Lectures de Fou (été 2014)

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C'est très géométrique, très froid.

La poésie comme seule réalité, encore plus fiable que les sens, admettons;
la poésie comme rupture pour révéler le vrai, ok;
la poésie comme transcendance, ok;
la poésie touche à l'indicible, ok;
la poésie est une tentative sublime et impossible, ok.

Bon, quand est-ce qu'on mange?

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Convenablement écrit - dans un style très orné. Le défaut majeur réside dans le fait que Styron ne prend aucune distance vis-à-vis des stéréotypes de l'époque, tant sur le plan littéraire que social. Ainsi, le roman a plutôt mal vieilli. Des thèmes d'inspiration manifestement faulknérienne sont traités de façon très traditionnelle (condescendance envers les Noirs Américains, caractère prévisible des personnages, psychologie de bas étage, etc.). Mais des passages sont magnifiques et laissent entrevoir le talent de l'auteur, plus manifeste dans d'autres œuvres que celle-ci. Après tout, il n'avait que 26 ans quand il l'a écrite.


"Potter’s field for New York City is on an island in the Sound, half a mile east of the Bronx and just inside the city limits. The island is named Hart’s, after a deer which, in the later days of the English settlement, was seen to swim out to the place from the mainland and apparently to establish residence there, among the scrub-oak and willow groves. The hart was later short, so the legend goes, by a man named Thwaite who rowed out to the island in a skiff, with a big gun and a hankering for venison. It was this person, a gentleman of preternatural modesty, who named the island Hart’s, rather than Thwaite’s, and it was also he who made a tidy living for years by rowing picnickers out to the place; at that time there were sandy beaches there, woods, gentle groves – a perfect place, in short, to rest yourself, if you lived in the eighteenth century.
As the city expanded, however, it became necessary to find a newer and larger place to dispose of the friendless, nameless dead. Up until the middle of the last century, when Forty-Second Street was suburban and sheep still nibbled placidly around Columbus Circle, this purpose had been served by the old Pauper’s Burial Ground, which occupied what is now part of Washington Square. The dead do not remain long dead in big cities, or perhaps they become deader; at any rate, the markers were torn down, the square filed in with new earth and sidewalks laid across. They have become twice unremembered, those sleepers; once, though many bore no names, they had at least a sunny plot of ground. Now no one can mark them, and the nursemaids strolling along McDougal Street, aware only of the birds and the boys and the dusty April light, cannot know even the fact of those who rest beneath the asphalt – their bones shaken by the subways – and await the resurrection."

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Voir critique

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Mouais ... Beaucoup de méchanceté gratuite, une féroce misogynie, quelques stéréotypes, un réchauffé de Don Juan. On se demande où tout cela nous mène; ça divertit cinq minutes, puis ça finit par lasser.

Mais c'est rudement bien écrit.

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Relecture