Believing in the irrational. Making the unlikely probable: this is the ground rule for all fiction. Through the ages literary narratives, plays, paintings – and now, films, have been full of characters and impossible situations… One could say that fiction, with its presumption of verisimilitude, is all the stronger the further removed it is from the ordinary, for which it substitutes another regime. To see, you have to believe. And to believe means choosing to inhabit this other “kingdom“.
In fact, a story is like inhabiting a particular world: to follow it, one needs to find one’s own place within it. Ideally, a front-row seat. Just like a world, a story lays claim to a sense of proximity, creates intimacy, and at the same time it is extensive enough to admit the presence of others. Others, and us: note the use of the plural here. Emmanuel Carrère’s books are about this relationship: they include the reader in a universe that gradually becomes familiar. His stories recount exceptional, unique cases yet they are written because these cases speak to us. They are close to us. They are book-as-worlds, in so far as they construct a space around a character in which others – the readers – can situate themselves in relation to the tale told, each bringing their own perspective.
Carrère’s writing takes wing from the moment a character disconnects from the writing “I” and forcefully assumes a “third person”. The choice to devote himself to non-fiction was accompanied by a transition to writing in the first person and, thus, to the creation of another character, the narrator as “I’, often assuming the lineaments of a detective who becomes actively involved. One might see portents of this choice in his work as a critic and journalist, but it was the Jean-Claude Romand affair that set him on course for a different mode of writing and a different approach to his own position in the narrative. Jean-Claude Romand, the man who for over 15 years deceived his family and those nearest and dearest to him, passing himself off as a doctor, while spending his days wandering through the woods or hanging around highway service stations, was the genesis for a novel, Class Trip, and subsequently for a second, non-fiction book, The Adversary. In the interval between the two books, it was adapted for the big screen.
Written15 years ago, The Adversary remains one of recent literature’s most fascinating books. A book that, right from its choice of title, takes on the way fiction is articulated, indeed its basic principles. The adversary is he who creates a story that it is tempting to believe in. And he who lures, and provides the illusion that can confound story with truth.
Curiously, The Adversary opens with a secondary character, Luc, a neighbor of Jean-Claude Romand’s. Like all the others, Luc Ladmirail – the bourgeois type par excellence, as secure in his ethical convictions as he is in the house and the position he has built for himself – is not only caught up in the complications of the Jean-Claude affair but is shell-shocked by it. To such an extent that he emerges with his sense of judgment utterly destroyed. After Jean-Claude has shown his true face, reality – all of it – seems more incredible than ever to Luc.
As science fiction has taught us, it is the unpredictable that reveals the sham of the ordinary. Carrère, who has written a book about Philip K. Dick and who often dwells on the latter’s thinking, sets himself the task of combining the most extreme fiction to that everyday nexus of actions, reactions, thoughts, commonplace relationships that form reality. Every one of his books takes form once he has found in reality that spark which creates fiction (those “forces terribles qui dépassent l’homme” as he writes in the first letter to Jean-Claude). It is only from this starting point that it is possible to enter into the biographical arena, and give a supplementary meaning to unraveling the events that form a life. In Le Royaume, his most recent and probably most complex book, this principle is put to work in a story that extends over 2000 years, confronting the most extreme of these “fictions” head-on. In the opening pages the writer affirms: I am going to talk about the dead who come back to life. Or, rather, about how it is possible to believe in such a story.
Another “Luke” features in Le Royaume. He is not the most important character, but the one who Carrère has chosen to give form to his narrative. Once again, he is a witness overwhelmed by events. A man whose ability to apprehend reality is put to the test through his encounter with another charismatic character who, unlike Jean-Claude, literally snatches him away from the reassuring routines of his middle-class lifestyle and transports him to another kingdom. If The Adversary took us on a journey via an artfully crafted fiction, this is a book about a writer. Or rather, about a chronicler, a writer of true stories who finds he has one that is particularly momentous and seductive. It is a book about a writer who firmly believes in what he is writing, who, even while knowing he cannot ever meet his character, still embarks on a quest to find him. The evangelist Luke becomes not so much an alter ego, but a prism through which to represent the art of storytelling according to Emmanuel Carrère.
It is no coincidence that Le Royaume is the book in which Carrère spends most time discussing and dramatizing the process of writing a novel (compare this with Yourcenar on the art of concealing– or not – the shadow that the witness casts on the scene). It is a book full of raw material that is made vividly present. It is a book conceived of as a kaleidoscope that conceals its ultimate subject (Jesus, in other words the God with us, Emmanuel), through a series of filters (highly detailed historical re-interpretations) and perspectives. Here again Carrère reduces the number of characters and intensifies the prospective relations between them. It is Paul, the apostle, as seen by Luke. It is Luke the evangelist, as seen by Emmanuel Carrère. It is Emmanuel, the writer, who years earlier had had a lapse into religion, as seen by himself. Each of these relationships reveals a tangle of empathy and distantiation via a mechanism that seems borrowed directly from film.
All of this will be our starting point, from which we will embark, alongside Carrère, on a journey into the kingdom of storytelling, which has no predetermined demarcations between film and literature.
Carlo Chatrian
Carlo Chatrian 