinson has shown, in the dialectic of a possessive suddenness and a sentimental tenderness. 17 The twenty-year-old man, however, is at an age where one doesn't believe one has anything to offer such a beautiful woman; he increasingly falls under her spell, buying things from her under false pretenses, such as newspapers, to appear more intelligent than he believes himself. He waits for hours, hoping to encounter her as if by chance in the woods, his gaze devouring every detail of her body; he calls her queen.
The tone was thus set early on, by a nameless "I" who rejects any rhetorical treatment of love, as it says towards the end of the new part: "I thought of the white arms in the old poetry, whose true meaning is white thighs." 18 The aesthetic and erotic here is as majestic as it is predatory, sublime and dangerous:
Je ne crois guère aux beautés qui peu à peu se révèlent, pour peu qu'on les invente ; These are important to the apparitions. Celle-ci me with à l'instant d'abominables pensées dans le sang. C'est peu dire que c'était un beau morceau. Elle était grande et blanche, c'était du lait. C'était large and riche comme Là-Haut les hoursis, vaste mais étranglé, with a taille serrée ; si les bêtes ont un regard qui ne dément pas leur corps, c'était une bête ; si les purees ont a fashion in elles de porter sur la colonne d'un cou une tête pleine mais pure, clémente mais fatale, c'était la purely.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, I, 1.
I don't believe in beauties that gradually reveal themselves when merely invented, but only in appearances. This one set my blood racing with indecent thoughts. It's an understatement to say she was magnificent. She was tall and white, she was like milk. Broad and rich like the houris in the sky, wide but as if laced, with a narrow waist; if animals have a gaze that doesn't deny their body, then it was an animal; if queens have a special way of bearing a rich but pure head on the pillar of a neck, indulgent but fatal, then it was the queen.
Instead of painting, the technique used here is comparable to graffiti, inscriptions scratched somewhere with a sharp object: "quickly, spontaneously, sometimes unfinished and usually probably without the permission of the building owner." 19, a sudden, urgent impulse. In Pinson's new review of Les deux Beune He emphasizes how much the first part delays the resolution of expectations: “rushed, I said, and yet, the desire in this race Desire remains, because waiting is an essential part of enjoyment, of its “eternal immediacy”: “We let it drag on.” “Did we even have to come to an end? My endless longing was the exact opposite of his endless enjoyment.” 20 While literature student Mado reads to her absent-minded lover Baudelaire, he can only imagine the distant Yvonne:
Moi, j'avais dans la poitrine ce coeur de glace que fevrier et mars à leur joint se refilent, et pour le faire fondre, celui-là, il faut d'autres brasiers que les alexandrins. Je tournais ce cœur vers la fenêtre, j'y tournais mes yeux ; j'y voyais le brouillard ou le gel, et dans ce meme brouillard ou ce meme gel quelque part se tenait Yvonne ; là-haut sur la place ils content Yvonne, ils frôlaient Yvonne, arpentaient Yvonne, la mesuraient, la cinturaient, s'insinuaient en elle, ils étaient son linge – and je respirais passionnément ce linge universel.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, II, 3.
I had this icy heart in my breast, the kind February and March pass back and forth, and to melt it, you need fires other than Alexandrines. I turned this heart to the window, I fixed my eyes on it, I saw the fog or the frost, and in that same fog or frost, somewhere, stood Yvonne; up there in the square, they enveloped Yvonne, they caressed Yvonne, circled Yvonne, measured her, girded her, penetrated her, they were her clothes—and I breathed in this universal washing with passion.
The Ice Heart here may be seen as an allusion to (and rejection of) the Snow Heart in Baudelaire's Alexandrines. The beauty They sound good, but unlike the poets in his sonnet, Michon's lover does not want to spend his hours in meager studies.
Je trône dans l'azur comme un sphinx incompris ;
J'unis un coeur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes ;
Je hais le movement qui déplace les lignes,
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.I reign in the sky as the enigmatic sphinx;
Charles Baudelaire, The beautyTranslated by Eric Boerner
My heart mixes with snow the white of swans;
I hate the movement that shifts lines,
I never cried and I never laughed either.
Or let's say, not the poet, but the desired Yvonne herself, as the one who desires, who reshapes and semiotizes the natural, an archaic-sublime ornateness, a rule-bound-festive enactment, when the promise, the waiting of the first part now comes to an end in the fulfillment of desire:
L'accouplement is a ceremony – it's not a work of the dog. The joy is a phrase. Longue, contournée, obéissant à des rites, des forms. Yvonne didn't decide what she chose. Elle doesn't have anything else to choose from. Je le savais bien, à ses apprêts, à son goût exagéré des bijoux et des poses, à son art de se faire un other corps avant l'amour. À la marque de November. Elle ne souhaitait pas faire l'amour, elle voulait le commettre. The aim is to combine civilization.
Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, II, 6.
Mating is a ceremony—otherwise, it's a chore. Pleasure is a sentence. Long, elaborate, obeying rituals and forms. Yvonne said nothing else. She wanted nothing else. I knew it from her preparations, from her exaggerated fondness for jewelry and poses, from her art of creating a different body for herself before lovemaking. From the November mark. She didn't want to make love, she wanted to consummate the act of mating. She loved this pinnacle of civilization.
With the neologism Oniritti Botho Strauss titled one of his books, in which graffiti carvings and dream images (Greek "oneiros" = dream face) come together as cave paintings: "How many phantoms in this bright room! But only at night do you recognize the honest graffiti they left on the walls. Warning signs, hieroglyphs that want to stop a fast-moving world for a while." 21 Michon understands his notebooks themselves as such ethereal signs, so when he gives information about the status of the blocks in which he La Grande Beune had designed:
Mais le carnet dans son ensemble est une trace chue, l'indice inanimé d'une expérience qui est révolue, et qui ne peut plus servir ni à moi ni au lecteur. The carnet is an ensemble affecting. Je peux recycler des métaphores ou des fragments de phrases qui y trainent, mais je ne peux plus être après coup le personnage qui a écrit cela. This is a bloc sensitive: à la fois affectifif and mental, with a forte coloration that is celle d'un moment précis de mon existence. Celle des intentions de la rédaction pour laquelle ils ont été conçus: par exemple une coloration fortement érotisée dans le cas précis de ces carnets de La Grande Beune, which is a type of good woman. A text, pour me, n'est d'ailleurs que l'image aussi fidèle que possible de ce que je suis intellectual et affectivement au moment où je l'écris. Et l'écriture du carnet est le sismographe de ces petites catastrophes ou de ces mouvements internes qui constituent les aventures émotionnelles ou conceptualuelles de l'âme pendant this period-là.
Pierre Michon, “21 Les carnets inédits de La Grande Beune“, in the same, Le roi vient quand il veut.
But the notebook as a whole is a faded trace, a lifeless indication of an experience that is over and can no longer benefit either me or the reader. The notebook is an affective whole. I can recycle metaphors or sentence fragments lying around in it, but I can no longer be the person who wrote it. It is a block of sensations: both affective and mental, strongly colored by a particular moment in my existence. Colored by the intentions of the writing process for which it was designed: for example, a strongly eroticized coloring in the specific case of these notebooks. La Grande Beune, which were a kind of obsessive observation of the woman. For me, a text is nothing other than a reflection, as faithful as possible, of what I am intellectually and emotionally at the moment I write it. And writing in a notebook is the seismograph of these small crises or inner movements that constitute the emotional or conceptual adventures of the soul during this time.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- Philippe Dagen, “Le Musée d'Orsay dévoile « L'Origine du monde »”, Le Monde, June 21, 1995.>>>
- Hermann Parzinger, The Children of Prometheus: A History of Mankind Before the Invention of Writing (Munich: CH Beck, 2014), Chapter 6.>>>
- Hermann Parzinger, The Children of Prometheus: A History of Mankind Before the Invention of Writing (Munich: CH Beck, 2014), Chapter 3.>>>
- See ibid.>>>
- Le bassin des 4 Beunes de Dordogne. Wikipedia.>>>
- See Wikipedia entry “Beune (Dordogne). ">>>
- Georges Bataille, La Péinture préhistorique, Lascaux ou la naissance de l'art (Geneva: Skira, 1955). See also Andreas Hetzel, “Georges Bataille”, in French image theories: a handbook, ed. by Iris Därmann and Kathrin Busch (Brill, 2011), 39–46.>>>
- See, for example, Écrivains de la préhistoire, ed. by André Benhaïm (Toulouse: Presses Univ. du Mirail, 2004).>>>
- “C'est que this oeuvre, also peu copyieuse soit-elle, résiste à l'analyse et au commentaire, comme l'anguille aux mains du pêcheur.” Thierry Clermont, “Les deux Beune, de Pierre Michon: the return of the narrator of the ombre,” Le Figaro, 24. March 2023.>>>
- “Là où La Grande Beune déployait un faste tendu par le desir, sa petite sœur doit, pour finir, se résoudre à composer, au moins un peu, avec le monde tel qu'il est. The style in est plus âpre, moins grandiose, moins parfait peut-être, et pourtant Pierre Michon s'y montre toujours grand écrivain par sa faculté de nouer les themes à la force de la métaphore, pour dire en même temps la réussite et le manque, le ridicule et la creation." Sébastien Omont, “Savoir poursuivre”, Waiting for Nadeau, March 2023.>>>
- Originally translated as “Une heure avec Pierre Michon”, propos recueillis par Alain Girard-Daudon, Encre de Loire: revue trimestrielle des métiers du livre en Pays de Loire, No. 20, October 2001.>>>
- “[…] ils voulaient gentiment qu'on ait loisir de faire ripaille comme les hautes époques l'avaient fait, qu'on mange les cochons de fabliau, qu'on perce les fûts de fabliau, avec sur le visage un masque qui nous fasse pareils à ce monde hagard, vague et veule, que fevrier et mars tiennent dans leurs griffes de fer. Car c'est Carnaval.” Pierre Michon, Les eux Beune, II, 3.>>>
- "C'est d'un temps immémorial, d'un espace très lointain et comme relégué que les livres de Pierre Michon semblent provenir. Dates and lieux peuvent bien être nommés, mais seulement pour dire l'épaisseur immobile de la mémoire et les strates du temps, pour montrer que le paysage, comme les figures qui s'en détachent, sont tributaires de this mémoire ou l'inverse." Patrick Kechichian, “La Grande Beune” and “Le Roi du bois”, de Pierre Michon: le miel noir”, Le Monde, January 13, 1996.>>>
- “[…] on est dans la caverne, with aux murs les grands monstres.” Pierre Michon, masters and servants.>>>
- See the interpretation by Philippe Dagen, “L'unique « Origine du monde »”, Le Monde, August 7, 2014.>>>
- “Paraissant à une époque où les rapports entre hommes et femmes ne s'envisagent plus tout à fait comme il ya trente ans”, Raphaëlle Leyris, “« Les deux Beune » : Pierre Michon, à new sidéré par le désir”, Le Monde, 23. March 2023.>>>
- See Jean-Claude Pinson, “Fragments d'un roman amoureux”, ibid., Sur Pierre Michon: three chemins in the oeuvre (Fario, 2020), 47–68.>>>
- “Je songeai aux bras blancs de la poésie ancienne, dont le sens vrai est : cuisses blanches.” Pierre Michon, Les deux Beune, II, 6.>>>
- Ulf von Rauchhaupt, “The ancient Romans wrote it brilliantly”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 22, 2020.>>>
- "Se précipite, dis-je, et cependant, in this course, the desire demeure désir, car l'attente is a composante essentiale de la jouissance, de son " imminence éternelle ": " nous faisions durer ". « Fallait-il même conclure ? Mon désir interminable était l'égal exact de sa jouissance interminable ».” Jean-Claude Pinson, “Pierre Michon: L'art de la prose à son acmé (Les deux Beune)”, Diacriticism, 31. March 2023.>>>
- Botho Strauss, Oniritti cave paintings (Munich: Hanser, 2016).>>>
