« J“I let my family go upstairs, settle into something, let’s say, unacceptable” states the narrator at the start of Bertrand Belin’s new book. “It’s at the bottom of this building, on the few cement steps that open onto the parking lot, that I’ve been ever since. » Since what? Since his family moved into a new home, and the very little boy he was then decided not to follow suit. The child decided to extricate himself from this “bad growth machine” by taking up residence just below the building, settling in a sort of solitary and wild camp for a long time, where he remained for the duration to teethe and go through the school stages.
Wringing his neck from any concern for verisimilitude, Bertrand Belin tells, from the point of view of the narrator who has become an adult, the life of a child who seceded by carving out a space of his own, sheltered from domestic disaster. In the solitude of his base camp, this voluntary outcast is accompanied by his double, “the Figure”, an inner voice as faithful as it is irritating, with whom he maintains a casual dialogue. The writer, who is also known as a songwriter, constructs here a strange family closed-door in which the main protagonist stands outside, observing the others but not being seen by anyone. “Everything, I see everything, from where I am I see everything, I hear everything”, sang Bertrand Belin on his title “Grand Duc” (album Persona). Seeing everything, hearing everything, such also seems to be the skill of this narrator who spends “all the damn time” chomping at the bit next to the bushes surrounding the building, but nevertheless also proves to be a witness to what he takes place inside the family apartment. In a baroque language, both burlesque and tragic, he will deliver in droplets the evocation of “evenings of struggle, of blood, of shame” where paternal violence is unleashed, when the apartment seems to “roll over » and “turn on itself like a cement mixer”.
Bertrand Belin constructs a resolutely non-realistic narrative situation, stretched between fable and allegory; but this refusal of any direct autobiography proves to be the best recourse to really say something about oneself. “Keep quiet, don’t say anything, I’ve already tried. This is not tenable,” states the narrator of The Figure. “I’m suffocating, that’s easy to understand. This is why I want to say clearly what is. » Making a word happen, against the suffocating silence imposed by the head of the family, that is what is at stake here. The narrative device chosen by Belin evokes that of his first novel, Sharkwhere he imagined a character also caught in a situation of radical (and fatal) solitude: victim of a cramp, he struggles in the water, alone in the middle of a lake, occupying the few moments that remain before he sinks into remembering certain significant episodes from his past. A fictional story whose burning heart was already the expression of family violence.
And The Figure does not therefore present itself as an overtly factual work, the fact remains that Bertrand Belin takes head-on certain biographical elements mentioned in his previous books in a more or less oblique or euphemized manner. Because The Figure is a book of anger: this affect, hitherto so little present in his universe, finds its full place here. Anger against those who did nothing, wanted nothing to do with a chaotic family situation; anger, above all, against the father, which is expressed in a particularly corrosive way in a brief “letter to the father” à la Kafka that the narrator writes while the patriarch is dying: “Oh dear father, I say it like this m It came, I won’t take it back, too late, father, you jumped, twisted, squared at the slightest draft. You have your reasons and I don’t forgive you for anything. »
It is this anger, in particular, which gives its energy and its rhythm to the prose of Bertrand Belin, who gives free rein more than ever to his language, both oral and very written, and to his very singular cosmogony, where the aphorisms and philosophical sentences collide with very material images, a taste for the concrete which makes him summon fauna, flora and natural elements.
“However, this series of meanders and appendages is not meant to be pretty. On the contrary. I dream of being able to say things clearly. To state them under the regime of barking. No other voice than that. A unique voice. Without more poetry, nor less, than an emptying tub. Only when I bark, I scare myself. That’s not human. »
-The story progresses in convolutions, but it is always tending towards the long-announced and long-delayed evocation of family life in the apartment: the limitless violence of the “head of the family”, the also limitless suffering of the mother. , whose cry is evoked as a “song” – the only striking allusion to the music of the entire book, and which allows us to perceive the homage that its author wants to pay to it. “I experienced shock and astonishment before those emotions became the promise the least contemporary art exhibitions. This cry was a song. And he belted me, that’s it. The song comes before the speech, closely following the cry. And only reappears once speech has been exceeded. » If we hear, here as elsewhere in the book, a dimension of social criticism, Bertrand Belin always has the tact of avoiding big words, big words: his story can also be read as a refusal or a defense against a certain literature which tends to promote the clarity of testimony. The pathos, the miserabilism, as well as the glorification of the class defector or the victim are sent back to the ropes by his untimely style.
What he is working on here is rather tinkering with an architecture of resistance to counter the silence, like an echo of the wild camp once built by the child. “Silence alone does not exist, it needs a place and this place, I delimit it here, by erecting this phraseological belvedere in the middle of a blank page and this without a building permit. »
Bertrand Belin, The FigurePOL editions, January 2025, 176 p., €18
Photo credit: BERTRAND BELIN © BASTIEN BURGER – POL
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