The man is modest, likable, almost inconspicuous—far from the image one might (rightly or wrongly) have of the Director of a powerful national daily. But is it the former Senior Reporter and new head of the newspaper “Le Monde” who, this Saturday at the Fnac in Nice, discusses his book “Cinema Kisses,” or is it the novelist awarded by the “Fémina” jury in 2007? There’s a clear “separation” between the two roles, he assures us. As a “journalist,” Eric Fottorino explains, he obsessively “confronts the facts.” As a novelist, he continues, “I do not use documents.” Those, he believes, risk becoming “lumps in the narrative” because of the great temptation to stuff the work with “learned things.” A direct reference from the author to André Gide: “to write, one must lose consciousness.”
There is still a connection between the two, he would eventually “admit,” once made comfortable by an audience that appreciates the return of a local son. The novel allows him to “retreat from the world”: a phonetic ambiguity that’s appreciated at its true value. It also provides him a “detour to cross reality.” The more new and significant responsibilities at “Le Monde” are imposed on him, the more his novels seem to become intimate, the more they delve into his psyche, and the darker they also become. The “engines” of his writing, he confirms, besides “the influence of Bernanos,” are “cracks,” “sufferings,” “identity disturbances,” and issues of “filiations,” all seen through the “eyes of a child observing adults.” Hence a plot that develops a play of incessant ambivalence between shadow and light. Consider this: a story of a father, a photographer on movie sets, who captures in black and white the faces of famous actresses, a male figure—whose banality and passivity almost tip him into the realm of the anti-hero—, a man in search of a maternal imago, compulsively swept away by a mysterious encounter on the very day of his father’s death in an obviously “dark” room of the Latin Quarter. A psychic transgression that will be followed, at the end of the book, by others much more physical. The choice—again a chance rather determined—of a woman who attracts him because she eludes him, the only stance capable of arousing desire by reminding him of the painful and eternal absence of the mother. Tragedy, as one might guess, is inevitably at the end of the path. Even so, Eric Fottorino reassures us that this “eighth novel” is “a bit more optimistic than the previous ones.” We breathe a sigh of relief!
A narrative that could become tiresome with the repetition, the rehashing of countless “clichés” in the form of strolls and encounters in the most famous places of the Capital. But what is shown is actually intended to conceal. Each time, on these sites from which tourists generally snatch postcards, the author projects a kind of veil or, to follow his father’s steps, diverts the brightness to his advantage. His father placed the women he met in full light in a café where he was a regular. The author repeats the feat but conceals in the back-light the keys to understanding his past: could this be why Eric Fottorino does not fully assume his desire and substitutes for Deauville in “A Man and a Woman,” the less “viewed” seaside resort of Cabourg? To be grasped in their deep, unconscious meaning, as much by metonymy as by metaphor, these situations and “cliché” moments also refer to the photos powerfully charged with symbol and meaning. Those of a father who constantly makes a “return,” those still of a feeling of “déjà vu.” In memory of a glance surreptitiously cast upon a print, among all those scattered throughout the paternal apartment.
In a conversation with the Academician Michel Déon, Eric Fottorino solidifies a feeling already present in himself: writers should not tell everything. “What is beautiful,” the one who now lives in an old rectory in Ireland would have explained to him, “is this part of the unknown, this space of imagination offered to the freedom of the reader.” Especially when the writer himself, like his audience, is steeped in uncertainties about the path taken, the direction, and the final destination. Are the cinema kisses feigned or authentic? And for whom? A work all in delicate palimpsests where several readings of life are successively deciphered.
Eric Fottorino, “Cinema Kisses,” Editions NRF-Gallimard, 2007, 190 p., 14.50 euros
