UThis sentence quite aptly describes Gabriel Gauthier's book, Space : « the possibility of a miniature universe that would contain an infinite number of secrets and investigations that could be solved in the space of a week, in the height of summer “. A little higher, the text announces who is leading the investigation, “fearful and secretive children with a passion for puzzles “. These are some of the keys to the book.
Gabriel Gauthier traces a world of investigations based on conversations carried out during their reunion with his childhood friend Ben. Which Ben says he is in Dubai, says he is approached by UK domestic intelligence, says he is working on space projects. Unlikely?
Whether true or false, Ben has a fascinating voice anyway, as a scientific narrator of reality, as a mechanic who dismantles the world, so that the author puts it back together in his sentences, in an infinite puzzle game where each problem is a blue swimming pool in the grass: a striking, sufficient image, which does not need the puzzle around it to be complete. Each piece of the puzzle (here, chapters of one to a few pages) is a consistent construction, a full, formed image. All of these chapters do not form a story, a biography, a response, but a tireless, patient and measured construction, methodical and hallucinatory, with surgical precision in the sentence, and which prohibits generalized collapse: the collapse of the author in a vacuum.
What is this void that haunts the pages of Space ?
Suicide is the inner abyss, and perhaps the black space of Spaceas there is dark matter in space: undetectable, invisible, more numerous and heavier than baryonic matter. Around it, it’s a bit of an investigation. Ben carries a few secrets. But the goal is not their unveiling or access to a revelation. Because we have the truth to know very early in the book: a suicide is already there, it took place before the book, and something must be opposed to it so that this black space does not come to grab us again, to devour again. , so he can't do it again.
What does not exist threatens us more than what does exist, such is one of the many paradoxical and yet fair propositions in the book. We must oppose the existence of writing, or its persistence, in order not to fall. You have to write with this dynamic that the characters have when they climb cliffs, dive with oxygen tanks, discover caves, travel by plane. That is to say, not standing still – depression feels too quickly at home in us – but a permanent forward movement.
« As far back as I can remember, I have always felt a horrible background noise beneath the world, unfairly felt the limitless abyss digging an enormous gap into me everywhere. What increases my terror is knowing that these presences do not really exist. These are not the monsters, the ghosts, the living puppets, the faceless and mouthless swarming beasts from the slimy depths and the transparent abominations that drive mad and forever alone those who encounter them in the reflection of a mirror. What makes loneliness crazy is knowing that it doesn't exist. The real terror comes from the fact that no one but us can see what does not exist. All because what doesn't exist lives inside us. There is within me an entirely paranormal world and it contains all the phenomena that I alone see, alone hear, alone feel. I thought they would lessen as I grew older, but they intensified. I don't want to be alone hearing this world. Sometimes I fear that I will become so haunted that I won't be able to come back from my loneliness. »
Space is an adventure book: staying alive, moving, connected, writing, writing again.
Since the void is devouring us, Ben and the narrator get into Ben's car and he turns on the headlights in front of them. Writing is this light which rekindles the world, point by point, under the dictation of Ben, who makes each place in the world real through a journey he has already taken there, or even each object real by detailing its functioning. The world ceases to be a black abyss, because points shimmer everywhere: Izmir, Venice, planes, etc. They are designated, described, crossed, inhabited. The world, when lit by writing, can become a comfort.
The book does not describe a method of survival. He is a survival. Survival happening. No doubt that's why he's very alive. No doubt this is why, with its meta airs, it makes so much room for reality, when each sentence invokes a real referent, and in any case brings out a reality. Whether it is true or false, it exists identically in the sentence, since our readers will not go to verify it, and it only has its place in the sentence because it is true in it.
The book finds this quality of presence of referents usually reserved for journals or travel stories, with its pop and colorful accessories (plane, car, etc.), its sensitive landscapes, its clear atmospheres, its picturesque or unexpected places and places, its rich spaces like toy boxes. And if the novel goes speedboating in the oceans of these two genres, it is nevertheless of another nature, precisely by its speed which skims the wave and surfs in its foam.
To stay on the wave, the surfer needs attention, and this is undoubtedly the rhythm of writing: a regime of attention, against the perils of silence and emptiness. Pay attention to what goes into the sentence, pay attention to names, pay attention to the number of letters in a verse, to anagrams. Make your attention a reflex to respond to the bursts of light in the world. And always have a notebook in your pocket to write down, write down and write down again, anything that will allow you to add another poem.
It’s a method of writing and a method of staying alive. Where it is so easy to die from the inside (slow decay), or from the outside (give up). A graphomaniac attention, which describes-writes.
Space also offers amorous literature, without love. The narrator always describes his companions as if a love story was taking place (Ben or Olivia Speed) without any story being initiated in the book. The relationship with someone is essential. Moreover, numerous diving scenes reinforce the feeling that the narrator is observing in a diving suit, at the same time always diving among others, as if the places they inhabited were new possible swimming pools, and that he always had to find a new pool to dive into, but from which the narrator remains separated by an immarcessible glass wall. Ben seems to be the only one to sometimes place his hands on the visor, and in his level-headed, playful, analytical tone, full of old sympathy, the only one capable of explaining where the levers are, the bolts, how the wall unscrews , how it is possible for the narrator to move from the inside to the outside.
Ben seems to be saying that despite the narrator's anguished feelings, the world may be empty, but it functions, it is operational, and we can therefore enter it and live there. It is no coincidence that Ben works for aerospace, he is the bearer of a message: the earth – throughout its surface – is habitable, the air is breathable.
Space charming, worried, moved. His characters don't really exist and are endearing. If the narrator opens his dizzying interior, the others offer the exterior of their successive actions. Even when they are at the beach, it is through an action verb that they are there. They have the childish and tragic beauty of the heroes of adventure books, where it is not the adventure that counts but being on an adventure. Like in these Green Library series where adventure is a continuous modality of existence.
Space is a constellation of glass boxes, each full and shimmering, funny or melancholy, curious or tender, which cancel out the intolerable space outside them. A sort of space shuttle launched into the deep darkness, which approaches the stars and through writing, prose, poems, manages to stay in orbit with them.
The book is often tender, often funny, and knows how to bring out surprising white rabbits in the hat of the sentence: an unexpected idea clicks, a formula hits. Writing is one of the magic arts, except that in the space of the sentence, and in the duration of the sentence, everything is just, fresh, sparkling.
« If I had to pinpoint the period when I slowly started to stop checking anything, it would be during my stay in Leamington Spa. In any case, it was there, near the Warwick campus, that Ben was first approached by the UK's domestic intelligence services, at which time he began to accept, before anyone else, long before you, and before me for sure, that truth, reality, text, world, are things that do not belong to us, not entirely, not completely, through tunnels that we never take.
There, I let go of all verification efforts. I glimpsed the exit from this state of permanent surveillance into which I had fallen all alone. I stopped looking for information anywhere other than myself. I stopped putting together sets of documents before writing a paragraph, and I ended up no longer feeling the need to check whether what I was saying in my sentences was accurate, realistic or sufficient. . All of this would have very little chance of being true, very little chance of being false.
It's true that I could no longer stop at the end of each line to ensure the accuracy of a definition, a mechanism, a phenomenon, the functioning of a system, and I I said that perhaps the way things worked had never interested me. That it was something other than their function that made me write. I had nothing to prove. I just decided to go for it in the dark.
This revelation came in the middle of a key passage. One evening, on the way back from Oxford, we broke down. White smoke suddenly escaped from the hood. I remember the scrolls going up in columns. It was February. I set out to describe the engine's cooling system. »
Gabriel Gauthier, SpaceCorti editions, August 2024, 248 p., €21
