French novelist and playwright Christine Angot devoted a significant part of her work to writing about incest, writing from her experiences: She was abused by her father at the age of 13. It is the central theme of Incest (1999) and runs through the trilogy that make up A Week of Vacation (2012), An Impossible Love (2017), and Journey to the East. In his second, which Anagrama has just released in Spain, he crosses his gaze as a child, adolescent, and adult to explain what happened to him. Direct, succinct, and painfully autobiographical, his novel goes beyond the personal and appeals to collective responsibility.
His novels transcend personal experience and become spaces where the reader finds and designs himself. How do you design your writing to achieve this?
The element we call the personal is never separate from a collective consciousness that is both social and private. The personal is difficult to live, precisely because it has a social meaning. Whenever a woman or child is involved, there is a tendency to limit the event to the personal, bodily, sexual, familial, family sphere, and to isolate it from the political sphere and social logic. In writing, the two fields are inseparable, because they are complex in the consciousness of the narrator, of each character. I see writing as a necessity to see and write something. What are they. how they are formed Who does what. And frankly, the real thing is, literally, romantic when taken in great detail.
A very interesting thing about his books is how he determines his distance from the events described. In Viaje al este, for example, the protagonist suffers and at the same time observes what happens to him from a distance.
When the hero suffers, he knows very well what happens to him. He makes an effort not to think about it, to isolate himself, to survive. Wait for the future, adulthood; Trust remains, shaken, but not completely broken. Busy growing up. But still he saw it all, lived it all, all recorded, observed, present and able to return to it. The narrator, for his part, has to think and see in order to describe them. There are two times. At least two.
There is something extraordinary about the way you train your memory in Journey to the East. In the story, the voices of the protagonist mix at different stages of his life. Was it difficult to find a coexistence of sounds that were actually the same?
Of course. Herein lies the whole difficulty of the work. It’s only when I find that note that I really feel like I’ve started writing the work. Even if it takes months, sometimes years to work on it.
Recently, books—and movies—are analyzed almost exclusively by subject matter, especially if they relate autobiographical experiences and tackle difficult topics. You’ve written in several books about incest. Does it bother you that they ask more about how you turn the experiences you describe into literature?
I always try to answer the questions they ask me. I understand that they ask me questions on the subject, and I answer them. But doing psychology is another story. And it’s true that I didn’t take it well. I usually turn the conversation away when faced with these kinds of questions. The phenomenon he describes tends to deprive the work, which is inseparable from the words and composition of the novel, of its capacity to analyze, and to reduce it to a theme intended to be resolved through discussion. But it is not. What can be done and conveyed in literature cannot be done in ordinary discourse.
Journey to the East is the author’s most concise and comprehensive novel. Each of the books on incest [El incesto, Una semana de vacaciones, Un amor imposible y Viaje al este] He wanted it written differently.
The books he refers to do not contain the same emotions or the same visions, the narrator is not the same. Even though it consists of my own person, it is different in every book, it sees something else. As in life, we never see all aspects of something at once. It is like a light that is constantly moving and illuminating reality in different ways. The narrator of Viaje al este agrees to think that it is not burdened with anger, as in El incesto, or with emptiness, as with a week’s holidays. Everything is collectible and available at the same time.
You are one of the best writers of silence. His latest book is just as impressive as it describes it, for how it literary treats the silence that ensues around dire situations.
Literature is silence. It is the art of silence. This is the art of writing. And silence is freedom, because it speaks for itself.
There is something very physical about Journey to the East. The body that suffers, reacts, feels occupied, is always in the foreground. How do you get that body?
I am patient. To wait. I am listening. I insist. To search. I deepen. But above all, I listen. I write, read, reread, rewrite, reread, etc. take a long time. It’s a long process. Sometimes too long for my publishers who have a prior appointment with the printer.
Fuego, a movie adaptation of Claire Denis’ novel Un tournant de la vie, has just been released. [inédita en España]. And in 2017 you wrote the script for Un sol Interior with him. What was it like working with Denis?
What I love most is being able to bring the liveliness of the dialogue to it. I was happy to experience this.