The accumulation of evidence – on Archipelagos by Hélène Gaudy

A man disappears: the formula, transposed from the famous Alfred Hitchcock film, describes the discreet movement of erasure which gently carries away Hélène Gaudy’s father and creates the urgency to paint a portrait of him. Like an island in Louisiana, which bears its father’s first name, and sinks deeper every day, this family silhouette fades and recedes into mystery.

In this initial comparison, the writer’s marine imagination finds expression: Sea views has A world without shorepassing through An island a fortress, a maritime furrow runs through the work and an ambivalent fascination for the motif of the island. If oil extraction, marine erosion and the effects of the Anthropocene make vain the desire to save this Louisiana island from sinking, it is still time to probe the mystery of an individual, to grasp his existence under the surface of his discretion, to reconstruct the journey of someone who, like Georges Perec, says he has no childhood memories.

Investigating one’s parents, drawing distant genealogies, paying homage to forgotten figures in the family album, it has become a literary genre: the story of filiation, according to the term proposed by Dominique Viart. But such family portraits are written most of the time since the death of the ancestors and the book then composes a sort of tomb, to record for memory and pay homage. If Archipelagos by Hélène Gaudy constitutes a story of filiation, composing by fragments and facets the portrait of a father, it is developed in reverse of I like it by Annie Ernaux or by Tiny lives by Pierre Michon, in a lively dialogue with her father, who entrusts her with notebooks, opens his studio wide to her, allows the writer to have all the pieces in hand to piece together the puzzle of an identity.

But dealing with the living is undoubtedly no easier than having to recompose the lineaments of a distant silhouette: it is this paradox which is the most poignant in Hélène Gaudy’s beautiful book. What do we really know about the “relatives” we often meet? What do we know about the desires and sadness of these figures who accompany us? After having spent a long time investigating explorers of the Far North, having reconstructed some aspects of the life of Albert Kahn at the beginning of the 20the century, Hélène Gaudy tries to identify a father figure.

“If he were a stranger, I could see him appear all at once, just as he shows himself to others. I could investigate him, and each discovery would add a point to the drawing. But this simple, immediate vision will never be offered to me. Living together makes you short-sighted. The points are so numerous that the drawing is illegible. I’m too close. I investigate someone who is there, in front of me, with whom I drink coffee while talking about everything and nothing, I investigate the others himself, the former ones, the ones in ambush.”

Throughout the project, Hélène Gaudy rediscovers certain paradoxes of the human sciences: from Rousseau to Lévi-Strauss, we have continued to value the “distant gaze” and the force of distance which intensifies the contours, emphasizes the contrasts , makes the rough edges visible. But as we have moved from an ethnography of the distant to an ethnography of the close, the writer conducts an investigation of the close, like Jeanne Favret-Saada or Yvonne Verdier, attentive to relationships and interactions, to the disturbances of proximity.

What this Copernican revolution disrupts in the writings of filiation is the relationship to archives and documents. To strive to restore distant figures, already obscured by forgetting, is to deal with the few, to mobilize a meager harvest of clues, to try in vain to bring together mismatched pieces: time has done its work, dispersing to four winds the evidence, allowing a silhouette to be redrawn. Instead of the scarcity of traces, Hélène Gaudy confronts on the contrary the documentary profusion, the multiplication of archives, the infinity of notations and memorial records: the father whose journey she retraces is in fact an archivist of the present, obsessed with the gesture of remembering.

“He has always gleaned and heaped up. With his discoveries, he builds walls, mountains, snubs to the leveling, to dissolution, to oblivion, the emerged part of an island which alone keeps contact with the depths into which it sinks, and about which I never knew anything. »

Crossed by the traumatic history of the 20th centurye century, the father works against time, builds walls to counter entropy, freeze the erosion of the world, in a workshop which is not unrelated to a museum of the world, that is to say a memory of the planet, like Albert Kahn in his collective enterprise of Archives of the Planet, to which Hélène Gaudy had devoted a very beautiful book, Villa Zamir.

Archipelagos in short, reverses the model of the investigation: instead of following erased traces, discovering the random mention of a name in the archives, sparking the epiphany of reunion, Hélène Gaudy plunges into the profusion, otherwise the chaos of an existence which has never ceased to record, to preserve, to note. The life journey of a father confronted with the worst hours of the 20th centurye century and the erasure of traces largely explains this concern for accumulation. The accumulation of evidence : the formula of the collector Luigi Lineri returns in the story to express this obsession with accumulation, and to point out that in this serialization an enigma is woven.

If the investigation also shifts, it is because Hélène Gaudy moves from a police model of investigation, with crime and a handful of clues, to a model closer to the social sciences: the investigator does not make the dead, but constitutes the investigation as the very space of a relationship or a conversation, according to the beautiful hypotheses of Steven Prigent. The book constantly oscillates between the narrator’s hypotheses, her solitary attempts at reconstruction, her interpretive inclination, and the meetings with the father, who nourishes the investigation, influences or denies some hypothesis and rereads the book. The figure of the investigator therefore abandons a certain overhang: this figure is no longer the master of truth, holder of superior knowledge about social actors, as Michelet, for example, thought he had in his magisterium of the dead.

It is indeed the investigative relationship, to use the subtitle of Steven Prigent’s essay, which is at the center of the story: from then on, the book records these interactions, these exchanges, these collaborations which mark a form of co-authorship. Something is written together, and undoubtedly it is for this whole to be constituted and formed that the book is made. This work under the gaze or in the company of others is undoubtedly what constitutes the great ethical accuracy, the sense of tact of the writer, for example when she discovers the letters of her grandfather: “I’m stopping. I wanted to reproduce passages as they are. I can’t do it. I see him there, behind my shoulder. Everything he would have hated. Everything I’m not allowed to do. So I repeat his words. I mix them. I distort them. They are no longer his. They don’t belong to anyone. He didn’t write that, not quite, or we wrote it together. It would be the first time. »

Archipelagos is neither a tomb of the father, very much alive, nor an attempt at exhaustion, but poignantly a relief of memory and a factory of forgetting.

There is a taste for landscape in Hélène Gaudy’s work, which she shares with Maylis de Kerangal and Joy Sorman. But what the writer will draw from the landscape is its way of sedimenting time and materializing a duration: in the distant memory of the arts of memory which distributed memories over the course of an architecture, Hélène Gaudy distributes the memories of a family according to the logic of an archipelago. The word highlights that neither individuals nor families are isolated islands, but that neighborhoods and interactions constitute an erratic community, all together flexible and fragile. And the work of writing consists precisely of constituting these waves which circulate from one individual to another, and in concentric circles say something about the history of a century:

Each family is an island, an ecosystem, enriched or disturbed by invasive species, an island whose depths lie at the bottom of the water. If you plunge your hand through the surface, swirls, concentric circles, form. If we lack neither energy nor patience, the wave is gradually transmitted to the darker layers, and those which we thought solidified like blocks of amber reveal the movement which disturbs them – which always acts, deep beneath our feet.

Painting the father’s portrait braids these discreet connections, ties his journey together with others, notably that of the grandfather. This gesture of resonance is found within the workshop itself where the works echo each other, as in a cabinet of curiosities: “The objects respond to each other, work together. » The thread drawn by the writer is an Ariadne’s thread, winding from figure to historical episode, finding echoes throughout time, according to minute coincidences. The writer accompanies this material memory, this deposit of memories in the hollow of objects, and constitutes the father’s workshop in a mismatched puzzle, which one could, as in Aby Warburg’s Atlas, recompose endlessly, to tell stories of other stories.

Accumulating, building ramparts of objects, inventorying endlessly: the writer discovers little by little in a shocking way that, contrary to a documentary gesture, allowing proof or testimony, that it is more of a gesture of dissimulation, concealment of oneself or disappearance: “ He teaches me about his absence. Accumulating is the opposite of living. It’s filling the slightest empty space to the point of excluding oneself, to the point of replacing oneself. »

Portrait of the archivist father as a ghost during his lifetime, inhabited by a desire to disappear, according to the beautiful expression of Dominique Rabaté. This reversal grips the reader in a poignant way, as it reverses many of the functions assigned to literature and its testimonial or memorial vocation: if the father records and inventories, it is not to store the world, in a museum gesture who would freeze it or put it under glass, but to hack the memory. “He does not write to remember. He writes to forget. » It is then the very ambition of the book which is turned upside down: Archipelagos is neither a tomb of the father, very much alive, nor an attempt at exhaustion, but poignantly a relief of memory and a factory of forgetting. “ When we write about our parents, perhaps we don’t really want to know more but rather unfold our meager knowledge, explore its folds, its hiding places, so as to no longer carry it inside us like a black box, and to better forget it. To be clear about it would not only be to know, but to be relieved of what we know. Wash your heart and your memory. »

This reduction carried out with the father, in his company and thanks to him, constitutes the book as a powerful lesson in writing, to use Jacques Derrida’s formula: writing is a pharmakon of memory, it stores memories but to create a paradoxical technique of forgetting.