In absentia - Jean-Louis Coatrieux
Essay, poetry
Jean-Louis Coatrieux crossed paths with Aragon, Neruda, and Guillevic thanks to his philosophy teacher, Jean Marcenac, who was also a poet himself and biographer of Aragon. Then other writers like Georges Perros, Philippe de Boissy, and Charles Le Quintrec.
In absentia continues a dialogue begun in À les écouter parler with his writer friends, Xavier Grall, Guillevic, Louis Guilloux, Georges Perros, Armand Robin, Victor Segalen. This time they are Federico Garcia Lorca, Nazim Hikmet and Pablo Neruda.
Are Lorca, Hikmet, Neruda poets too tempted to enlarge the world? Victims of causes heard in another century that we have no need of today? Far from writing them an end of history of which they will not have been the authors or sticking to their bodies as if they were still alive, something in the present yields nothing to all those who suffer from digging still the blanks and the silences, in these words where simply living and taking a residence on earth, unknown or foreign. So, whether it is under the sequoias, the maples or the cedars, all these trees of fire, sleep is impossible.
They are talking about it...
Beyond the great sculptors of words that these three great writers were, it is indeed to the resistance fighters that he devotes his admiration. Resistance: the common thread of three itineraries. And resisting today, for Jean-Louis Coatrieux, begins by reappropriating authors for whom "the world was not as it was, but as they wanted to create it, free, luminous, insolent."
If he highlights the literary – and revolutionary – power of the trio Hikmet, Lorca, Neruda, it is also to better point out the insignificance of certain current writings and to castigate “the literary hubbub” or the “washing of ideas” in a life “increasingly colonized by the brief, the impulse, the wave of the moment”. His little book is, in this respect, a beautiful overhaul and an invitation to return – as they say – to the fundamentals.
Pierre Tanguy ( read this reading note in its entirety )
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Digital book
ISBN 978-2-313-00408-1
Ebook (PDF, ePub, Mobi) - 79 p. (2013)
