Where are we now? – on two books by Cécile Wajsbrot

The title of this article is intended to be a translation of “Where are we now?” », a song by David Bowie released in 2013, where the Thin White Duke (as they called it then) explored his pre-posthumous side and imagined himself as a ghost: he would die three years later. In this song, a sort of Bowie from beyond the grave wandered through the Berlin of the 1990s Heroes and “walked the dead” with memories. As the star did not manage to die immediately after this album (The Next Day), she had to reiterate her effort with Blackstar in 2016, which became posthumous two days after its release. But real success only arrived in 2017 with the EP No plan, which contains the eponymous single, sung from limbo: “There is no music here, / I’m lost in a flood of sounds, / Am I nowhere, here? »

In reality, if Full sky is well told from the skies, the musicians cited there by Cécile Wajsbrot are rather Rammstein or Blixa Bargeld (from Einstürzende Neubauten) than David Bowie. As long as it’s Berlin and cold – since Berlin haunts the author’s work – we might as well take the originals rather than the copy: she’s right. However, at the same time as Full sky, a collection of texts published here or spoken there appears from the same publisher: The day after and other essays.

” The day after ” (The Next Day, Bowie would have said) was read at the Passa Porta seminar in Brussels in 2016. It was on the day after the Bataclan attacks, which occurred four months earlier. Wajsbrot reports that he has been asked to speak on the radio. She refuses. “What can we say? I do not know. And what to think? That it is not yet the time to think. That there is something to respect, a suspension of the use of words, a suspension of the use of thought. To reflect – but not only. So that the event settles down, takes its place in us, leaves its mark. »

In fact, a number of essays in this collection raise the question of what literature can do “Apres coup” (title of another essay, from 2008, borrowed from book by Maurice Blanchot). After the attacks, the genocides, “the destruction of the Jews of Europe”, there is, notes the writer, this double contradictory injunction: “no poetry after Auschwitz” except that of testimony and, at the same time, “the duty of memory, the need to find one’s place in the chain of transmission” with what she calls an “eleventh commandment, You shall speak of it”.

Cécile Wajsbrot was born in 1954. Her grandfather was assassinated at Auschwitz in 1942. But she is part, as she writes, of this generation which “did not know the paths of an exile planned in time nor the frantic flight (…) nor the night of the trains, the terror, the camps.” Likewise, she wrote in the article “Wounds endured…” (2017), most of us have not been victims of an attack, will not be, do not know or will even know any victim and yet, “as with Ulysses, it is not our blood that flows, it is our tears”, listening to the story of our wounds and our fight. A story (novel, song, etc.) which has the virtue of making everyone know for a moment “that they belong to the same world”.

Nevertheless, the command to “talk about it” is given to writers who have “perceived the invisible wall [les] separating them from others, from those whose family had gone through nothing or not much” while having experienced nothing themselves, places them in a position that Wajsbrot describes in “After the fact” using an astronautical metaphor: “ we were nowhere, lost in space and time like those characters in science fiction films who orbit around a distant planet without being able to return to Earth or arrive on another planet because they are prisoners of an eternal attraction. This floating both so close and so far from the catastrophe is also the most effective position to talk about it: an embodied indetermination. “What happens can only pass through what we write, provided we don’t want to write what happens,” the author summed up after the Bataclan.

It is therefore in a kind of weightlessness that the story is told Full sky. Where are we ? Who is speaking? “The stage is empty like the sky (…). No scenery to distract us. » We advance in an “invisible form”, an “impalpable thickness”. The simplest would perhaps be to refer to the poem “Plein ciel” by Victor Hugo that the author cites. He is in the legend of the centuries (1859), section “Twentieth Century” and, in this human epic from darkness to light, he celebrates air travel (by aerostat or even by helicopter, a machine which was beginning to be in the pipeline of engineers): “In a distance of clouds, (…)/ A vague and confused point appears; in the wind,/ In space, this point moves; he is alive;/ He goes, goes down, goes back up; he does what he wants to do;/ He approaches, he takes shape, he comes; it’s a sphere”… Let us note, for the sake of the good mouth, that “Plein ciel” in Hugo follows the poem “Pleine mer” and that Cécile Wajsbrot has brought together her cycle of five novels around creation and its reception under the title High sea (The sound of time, 2022).

The beauty of Full sky lies above all in the lightness and freedom of its constellar form.

It is therefore a question of an airplane in Full sky, we understand it little by little. “Air France Flight 406 Brazzaville-Paris crashes in Libya in the Sahara Desert,” we read in Wikipedia, “after the Lockheed Starliner broke in two. The disaster left 78 victims. » The novelist makes intensive use of the internet and social networks for her documentation, sometimes quoting them, sometimes leaving only the ghost of her borrowings in the story. The narrative voice is a “corypheus”, that is to say the leader of the ancient choir – if indeed the corypheus can have a gender. Suffice to say: no one and everyone and, perhaps, with a little luck, an instance “where contradictions are resolved”. This corypheus speaks in particular in place of an “ageless woman” and, in a way, responds to her in a game of indeterminacy: “Have you thought of the opposite question,” I say, supposing that it is me who speaks through the words I speak. Have you thought about the opposite question, would you have the right to forget it? »

Indeed, the “ageless woman” was traumatized by the disappearance, when she was six years old, in 1961 (like the author), of a family friend, an air hostess who worked on the fatal flight. Air France Brazzaville-Paris on May 10. This “travel fairy” sent him postcards from faraway places, telling him about exotic wonders when he returned. Full sky is carrying out a polyphonic and fragile investigation into this aeronautical disaster: because we suspected that it was an attack, intended to kill a Central African minister. May 10, 1961 is, however, reminiscent of the date on which Cécile Wajsbrot’s grandfather was summoned by the French police to be sent to his death, twenty years earlier: May 14, 1941.

Beyond the investigation, the beauty of Full sky lies above all in the lightness and freedom of its constellar form. Cécile Wajsbrot sails from Nils Holgersson from Lagerlöf to Travel to Congo by Gide through Kafka’s journalistic essay “The Airplanes in Brescia” (1909) or such a poem by Yeats, “An Irish Aviator Predicts His Death” (1918-1919): “Those I fight, I do not hate not,/ Those whom I protect, I do not love them. Wajsbrot even succeeds in re-enchanting Saint Brendan’s Navigation (12th century) with its fallen angel birds found in Farid al-Dîn Attar or Clément Jannequin. There are many songs, several works of video art and also writings on the Moon (Lucien, Fontenelle) in addition to planes: decentration requires. There is Günther Anders who notes, in View of the Moon (1970), that we have managed to see our planet from the outside, “that is to say, not as our Earth, but as a celestial body belonging to no owner, like a wreck floating in the universe. »

To escape this overlooking, coercive and, ultimately, annihilating gaze, we must undoubtedly adopt that of Wajsbrot in Full sky : floating, ubiquitous, disarmed, which is also the one theorized by the artist Hito Steyerl in several of his works. We know the place of contemporary art in Wajsbrot’s stories. Here, the encounter with the “ageless woman” takes place in a monographic exhibition by Steyerl, “I will survive”. The corypheus attaches itself to In Free Fall (“In Free Fall”), a 2010 video trilogy: After the Crash, Before the Crash, Crash (“After the crush”, “Before the crush”, “Crush”). No real disaster here: Steyerl’s work is rather a reflection on economics, fiction and bankruptcy. But page 111 of Full skythe corypheus begins to read the article ofe-flux afferent, “In free fall: essay on vertical perspective”, where the Berlin artist theorizes the overlooking point of view, its disadvantages (it “means a strong hierarchy of power”, summarizes Wajsbrot, the surveillance of drones and Google Street View) but also its unique advantage: the possibility of its own destruction , a bit like classical perspective, an instrument of colonization, carried within it the seeds of its bankruptcy.

Assuming that the contemporary vertical perspective has completed the destruction of our belief in ground and foundation, Steyerl speaks of an endless “perspective of free fall” – which echoes Wajsbrot’s “prisoners of an eternal attraction”. And in this free fall, the video artist concludes, “struggling with ruined futures that bring us back to an agonizing present, we see that the place towards which we are falling is no longer anchored, nor stable. It does not promise a community, but an evolving entity. » It is obviously this political mutation that, in the order of the story, is used Full sky, with its chorus which from the start warned us: “Each of us is someone but together we are no one. » Not to exercise it, such would then be the power of literature and art.

Cécile Wajsbrot, Full sky And The Day After Tomorrow and other essays 2001-2023The sound of time, March 2024.