Marelle, littérature contemporaine et comparée

Trensistor Webradio

En 1959, naissaient deux auteurs américains peu connus en France : Kate Braverman, et Peter Kaldheim. Tous deux se sont vite intéressés à l’écriture autobiographique, mêlants dans leurs récits leurs expériences de la prise de drogue. Un rapport intime, qu’il soit lyrique ou humoristique et autodérisoire, se tisse rapidement entre autofiction et drogue, la drogue étant un seuil permettant de franchir les portes de la perception et de la vie intérieure. C’est l’occasion pour Marelle de commenter ces rapports intimes de la littérature à travers la découverte et lecture de deux oeuvres, Lithium for Medea et Idiot Wind, qui explorent les confins du sujet humain et de ses affres à travers l’univers psychotrope et chimique. Pour aller plus loin, entre addiction et sujet, Clément Camar-Mercier, jeune auteur français cette fois-ci, a étudié ces rapports modernes de l’addiction et du récit dans Le Roman de Jeanne et Nathan, roman néo-romantique et expérimental en montage alterné entre deux protagonistes cocaïnomanes au XXIe siècle. De quoi pimenter et altérer vos expériences de lecture…

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Extraits de Kate Braverman, Lithium for Medea, Seven stories press, 1979 :

Los Angeles, brutal claustrophobic basin of delusion and ripoff, clutter, eerie, sticky, horrible. They came, they saw and wend blind. O hallucination of urban gray slabs. . . . Poor ruined sunsore and sadness for demented City of Angels.”

Everything requires an explanation: Name. Age. Sexual persuasion. Occupation. Incarnation. Marital status. Addictions. Past arrests (note convictions).
There was a sound.
Water.
I was running a bath. It was good to be liquid. I didn’t have skin at all. I had the gleam of a fish, the fine etched scales and gills. I knew the soft channel down. I could burrow into the blue weight. I could wear whitecaps embossed across my back, a kind of spine. I could eat anything and breathe under water. »

You are my dark one. My solitary one. You are my longed for and absolute in black marble. You are onyx. We skate down the iris night, one body. We map the black warm flesh openings. Your tongue is moss. You are a flutter of wings and hemp smoke. Your breath is sweet lime. Your sighs are like a drum, a tree falling down. You are my charmer, my fire-eater, my wind-rider. You are the cloud dance.

Extraits de Idiot Wind, de Peter Kaldheim, Canongate Books, 2019 :

And what, exactly, was my situation? Well, for starters, I was thirty-seven years old, unemployed and flat-out broke. On top of that, I was also homeless, except for the pay locker in Penn Station where I stored my clothes and toiletries. In short, my life had become nothing to brag about, only something to survive, and for that I had no one to blame but myself and my accomplices: alcohol, cocaine and a deep-seated streak of what my old Greek philosophy professor would call akrasia – a weakness of will that allows one to act against one’s better judgement. If Greek’s not your thing, call it what Bob Dylan does: idiot wind. That’s what I came to call it, and for nearly a dozen years it had been blowing my life ragged. Along the way, I’d watched it carry off just about everything that should have mattered to me. My marriage. My career. The respect of my parents and friends. Even a place to lay my head at night. All gone. Gone with the idiot wind.

You would think that after snorting coke for sixteen hours nonstop, sleep would be hard to come by. Not true. Despite all the marching powder in my system, as soon as I stripped down to my skivvies and flopped on the sagging bed I was out for the count. And I stayed out for the next five hours, until my bladder finally rang the Apache alarm clock and forced me out of bed.

And what did I have to show for my efforts? Twelve measly dollars. That’s all that was left in my wallet after I’d forked over twenty for the room. Even for me this was an all-time fuck-up. What now? I asked myself, again and again, as I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to wrap my « head around the full dimensions of this disaster.

Chanson de Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind, 1975

Chanson de The Field Mice, Canada, 1990

Une émission produite par Mélusine O’Connor

Générique original de Géraud Baudet