"Where are your deaths?" is the question asked by the novelist Hélène Frappat to residents of the city of Saint-Denis. She drew a luminous account of it, presented at the Basilica of Saint-Denis.
Real machine to invent possibilities, «New Worlds», the program launched by the Ministry of Culture, continues to shake up all the codes, and that’s good. The latest example, «Ville haute, ville basse», the creation of Hélène Frappat, novelist, essayist, translator, film critic, borrows from many disciplines, literature and scenography, history and sociology, many more, without being able to detect the pre-eminence of one over the other. Could his project not instead be summed up in a simple question put to the inhabitants of the city of Saint-Denis, his fellows, his sisters: "Where are your dead?"
With the Cathedral Basilica of Saint-Denis as ' echo chamber » (doesn’t its crypt house the necropolis of the kings of France?), the novelist first set out to do « give birth » these women of one of the most intimate stories of all, the place of their dead, then to draw from it an exciting story, which restores to these anonymous testimonies a body, a voice, a humanity. A ' narrative ” – she insists on the word – where everything is true and nothing is “ morbid ". " I was there to listen as much as I could and to make every story a life story. Because when you ask about death, it’s life of course that you hear ” says Hélène Frappat. The unique performance of this original and luminous performance with six female recitalists, a singer, a musician and an organist took place on September 29 in the Cathedral Basilica of Saint-Denis. It will continue on November 7 at the Ricard Foundation. Interview with Hélène Frappat.
We all carry our necropolis (Gustave Flaubert)
What did you like most about the New Worlds program?
It is the importance of national monuments in which it was possible to inscribe his project of creation. Since I did not have much time to write mine, I invested a territory, that of the Seine-Saint-Denis, in which I worked several times, and where I keep a strong memory of a residence at the Avicenne hospital in Bobigny. For New Worlds, my wish was to make the Basilica of Saint-Denis an integral part of the project. This, for two reasons. First, because it is a place that already contained a story, which obviously belongs to the great national novel. In this context, the challenge for me, whose job it is to give birth to stories, mine and those of others, was to create a new story in this place that already contained one. On the other hand, and this goes back to my obsessions as an author and as a human being, the Basilica of Saint Denis is also the royal necropolis, it contains dead people, lying people, and therefore ghosts. In his correspondence, Gustave Flaubert writes that we all carry our necropolis I was haunted by that sentence. In my opinion, the narrative and the necropolis are superimposed, the visible coexist with the invisible, the living with the dead.
This brings us to your project…
From the outset, I have thought about women’s stories. Wherever we are in the world, women have this role of carrying stories. For “Upper Town, Lower Town”, I chose to collect their words in two places on either side of the basilica, one a neighbourhood house, which is far from it; the other, which is an extension of it: the boarding school for girls of the Legion of Honour, created by Napoleon. I did not know this place but I was interested, especially because it is surrounded by secrets. What is written there are individual destinies that have to do with the great history (the condition of admission is to have a father or grandfather who has been distinguished by the military medal or the legion of honour). In fact, in the stories I have heard from these young girls, the silence of their ancestors is often mentioned, and it is very striking. As for the other residents of Saint-Denis, whom I met in the neighbourhood house, naturally, it’s not the same story. These women have often lived in exile, and this is also an issue that interested me a great deal. What do we do with the dead that weren’t buried in the right place, and that we couldn’t remember?
The visible coexists with the invisible, the living with the dead
You just talked about your work as “ give birth to stories How did it go with the residents of Saint-Denis?
Above all, I explained my ethics. It is not every day that a writer asks you: "Where are your deaths?" This naturally required explanations. Then I told them that the question of the place of the dead was a question that interested me insofar as each person to whom I asked it was the only one who could answer it. As a writer, that was the biggest difficulty, finding the right tone, the right way to say it. This question referred in cascade to those of subjectivity and freedom. Accessing a type of statement that only you can make is probably a lifelong journey. We had to restore a specificity, a precision. The other issue was to pretend to be invisible. “ An omniscient invisible », this is how Nabokov talks about Flaubert that I always come back to. I talk about it in a text about Nabokov that I am writing for The Cahiers de l'Herne. That’s right. I was there to listen as much as I could to make every story a life story. Because when you ask about death, of course you hear about life.
For that to happen, your interlocutors had to feel confident…
Listening and looking are the very method of writing. This can take various forms, such as surprising a private word on the street or taking on a role that could be described as a public writer. During the performance at the Basilica of Saint Denis, most of the reciters who told their story were convinced that they had written it themselves. This is how I see literature, as an exercise in hospitality, a form of intense empathy. I was referring earlier to Nabokov, well, he has that as well. In a form that may seem colder and detached, there is this idea of obsessive observation and listening without judgment.
Finally, for most human beings, the question of death is that of religion. Now, there are an infinite number of strata between the relationship of each to religion. I wanted micro-details, specificities, so that the people who attended the performance were able to have a vision of each person who was “there”, both of the one who said a text and the missing persons she could mention. It was not necessary to switch to generality, it was a difficulty for the literary elevation of the text.
That’s how I see literature: an exercise in hospitality, a strong form of empathy
At the end of September, «Lower Town, Upper Town» was represented at the Basilica of Saint-Denis. What was the mechanism put in place to make these voices heard?
The administrator of the Basilica was very open to the project, very welcoming. Nevertheless, in such a place, with a short rehearsal time, this performance was a tour de force. There were six recitalists, as well as a singer and musician Olivier Mellano, who composed the music. I wanted a singer on the side of the dead. I wrote songs that intertwined the stories and were a kind of echo on the other side of the world. The reciters did an incredible job with the help of an actor coach. The organist of the basilica played live at the same time as the musician, and accompanied the singer. The sound engineer also did an absolutely magnificent job: the organ was several tens of meters from us, and yet he managed to create an intimacy of the sound.
How was this representation received?
At the end of the performance, and I was very touched by it, people immediately came to me and told me their own story. Their stories had nothing to do with those they had heard, but a detail, a specific element, brought them together. This is the principle of rebirth in literature. Representation has become a kind of spiritual exercise.
Does this project continue to irrigate your work today?
It is difficult to give a concrete answer because books always follow a long process, but it is certain that «New Worlds» still lives in me. And even though I didn’t do that, this project kept me busy for a year.It was sometimes a bit harsh, because I was the guardian of these deaths, especially during the summer when I wrote the texts. Such work leaves no one unscathed. In the immediate future, the evening will have an extension at the Ricard Foundation on November 7.
Hélène Frappat on six dates
2007: The liaison officer (Allia)
2009: Breaking and entering (Allia)
2019: The last river (Actes Sud)
2020: curator of the exhibition Love is a fiction presented at the IMEC
2021: Mount Fuji doesn’t exist (Actes Sud)
2023: Three women disappear (to be published in January at Actes Sud). A special evening dedicated to Three women disappear, will take place on January 23, at 8 pm, at the MK2 Institute in Paris