Il y a tous ces livres de la rentrée. Ceux du printemps pas encore lus. Ian McEwan qui attend sa chronique, avec son Dans une coque de noix, merveilleux de cynisme et d’originalité. Et puis j’ai eu envie de relire La Grande Musique. Juste comme ça. Pour la beauté du texte. Pour son souffle. Pour le son de la cornemuse. J’aime ce qu’écrit Kirsty Gunn depuis Pluie. Lu en 1998. L’histoire aux yeux pâles. Featherstone. 44. Le garçon et la mer. La Grande Musique a des airs d’aboutissement. C’est le roman de son retour sur les terres d’Ecosse. C’est comme si elle était enfin arrivée là où elle devait aller, du côté des histoires de son enfance, de la mythologie familiale. Comme un retour aux sources.
La lande, le silence. Puis les premières notes. Le son de la cornemuse sur les Highlands désertes. Au milieu des collines, tâche blanche sur fond vert, la silhouette d’un vieil homme, un bébé emmailloté entre les bras. La néo-zélandaise Kirsty Gunn mêle ici souvenirs d’enfance, des récits sur l’Ecosse entendus, réentendus, étroitement mêlés à une lecture intime du paysage, un univers recréé autour de la musique, hommage ou tribu à la forme particulière du piobaireachd : « J’ai commencé à entendre la forme de La Grande Musique bien avant de commencer à écrire. Je pouvais sentir son rythme, si particulier ; c’est ensuite seulement qu’il m’est apparu évident que cette structure était celle du piobaireachd. C’est une forme musicale particulièrement intéressante, très belle, grave, étrange, réfléchie. Faire le lien était ici particulièrement facile ; la musicalité interne au texte reflète la structure. Mais ce n’est pas le piobaireachd qui a défini le texte ; c’est le piobaireachd qui s’est trouvé refléter au mieux le rythme que je voulais transmettre. »
Un chœur et ses répondants ; on pense à la tragédie grecque antique. « La manière dont le théâtre antique se focalise autour de l’idée de Praxis m’a toujours tout particulièrement intéressée. Il y a ce moment précis où les choses adviennent : on voit ce qui se passe, ce qui va se passer. On ne prétend pas à plus, pénétrer l’esprit des différents protagonistes ou prétendre ressentir ce qu’ils ressentent. On peut montrer et observer, entendre un personnage, ce qu’il dit aux autres, à lui-même. Tout est montré. Mais prétendre comprendre ? Jamais ». Les personnages apparaissent un à un pour dire leur histoire. Entre deux voix, Kirsty Gunn propose ce qu’elle présente comme des pièces d’archives, miraculeusement préservées. L’histoire de la Maison Grise ; de la famille ; le fonctionnement du piobaireachd ; un retour sur l’histoire écossaise ; des témoignages. Autant de « preuves » pour renforcer la parole des habitants de ce bout du monde. Au bout de la route, celui qui se perd n’est plus grand-chose face à l’immensité du paysage : Les collines ne renvoient que le même : Je ne m’en soucie pas, et l’étendue plate de la lande et le ciel. Je ne m’en soucie pas, disent-il, et l’eau le dit aussi, ces chutes noires qui sont bordées de tourbes, et les montagnes dans le lointain le disent, et vers le nord… Comme si tout le bel espace vide inutilisé lui criait dans le silence qui l’environne, criait à cet homme là au milieu du paysage, au milieu de toutes ces collines et de tout cet air. Que sa présence ne signifie rien.
La Maison Grise comme une frontière, dernier asile pour John Callum, rentré pour mourir, et qui tente d’achever une dernière composition en forme d’hommage, d’excuse, d’aveu : Lamento pour lui-même. La Grande Musique raconte l’histoire de ce père rattrapé par ses ratés, ses fuites, ses échecs. Comment composer une mélodie pour quelqu’un, le mettre à l’intérieur, quand vous ne le connaissez pas du tout ? La Grande Musique raconte ces lignées d’hommes qui s’ignorent, ces lignées de femmes bâtisseuses et paradoxalement ? infiniment plus libre. Kirsty Gunn dit les choses du quotidien, souvent oubliées du roman. L’histoire des femmes dans ces endroits est toujours une histoire discrète, elle se raconte discrètement. L’histoire de sa mère, la mère de sa mère. Toutes captées dans ces papiers sur la vie domestique. Embellissements. Variations. La Grande Musique est une histoire qui se mérite, une histoire de mémoire, de création, de pardon, loin du roman, plus proche de l’élégie, pour reprendre Virginia Woolf. Parce que la fiction se mérite : « J’aime l’idée qu’on ne puisse pas entrer en fiction juste comme ça, de manière anecdotique. Il faut pouvoir attendre une véritable expérience : être effrayé, intimidé, inspiré, ému, tomber amoureux ; ou bien se sentir désorienté, confus… Quel que soit le sentiment qu’on ressent, et même si on ne ressent rien, il faut pouvoir être transformé, enrichi, par l’expérience de fiction. »
Traduit de l’anglais par Jacqueline Odin - Editions Christian Bourgois
Interview en VO, réalisée au moment de la parution du roman chez Christian Bourgois. Un bel échange.
Considering you don’t like the word « novel », and The Big music is so particular, how will you describe this « fiction »?
Virginia Woolf always called her « novels » elegies - i think that s a very good way to think about my books, too.
You use the term « elegie ». But I didn’t even ask : what is it you dislike so much in the term « novel » ?
The thing about the « novel » is that it is very much tied up with ideas of the marketplace (its bourgeois origination, if you like - as well as ideas about fashion and relevance and commodity) and it is freighted with preconceptions about what it is. When one thinks about the novel - in the UK and America, for sure (I know it is different in France) when most people think about the novel - they have a certain idea of what it is. So…Elegy evokes another kind of idea. A tablet of text. A cry. A mourning. A thing that is ongoing, that echoes around us, that speaks for aching that is lost (the story itself) in a language that is living (the book itself.) It is also music and poetry…yes, Elegy is a rich rich and curious word - therefore I love it to describe the kind of fiction I care about!
Rereading 44, I found this short story : The pass, where Callum go back to his ancestors house. So, you already had The Big Music in mind since that time?
You are quite right about « The Pass » - i have had The Big Music in my mind for a very long time, and thinking about the characters and the place - and these thoughts came through in some earlier pieces.
The Big Music is your first scottish, even « highlander » fiction. You have quit New Zealand for a while : was it something with a specific meaning, writing about Scotland, the landscape, the unhabitants, the origins?
Writing about a named place was a first for me - but even in tis book the real is mixed in with the dream, the imagined, the invented. I was brought up as a Scot in New Zealand - when I was a child everything about the Scttish landscape - and particularly the Highland landscape was familiar to me. I drew upon that remembered material too, from childhood, in writing this book…
You were born in New Zealand, then you ended your studies in Oxford, and finally stayed in United Kingdom ; you now teach in Dundee, and I red you own a house in the Sutherland, where your family comes from. You often write about return ; it is a major theme in The Big Music, you also wrote short stories, This place you return to is home…Why did you choose to return to your origins? Where do you feel belonging to?
I am not sure writers ever « belong » anywhere except for in the pages of their work. My own sense of identity is liminal, marginal, a sort of two places at once feeling. A wider makes his or home « in words » Edward Said has said.
Your fiction is always so remarquable because of the style. Here in The Big Music, the form comes first. You structure the fiction as a piobaireachd with 4 movements : the main theme, the repetitions, the refrains, the rythm…Technically, how did you proceed to reconcile music and written ?
Form always informs style and content. If there is no sense of form the style and content are artificially included in the fictional project - and that artificiality can always be sensed and read. The form lies even below structure - it is the SENSE of the work, its underlying meaning and authenticity…Like I could hear the form of this book. I could sense its rhythms - and this long before I started to write it. And then, yes, the stricture was there in the structure of piobaireachd itself. The music of the book had its structure, of course - so in this instance, making that connection was easy!
What interested you so much in linking the musical and the written form ? Why did you choose this very specific and not well-known form ?
I chose piobaireachd for the reason above - the very music of it reflected the rhythm I wanted to convey. It is a very beautiful form of music - grave and thoughtful and strange…
Reading the book, I first thought about symphony, but also classical greek tragedy : the structure, few main actors, the chorus. Then, you explain that the scale for piobaireachd comes from the music played before the greek tragedy. You had this literary structure in mind, parallel to the musical one ?
Thank you for saying that about Greek Tragedy - you are first journalist to see that element in the book - and I am very concerned with the way the classical theatre focuses on the idea of the PRAXIS - the area in which things happen to people, showing what happens, and then showing what happens next - not presuming to do more than that - get inside people s heads and so, try and pretend you can feel what they feel - bit one can show and one can observe…One can listen to the sentences a character says - to others, or to him or herself…Again, to show. But to presume understanding? Never. And that s what the classical writers knew. And they also knew about the TRUTH of praxis - that by witnessing a play we were witnessing something real. Not something that was ABOUT something, but something that was ITSELF. I love that idea of a grave preparation for the going in to a work of art - like the preparations before that theatre of tragedy…That idea of coming in with an expectation that one is in for something serious and transformative…I love the idea that we might go into fiction like that…To be able to expect that kind of experience from it that might frighten or overawe us or intimidate or inspire or make us fall in love…O make us feel confused sometimes or intimate and knowing…That whatever we might feel, though, any or all of these things, we would be transformed, enlarged by the experience.
Did you ever fear the form could eclips the story ?
No - I hope not. But the reader will tell me! To me the form ensures the safety of a project - if you have the form right, if you know EXACTLY how and why you are going to make the work, then, to my mind, everything comes together in the right way, with the right balance of elements. The form here is elegiac and deep and epic in feeling…BuT I knew the protagonist could t convey those thing,(he is too conservative and private and so on - also he is dying and frail) and I knew , too, such scale could t be contained by me as a single narrator, or by any single person in the book…But I knew all the characters could somehow sing together to make a chord of sound. And I knew there was someone in the book who would be able to make sense of all the various « files » of it, the papers and the pieces and the transcripts. By writing the book I found out who that person is…
You create something with landscapes, characters, loneliness, isolation… is it your personal musical interpretation for highlands ?
Yes! The Highlands of Scotland are so very beautiful, with such poetry and must caught up in the hills and lonely places…
You have this whole family with fathers and sons unable to talk to each other. Then appear women ; they seem discreet but are the central characters, they hold the story. How did you imagine, create and then develop these characters?
See the answer above - re the « enabler » of the whole story - but the answer to the question is that I don t so much « create » characters as wait for them to present themselves to me. The more I wrote of Margaret, the more I saw how extraordinary she was - without her saying much at all, or apparently having an enormous role in the book. And Helen, of course, has a vital, central function…
You write that story of women is a discreet story. That reminds what you evoke in 44 : when you have children, the world becomes everyday life, family, but is also full of possibilities. Is that your way to define women’s life?
Yes - 44 and this book are very linked, I think - and it s nice of you to say that and see it. Domestic life is a huge part of our lives - yet its small contingencies remain, on the whole, outside the world of novels. That’s why I don t describe my books as novel, perhaps!
Maternity takes a huge place in your texts - and you always wrote, about children. Becoming a mother changed the way you write, the way your characters « present themselves to you » ?
I HAVE always written about children - they’re there in the short stories Le Pays Ou L’on Revient Toujours - and that was ages before I had children. And yes, maternity interests me greatly as part of creative process…
There is the fiction but not only : you give the reader a text, appendices, footnotes, maps, plans, interviews. There is a short film, with music created for the book and readings by Brian Cox. What leads you to create something so proteiform ? Did you imagine such a scale when you began to write ?
Yes - there are all these things - and now an installation with music and characters speaking and artwork…A sort of composition of people and physical elements and music…It s called The Lament Room, and it s just been shown at the Royal Society in Edinburgh…It s amazing - all set in the little « Box Room » - the single bedroom downstairs where John Sutherland dies. if you send me your postal address, I ‘ll send you a copy of the brochure about it…
The introduction for The Big Music has is own fiction : it appears as created with documents you collected and gathered to form the whole story. So the reader is wondering : what is real ? Where begins the fiction ? There is an unsettled border. You like this ambiguity ?
Yes - I want the reader to have all these ambiguities - like life, we can never be certain of it. I hate books that are stuffed full of all these certainties - like so many stories are. They are so smug and full and sales. I love the what -ifs, the hows…The ???And, just because it is ambiguous about what if fact and what is fiction that doesn’t make the book less real. Becvause everything in this book is real.The book is real.
You evoke these books full of certainties you hate. What, who, do you like to read - Virginia Woolf, I guess, but more ?
The reading list - wow. That would take too much time - but yes, Woolf, of course, and Katherine Mansfield and the Modernists and all the Southern writers like Flannery O Connor and Carson McCulluers and Walker Percy…And -for contemporary _ James Kelman and Cormac McCarthy and Jayne Anne Phillips…Oh there are hundreds…
John Callum needs secret for creativity. He has this place that no one is supposed to know, which is an « indefinite space ». Is this something you personally need to write ? Or just a way to transport the reader in the indefinite space of the fiction ?
The space for creativity exists outside the real world. It is the place where we « step off into vacancy » to use a phrase from The Big Music. I have a study in London overlooking beautiful gardens (that remind me of France, by the way!) and I write there. But the space for creating is inside my head. It s an indefinite place that s not anywhere in the word…It s out there somewhere, and right here, inside…
Today, if I want to listen to piobaireachd, where should I go ?
There are good competitions in Brittany that my father has been to. I shall ask him where you should go. But really you should come to Scotland and I could take you to the Highland Games and you would hear some good piobaireachd being played. On the whole - it is a music for living time, and is not recorded. But I shall send you « The Lament For Himself » - the piobaireachd from the book, so you can begin with that…?