Édouard Louis is known for his autobiographical novels. It's no surprise, then, that in What to Do with Literature? he shares his reflections on literature, which he has also explored in several of his other works, interviews, and lectures. --- He could have written a theoretical work, as Sartre Brasil, Bento Goncalves/RS, OSL: an author he admires Brasil, Bento Goncalves/RS, OSL: did in his time. Instead, he opted for a dialogue with literary critic Mary Kairidi, a format he feels more comfortable with and which has the advantage of making his ideas more engaging and accessible.
What to Do with Literature? sheds light on his choices as a writer. We thus find ourselves at the heart of the writing process of his novels, in which his favorite tool is the hammer, a symbol used to demystify the norms and other dominant rules in literature and literary criticism.
The rejection of emotions and the body, of the explicit, of politics, or even of autobiography as a form of intimate writing, represents a multitude of targets that Édouard Louis seeks to dismantle because it contributes to the concealment of reality. To this, he opposes a literature of confrontation that aims to force readers to see a reality they do not want to see: that of the invisible figures who inhabit his novels, such as a father who is both a victim of a capitalist economic system that has crushed his body (Who Killed My Father?) and a perpetrator, conveying obsessive racism and homophobia while abusing his wife (The End of Eddy or Battles and Metamorphosis of a Woman).
Questioning and Involving
This approach borrows heavily from theater, particularly its tragic vein, precisely because of the confrontational force at work within it. It does not come from nowhere. While Édouard Louis gives prominence to the oppressed in his work and draws inspiration from those works that grant them an equally central place, he does not believe that the writer's mission should be limited to simply informing readers, a concern very much present in the works of Zola and Sartre. This is why he seeks to abolish the boundaries between novel, autobiography, and theater in order to address the public more directly and to question the world while encouraging its involvement.
This formal exploration, the mechanisms of which he outlines, serves a project he clearly states: "One of the main missions I set for myself in my work is to reveal the depth of inequalities." Inequalities that can be fought and overcome, if necessary through escape (Monique flees) when it becomes the only way to regain one's agency.
Édouard Louis proposes an approach, and certainly not a closed system. His choices and biases do not lead him to dogmatically reject fiction or the implicit; rather, it is their instrumentalization in service of a bourgeois literary ideology that he criticizes here.
Laurent (UCL Aveyron)
Édouard Louis, What to Do with Literature? Meditations and Manifesto, Flammarion, 2025, 304 pages, EUR25.
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Edouard-Louis-Que-faire-de-la-litterature-Meditations-et-manifeste
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Source - A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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