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Claude Chambard: read, write, live ... A strange trip

Robert Campin, Nativity, circa 1425, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon

Reading is accepting get lost along the way, to engage in meetings of chance or destiny ... The journey of a player often takes unexpected paths and household appointments surprising. It is the richness and beauty of literature that bring together texts and people, combining reflection and sensibility, building a strong and human. We often forget that the author is first a reader, that his work is constructed in a literary environment, a special closeness, a text written in homage or necessarily in opposition to another ... The literary theory 's is seized of this idea, developed the concept of dialogism of Bakhtin or transtextuality in Genette. But the reader and the author can ignore these theories to discuss the work on a personal, intimate, as a bridge to through space and time, a source close communication and absolute that uses intelligence as well as feelings and sensations (because the meanings are also involved in writing or reading, not activities are not abstract).

There are authors who recognize more easily than others what they owe to their readings. Claude Chambard is one of them. Often at the end of his books can be read thanks to friends, poets, philosophers, novelists who staked his drive route. Thus, he often cites Walter Benjamin but Flaubert, Sebald, Voltaire, and others: Britten, Rublev and Tarkovsky - Stalker characters also (at the end of Alley Artists ) ... I have not had the opportunity read all his work, and discovered as she presents a lively and exploded, the author emphasizing the poetic form and the new novel. This is not to displease me. I have said here already my choice for news. It is for me like the world, each piece representing a splinter, fragment, which finds its place gradually, in a work that is being built. But the exploration of this original and sincere work slowly reveals a high degree of consistency in diversity.

Alley Artists

Exploration, Travel ... The path I walk includes some stops that are far from reflecting the complexity of the work to both universal and personal. I entered through Alley Artists, intimate and deeply moving story in which intertwine memories dreams, daydreams literary reconstruction of a lost world. A frantic search that we do not know if it fits into the real or imaginary reader of a writer, but is hampered by the elusive, the time that we can be out of words, of fleeting images, bits of memory for a moment revived. The story is that of wandering in a place both familiar and transformed, D., City of adolescence of the author, that of friendship with M., the friend disappeared, journeyman the world, awakening to the arts. Magdi Senadji photographer, able to freeze forever the feeling volatile, fleeting moment. But the narrator / author / character, which may not coincide with those rights in Macintosh, this mysterious being crossed eleven times in the Ulysses of Joyce, whose analysis (that of Nabokov in particular) are double Joyce himself, a haunting figure of author's work for eternity, places to steal, have changed, are veiled:

The world image is being projected upside down on the retina. Therefore, the world is it not a hallucination eye? Through the six tiles, is this the world I see, or the inside of my eye? The world goes on in my eye is the longest movement that is motionless.

no hurry;

The rain falls on the left, not right. Is this an effect of light? will of the filmmaker? desire of the writer? a hallucination of the viewer, the reader?

The rain fills the image along the River. The river separates the two banks. On one side, trees on the other riders. On the one hand, to nearly the other, the blur between the two, the uncertainty. Andrei Tarkovsky shows us this clearly in Andrei Rublev precisely, but probably in all his films in which rain and traveling - Stalker, remember the trip into the forbidden zone speeder - are fundamental.

This "I", "us" meaning the author and his friend become a "he" almost indistinguishable, as the two personalities merge in this desire to know the world through their particular view of a photographer or writer in the making. This "works" alone is painful but yet accompanied by memories of books read, the characters encountered in these readings, and that inhabit the memory even more densely than the living forgotten. The living ... where are they? The driveway is lined with artists of statues, monuments graves. This is the land of the dead that CC is gone look for his missing friend, the words are born to revive the memory of a loving portrait but blurred by time. So she is writing research, the time lost, the lost world, the relationship, beyond death, but did not dissolve a bit warped.

Who walks? Who

box?

Who goes to the invisible?

The text is beautiful, clear, but it raises the puzzle is complex, existential. A wrenching question that remains unanswered perhaps, but the wording of which establishes a link between past and present, between life and death, between author and reader journeying together in this county alone.

The meeting on the stairs

also published by Editions de l'Atelier IN8, this text is a step whose erotic in a first reading, I did not realize its importance. Without apparent link with the work mentioned above, it approaches surprisingly and desperate themes in Artists Alley, one of the impossible encounter and relationship established with the world of writing and reading .

The new, rather short, yet is full of ideas, opening tracks on critical thinking: the books they create a link between the men or do they separate? Two voices interweave, that of Clement, a writer, engaged in translating the work of an author Chilean he never met, and that of Hortense, his wife, who spends his days reading in an attic of erotic works translated from Chinese. A loving couple, united by the desire of the body of another, but the books seem to move away from each other. Clement and Hortense and they live in separate spaces, the translator in his office, his wife left it in the attic for a walk or go swimming. Their meeting takes place only in their sealed room, suitable for contact with the body, shared pleasure, but man, very quickly realizes that was interposed between them a presence mysterious, a man he does not see the body but which nevertheless led his company in which he revels can join.

Reading is here associated with the life force: "I read, I saw," said Hortense, "I enjoy, I saw." The act of reading is part of the pleasure these texts which man does not understand the interest, "an old-fashioned erotica, little exciting," are for her a source of intense intellectual enjoyment as well as physical.

I went back in my attic. I found a copy of the magnificent large orchard Xixian ji - The Western Pavilion - unnamed translator. I cut slowly, with relish, pages rustling. Reading relieves me and gives me strength and joy, pleasure, pleasure, enjoyment.

"Unnamed translator" gold Clement, he is the one whose name will disappear, since its job is to "write another" , that is to say to disappear. Moreover, this work away from writing the play:

I found a small chair near a window, and settled there, I read for hours while Clement to the floor below, strives to make in French what he perceives the work of a writer he does not even know. I think that is what he lacks the time to read. He translated it translated, it means it no longer reads.

Reading is therefore a vital act and nurturing. Without reading Clement away from reality and lets himself increasingly upset by this ghostly encounter that sometimes, in that staircase that gives the story its title: an invisible hand, offering an involuntary pleasure, violent and destructive , and reminds him that man without a body who makes love to his wife beside him. Translating he removed from himself? Is it becoming another?

The sensuality of words and situations thoroughly with terror. The pleasure is more pure, he joined an obsession. This story erotic plays in the reader a double attraction, Eros and Thanatos mixed, one taking on the other power. And the writer of private work and reading disappears, absorbed by a nothingness from which he revived, united with the eerie presence at the top of the stairs ...

Young Apollo

Published by the shack, under this enigmatic text, very short, seems the opposite of before. Claude Chambard to hear a different voice, yet again, this book, death ... love too, Claude Chambard one feels for an author we both venerate (and we are far from be limited to): Walter Benjamin, the philosopher whose thinking embraces all areas but is part of the idea of the level, crossing, and whose individual existence merges into the universal drama.

This profound and poetic text subtly revive the ghost of the author disappeared in Port-Bou, in his room at the Hotel Francia. A silhouette First, seen from afar it seems, but it penetrates the consciousness inhabited by uncertainty, erasing a past that anyway he can never return. This discrete character belongs to our world, but remains almost invisible. His life is dedicated to writing and books, "tenant" of the library which he tries to read all the books, even if this task is doomed to failure. The existence in words is a duty, a necessity that he can not escape.

He looks search for a word, then the next. As if it was to fill a huge void of language. A kind of anguish.

is a sacred work hard and thankless.

We need to find the pulse, instinctively, that is not learned.

Every day, we must be willing to find a word, then the next.

For courage, a vital necessity.

It is not explained.

The work is not explained, ever.

You just show.

is ignorance. It should not be complex. Ignorance is bliss. It remains alive, spontaneous & sincere.

Gradually the text leads us into the consciousness of Walter Benjamin - or the man who reads and writes - and the "it" gives the "I"; this passage coincides with the moment of revelation to the reader. The silhouette is embodied when death approaches, a series of brief notations, which build bits to be that which every reader can feel the humanity in this expectation that drives away the words

I have no strength in his hands.

Words elude, they do not understand that they are the story without me.

Words survive "without me", so the writer and reader can be certain to have already crossed this living shadow, which in a moment, will melt the author ... Finally, if the approach of death has removed the words, they are survival a man, a brilliant idea born in the discretion, and which today still haunts us and makes us live.

Thus through these three very different texts, emerges a rich work that reflects the concerns of an author in search of himself but also turned out to others. His generosity at the heart of humanity, at the crossroads, writing, reading, disseminating his ideas and relaying those who are dear to him. A life in books, in sentences in words in the search for a rhythm, a sound that will make all its thinking power. The multiplicity of themes can not hide a nagging concern: how, beyond the inevitable, the words they can both bind us and give us (to) live? The texts of Claude Chambard speak directly to each of us: the figures of the author and reader are intertwined to such an extent that we can all, whoever we are, we will recognize a bit, and we surrender to the reflection on the profound and essential role of literature in our lives.