“Initially, I didn’t want to talk about the Bataclan so much as the way of life that was hit that day”

A mother leaves her baby with the father, for a few hours, to go dancing, two sisters are going to celebrate their birthday, two lovers are going to meet again… And it is there, at the heart of lightness, that the horror will strike. With Terraces, which will also be directed by Denis Marleau at the Théâtre de la Colline *, in Paris, Laurent Gaudé strives to recreate from the inside the attacks of November 2015 in the capital: we follow in turn victims, rescuers and passers-by throughout a night of pain and atrocities, but also of heroism. The author of Salina and of Dog 51 works of memory in a tragic story coupled with a polyphonic song.

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Madame Figaro. – “History will tell the story of the facts, but who will tell the story of souls?” : the exergue of Terraces is he his motto his reason of being ?
Laurent Gaudé.– It took me a while to find the right place to talk about the attacks. The work of historians has been started, that of journalists done and done well – The world And The Parisian dedicated portraits to each victim. How can we come to grips with the attacks as a writer who wants to keep track of the chronological unfolding of that night? The last thoughts of people before dying, the sensations of the crowds, direct victims or witnesses, what passed through us, collectively, appeared to me as the only possible space. There were heroic acts, but there were heroic thoughts, too, because they managed to free themselves from horror. A woman who will not survive, but who manages, in the last moments, to erase the blood and the screams around her to summon a landscape that she loved, a child that she will leave orphaned, seems heroic to me, because she manages to remain dignified, and only the story of souls could account for this.

Have you had the desire to write about the attacks for a long time?
I dedicated a few pages to it in the first version of Paris, a thousand lives (in 2020 at Actes Sud, then in 2023 at Babel, Editor’s note), but they overwhelmed everything: it was too intense, out of step with the tone of the text, and I cut these passages thinking that one day I would come back to them. I think there needs to be a certain temporal distance. This is part of the gesture of homage and memory that is Terraces, than to return, ten years later, to the attacks. A theatrical version will be given on the Hill, and I was struck, during discussions with the younger actors, to see to what extent the 2015 attacks had become a historic event. For me, the event remains recent, and I am faced with young people who remember seeing this on television with their parents…

When did this polyphonic structure appear to you?
Right off the bat. I have often used the choral form, I like the plurality of perspectives. I wanted to open Terraces as much as possible: I needed a nurse, a doctor, a member of the intervention commandos, a police officer, a firefighter, passers-by… The book includes characters struck by the event and characters summoned by the event, who have the duty to go there and that I wanted to understand, like the others, through sensitivity and emotion, to see the inner crack under the uniform. It is not because they were trained to intervene in emergency scenes that they were not stunned and traumatized too. Getting into the functions interested me, as did the question of “we”: when can we say that there is an experience of “we”? The pandemic, certain demonstrations and that night, too, seem to me to bear witness to this. We were all linked by the same fears, the same reflexes, we all used the same phrases. The we is the chorus, and the chorus is also the tragedy…

There are several mentions of chance and destiny, as in Greek tragedy, and the characters’ speeches are monologues. Aren’t you as much a novelist as a playwright?
I think my work sits at the intersection. I have written a lot of theatrical monologues – with, therefore, the problem of the story on a stage –, and my novels are crossed by orality, as we can see with the exploration of legends and mythology. Besides the episode of Paris, a thousand livesthere is also the origin of Terraces the desire to work again with Denis Marleau. I knew that the text would be staged, even if it is not a play but a choral story: in certain pages, we know that we are with a nurse or a police officer, in others we don’t know who is speaking, and that’s what I liked. Naturally, the staging requires “attributing” the words to a specific person: we have seventeen actors, and it was necessary to designate the one who was going to embody this or that voice, a device which in itself offers an interpretation of text.

My novels are crossed by orality

Laurent Gaude

Where did the title come from?
In “terrasses”, there is “terrassé”, which summed up the journey of the night… Initially, I did not want to evoke so much the Bataclan as the way of life which was struck that day, symbolized by the fact of have a drink at a café terrace – which we have all done, although not everyone necessarily goes to a concert. It seemed more universal to me. The attacks in Moscow, and those in Israel, brought me back: the attack occurred during a rave party, and what is the coincidence of whether we escaped it or not? These three events have different geopolitical meanings, but for men and women they are the same: it is at the heart of entertainment – ​​dancing, drinking, etc. – that both were struck. And hearing this text in a theater will undoubtedly be all the more dizzying.

Can we say that, in your work, the poetic meets the political?
I am a committed author to the extent that I feed my writing with current events and what is happening in the world. In books like Salina Or The Death of King Tsongorit is up to the reader to make bridges with recent political history, when in Dog 51, Terraces or Eldorado, it’s me who established them. There is something, each time, of the memorial monument. I want what happened in Paris in 2015 to become part of my personal pantheon, just like the issue of migrants or war. I hope that the emotion felt by the reader is one more stone placed at the foot of a stele… In We, Europe. Banquet of the peoples, I tried to breathe a little passion into a dry subject. With Terraces, it was a question, through this “we”, of constructing a political wish which was also a song. Because I believe that for me, it is the celebration that weaves together poetry and politics. Beyond the harshness, the horror, the tragedy, there is often in my texts the celebration, depending on the case, of humanism, fraternity, a form of light, transmission or ‘healthy anger. Celebrate, therefore sing.

* Terraces, directed by Denis Marleau, from May 15 to June 9, at the Théâtre de la Colline, in Paris. colline.fr