Sometimes anxiety has the good thing about it: it forces us to investigate. This is what the narrator of Grégoire Bouillier’s latest novel does after feeling a sudden and unexplained anxiety while looking at the Water Lilies, the monumental and legendary work by Claude Monet held at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. To understand what seizes him at that moment, he zooms ever further into the painting, into the history of these paintings. A dive that makes him confront some ghosts, reflect on what we see, what we do not see. This pictorial shock reveals or even documents other shocks, other hauntings. To exhaust his own anxiety, he literally exhausts the mystery of the Water Lilies and blows up several levels of security of the secrets they contain. Let’s discover this lively, broad, playful, deep and fascinating text, in the company of its author Grégoire Bouillier, the guest of the Book Club Aujourd’hui.
The Orangery Syndrome published this literary season by Flammarion
“Writing is like falling in love”
“All my books, at some point, come from something that knocks on my window. I’m like everyone else, I go shopping, I pay my bills, I have a story, problems, but, from the moment I have an idea, when something knocks on my window, I am no longer subject to contingencies, I have much better things to do, I have to write a book. Writing completely contaminates my existence and my life becomes the book that I write. As far as I’m concerned, writing is like falling in love. You don’t fall in love every morning, but at some point, someone knocks on your heart, you are carried away, and you have resources of joy, sorrow, lucidity, or blindness, that you didn’t even suspect in yourself.” Gregory Bouillier
Getting rid of words to see better
“We see with words, which are already there, a priori, and which completely distort the relationship that we can have, particularly with painting. The whole beginning of my book consists of trying to find the words for oneself. I don’t care at all about what has been written about my book, on the other hand, what interests me, as a reader, are the words that I will put on the book that I have just read. This is my approach, and I think that once we get rid of words, it opens up a space, which is not only a space of consciousness, but also that of the unconscious. There, what happened is that my unconscious met the unconscious of the work of art.” Gregory Bouillier
The voice note
Gregory’s question @librairie.lebnoheur to the attention of Grégoire Bouillier: “I devoured “The Orangery Syndrome”. I found it to be a rather rare reading experience, because I think it calls on a lot of things. And then, I liked your digressions, your gimmicks. On this subject, Edgar Allan Poe is regularly mentioned in the book, and you quote this passage in “Genesis of a Poem”: “Pleasure is derived solely from the sensation of repetition, from a continuous series of new effects applied to a refrain that is always similar and sufficiently simple to facilitate its infinite variations.” And if we understand how relevant this is regarding Water Lilies, I wondered what relationship you had with repetition?
Grégoire Bouillier responds: “Monet was the first to invent serial painting, he invented the series, and in the series, there is repetition, and today, you no longer have a work of art that can claim to be a unique masterpiece. There is a phrase that I find very powerful and that I like to say a lot: with Monet, it is the slices that define the cake. In fact, the cake does not exist, we cannot say that one of the paintings is more of a masterpiece than another, and consequently, each person will make their own choice. What is very interesting about Monet is that he, who was not at all a theoretician, emotionally, and in my opinion, for reasons of mourning, created this principle of repetition: it is a morbid principle, but it gives the illusion of life.”
The great game of musical pages
Today, it’s in the book of our guest Grégoire Bouillier The Orangerie Syndrome (Flammarion) where the musical evocation is found. It is the Spring by the Raymond Fol big band.
Musical references
Philippe Katerine, Not
Django Reinhardt, Nympheas
Jessica Ackerley, Introduction
Daniel Avry, TBW17
The spring of Vivaldi by the Raymond Fol Big Band
Archive
Sacha Guitry, TV show Those from our home29/12/1952
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