Until 08/05, Three times Ulysses is the second play by Claudine Galea on the bill at the Comédie-Française. Whether she writes novels, for the theater or for young people, her language never ceases to venture off the beaten track. Meeting with an author who renounces neither poetry nor utopia. A writer attentive to the world, to humanity.
Marie-José Sirach : Laëtitia Guédon, who directs Three times Ulysses, says you accepted “to enter the great lyrical lung” of tragedy. That’s to say ?
Claudine Galea : I’m talking about a shattered lyricism, not that of tragedy as it was written several centuries ago. This is no longer possible today. Firstly because there is no longer any transcendence, because my writing has its own logic, its own coherence and, rereading the Odyssey, which I reread in three different translations to be able to understand it differently, what jumped out at me was the war, the massacres, the epic of a hero who never stopped destroying the world . Since then, poetics, a term that I prefer to lyricism, had to be broken. There is a lot of humor in what I wrote, inseparable from the necessary distance that I feel with this great myth.
MJ.S. : We are used to reading you in monologues, very intimate interior dialogues. Here, you explore several registers of writing, song, story, poem… Was it a kind of challenge?
CG : It was a real question. For six months, I read, I let myself be immersed and I knew that I would find what I had to tell as soon as Ulysses appeared to me differently. One day, I understood that he was heading towards his death. This vulnerability made him touching, human. As for women, Calypso and Penelope are very little present in the Odyssey. Penelope is only allowed a few lines; nothing is said about Calypso, who nevertheless shares her life for seven years with Ulysses. What Hecuba experiences is incredibly violent. She barely appears in the Iliad, his six children were murdered. They all appear to me like ghosts… We have always looked at Ulysses only from the angle of the hero, the superman, the victor. What could these female figures feel? We never took the time to look at them…
“The three women are only stooges of Ulysses”
MJ.S. : Is your approach to Ulysses a way of deconstructing this hero of mythology?
CG : I am neither trying to debunk nor deconstruct. I’m just looking, trying to understand what happened, knowing that it’s Homer who’s writing. The obvious is obvious: the three women are only stooges of Ulysses. They have no feeling, no emotion, no destiny, no future and everything revolves around him. Now, these are the ones that interest me. It is indeed a form of necessary deconstruction. There is the critical way of looking at a great myth, then there is the language we give it. We need to find a language that is not just a language of deconstruction that would be descriptive or aggressive, that doesn’t interest me. We can deny the figure of the mythological superhero but we cannot deny the power of Homer’s language.
MJ.S. : Your piece is an order. Has this had any impact on your writing?
CG : The most important challenge was finding the language. It was about measuring lyricism while making it contemporary. I had constraints and it was a matter of moving forward among them, of tracing a path. I explored the language in places that were not yet familiar to me, a mixture of triviality and poetics, a friction of register, a friction of temporality. I understood it while writing.
“What is paradoxical in myths is that in horror, there is beauty. »
MJ.S. : Why do we say that myths, age-old tales shaped by time, by men, by wars, echo our present?
CG : It’s the present that echoes the past, it’s the future that echoes the present… When I started writing, I could hear what was happening in Ukraine, then in Palestine. Mythological stories are not set in current events. They talk about the relationship between men. Ulysses is a masculine warrior figure that we find today in the figure of power, domination, who never ceases to want to reduce the world in order to make it his own, to destroy everything in his path in order to possess what he does not possess. What is paradoxical in myths is that in horror, there is beauty. Myths are a dizzying beauty and an abyss of horror.
MJ.S. : How do you see the arrival of artificial intelligence in your life as a writer?
CG : I am not sure that AI is a language, that is to say a possibility of inventing, of transgressing, an artistic possibility. I am a writer, others are painters, composers, we create sensitive works. Art cannot be replaced by know-how, manufacturing, some information. However, art is not the place of consensus but of the unexpected. Art is rebelliousness to everything. I don’t think AI occupies that place. On the other hand, this place must be defended because it is constantly threatened as if we no longer needed art. And it’s terrifying because it’s a question of civilization, beyond a question of culture. What would a society be without a writer, without a musician, without an artist? A world where we could not go beyond the rules, habits, uses, a world without invention? AI can be useful in many places but it all depends on how you use it. There is the use that power makes of it and the use that living beings make of it.
“We need art as much as we need bread”
MJ.S. : The culture budget will decrease by 200 million euros. Among the “savings” announced, minus 6 million for the Opera and minus 5 million for the French. How do you react ?
CG : It is a headlong flight by successive governments in the face of the need for art and culture. Today, it is the institutions that are affected and, symbolically, this is not nothing compared to the place they occupy in the world of culture. Hitting institutions at this height announces a dismantling of our French cultural treasure. This is extremely serious but we must not forget that this policy started a long time ago. The companies, which bring theater to life throughout the country, were the first to be impacted. It would take an uprising, a movement to overturn these policies. We are in a situation that puts the world of culture in the same place as employees, workers. We are all in danger in relation to what we need in life: eating, housing, reading, traveling, going to the theater, to concerts. We need art as much as we need bread. They are the same fights. Cutting the cultural budget speaks of a political desire to harm art and culture. Comments collected by Marie-José Sirach
Three times Ulysses is played at the Comédie-Française, Salle du Vieux-Colombier, until 8/05. Vieux-Colombier Theater, 21 rue du Vieux-Colombier, 75006 Paris (Tel.: 01.44.58.15.15). The text is published by the editions Spaces 34.
