We talk a lot, when it comes to thinking about education and our universities, about decolonization. For my part, it is already too late. Culturally, I am a conquered territory. Although I have expanded my borders, shunned the occupier for a long time and let in voices from elsewhere, the foundations of my thought and my sensitivity are laid on novels written by a group of old Europeans.
And now, in the middle of life, I come back to them.
Is this a sign that I’m getting older? That I fall back, like so many others before me, on what I have already known and loved, because the new thing scares me or, even worse, because it irritates and disturbs me? My ego bristles at such a supposition, it tells me no, not at all, novelty does not distress you in any way, on the contrary, it simply bores you. I don’t know if I should believe it. I would like to, but I know him: he’s not the most reliable of advisors.
Still, in recent years, when the time comes to start a new book, it is more and more often towards the classics that I turn. I use a definite article (THE classics), but a possessive determiner would undoubtedly have been better chosen, the idea of what constitutes a classic having lost its former rigidity. My classics, therefore, essentially belong to this era when the student was considered as an empty receptacle of baggage or inclinations. We were filled with knowledge that served as immutable and indisputable truths. “This is what is great, accept it as such!” »
I therefore accepted and loved a vast corpus of works, all from French culture, a proud parade of men with broad ideas and nimble pens, Molière, Voltaire, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, a joyful and rowdy company – if we have fun imagining them having a drink together in some tavern in the afterlife, we hear them speaking loud and clear, persisting without much doubt. listen and squabble with aphorisms and peremptory declamations. Hugo ends up sulking, Molière and Dumas close the place, good friends.
Other guests were added over time, whose concise and abundant books allowed me to completely disavow the old guard: I was 16 and I felt authorized to declare that I had had enough of big novels. 19th century idiotse century. I was a modern young woman who understood The stranger and who cried while reading The foam of the days.
Literally speaking, I spent my entire youth in a Europe that had not existed for a long time.
I read a lot, I wandered through streets with cobblestones polished by wear, lit by the flickering glow of gas street lamps. I walked through paneled living rooms and weapons rooms, the hiss of drawn rapiers and the rustle of blouses surrounded me.
The world later expanded, but barely, a small step towards the west where the stream of consciousness of Joyce and Woolf, another to the east where Kafka, Kundera and Dostoyevsky waited. Here again, the noise of the pubs of Ireland and of now forgotten districts of London, the stifling heat of the isbas and the destitution of the Prague rooms, realities irreconcilable with mine.
At the tavern table, in the afterlife, only white men. Alexandre Dumas, whose father, born in Jérémie, was the son of a freed slave, has the slightly dark complexion and frizzy hair of his grandmother, but one can hardly be more French than the author of Three Musketeers. Only the pale statue of Virginia Woolf really stands out, a woman in the middle of these deep, testosterone-filled voices, she speaks little, but she knows she is worth 10 of them. They are all, to varying degrees, troubled. The diagnosis did not exist at the time, but the majority are probably bipolar.
It is a table that is both diverse and of great homogeneity which has shaped, modeled, formed me. I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that this is the case for countless readers and, above all, for many contemporary authors. We may decolonize with all the good faith in the world, but the books to come will all bloom on branches whose roots drink in waters frequented by the Karamazov brothers and Madame Bovary.
So is it because I am wary of new leaves that I return to the waters of my first literary wonders? Or because, having become looser over the years, I prefer to stay relaxed at the roots rather than soaring towards the canopy? There’s definitely a bit of that. Perhaps also that I have lost the taste for daring and discovery, and that I am returning to the sure values of the rowdy table, in search of wasted time.
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reference: www.lapresse.ca