“I like splitting games”

Chantal Thomas is one of those beings caressed by freedom. This caress is its signature, metabolic and poetic. At 79 years old, the one who will never lock herself into one genre has decided to publish the diary she kept forty-two years ago, during those months spent teaching French literature at the University of Tucson, in Arizona. While we follow her from her arrival at the Tucson airport on January 13, 1982 until June of the same year, we are escorted from start to finish by Marianne de Marivaux – the subject of Chantal Thomas’s course, Marianne s imposes itself day after day as the common thread of this journal as lively, light and wonderfully offbeat as a laughing stream in the desert. We will remember this night when the reading of The Life of Marianne protected it from the extremely noisy savagery of its neighbors; in the morning, when everything is destroyed, the guard of the residence asks him: “You didn’t hear anything?”

– If any.

– So what ?

– I read. »

Six pages later, we learn that as a first lesson she offered her students the following reflection: “To what extent can reading protect us from the outside? » The description of the surface of the swimming pool at its accommodation – which changes several times – documents its indoor weather; At “Chateau Apartment Hotels”, the swimming pool, shaped like a bean, is “smooth and opaque, like a successful suicide”. In the next residence, the swimming pool, which, “does not call for thoughts of suicide”, “is hollowed out by whirlwinds of clarity”, she noted on January 28. She talks about swimming pools, therefore, but also dreams.

Nikos Aliagas: “Photography was like therapy”

Like this one: a course by Lévi-Strauss. “In the stands all the French intelligentsia. Philippe Sollers, a trumpet on his lips, passes between the listeners playing jazz […]. He stops in front of me, still with trumpet in his mouth, and in jazzy inspiration. I’m naked. I see myself smooth and tanned. A bit like an Egyptian silhouette. » In waking life, one evening, March 27, “without thinking about it”, she finds herself making love with Guillaume. Her lovers are not all monitored by intensity: we meet an Eduardo who inflicts on her “some manipulations possibly likely to evoke, for those who have already experienced it, the sexual act”… in the room right next to his mother’s.

So goes, runs, flies the pen of Chantal Thomas, whose sentences charged with electricity are like benevolent lightning which have the power, with a single stroke, to change the color of the sky of writing. An example ? This cock-and-the-donkey comment: “Depressed not being able to sell the car and not having sex. » We find the writer in her Parisian apartment; a suitcase lying in the entrance, poppy red like her nails, its owner loves the time between trips. She walks her sagacious lightness between New York (in spring), Nice (where she writes) and Paris; “it’s like that at the moment but actually I don’t know…”, we feel that she does not want to stop a frame, “It’s not worth it, it’s better to let it happen…”.

LA TRIBUNE SUNDAY – In this book, you ask yourself: “What makes the ardor to travel? His burn? Of all moments without hierarchy. Of all the encounters. » Your pen wants to thwart habit. What you call ” newspaper “, it’s much more or much less than that…

CHANTAL THOMAS – We don’t know, and that’s good! Many objectively very important events are not there. But the slightest flower that may appear occupies its place.

The cactus flowers get the cover – which reproduces a postcard you sent to your mother and maternal grandmother.

The miracle of this flowering over thousands of supposedly sterile kilometers makes the fleshy sensuality of the petal of the cactus flower even stronger. I really had a revelation about this place, Arizona. The thing that upset me, I would like to pass it on…

A journal as lively, light and offbeat as a laughing stream in the desert

The postcards you inserted contribute to this. They are almost all written jointly by your mother and her mother…

Even though they didn’t live in the same place! It’s disturbing, isn’t it? For me, it was just one woman. My grandmother was the mother. I like that these cards make us feel this physical, material, sensual, colorful presence which expresses the texture of Arizona…

By reading you, we take a shot of freedom…

I want air to pass between my sentences; we must try to allow a freedom to exist which is not a taking of power against something, but rather a certain openness to the world…

What it feels like is that you are not afraid…

Perhaps because I discovered society after a long time of childhood in a small provincial town on the water’s edge, Arcachon… I experienced freedom first of all as a physical freedom in the absence of fear, because the pool was a space as if designed for me, both open to the winds, to the scent of iodine, and non-threatening. I kept a passionate eye for the details and for the event that we don’t expect. I feel amazement, but fear, really no!

This does not mithridatize against danger. At the turn of a paragraph, we learn that, during a trip to Djerba, you were stoned with your friend Sandra for having refused to dance with a boy and having preferred Sandra. Isn’t that scary?

If we don’t have the presentiment of fear, the event occurs, it is violent, and that’s all; we are not afraid the next time. [Elle parle en prenant le temps de regarder ce qui vient, en elle et en vous ; curieuse de ce qui va la charmer l’instant d’après, elle a un sourire d’avance, souvent doublé d’un rire léger comme une bulle de savon.]

In Virginia Woolf, which I am diving into at the moment, the writing is anchored in anguish. Anxiety which is the matrix, the matter. In the same way that fear is also a strength, the absence of fear can be a form of stupidity, an inability to see beyond it. I’m crazy about Kafka’s diary which is woven with fears. A daily prose which almost without our knowing reveals a crack, and the fantastic emerges; I love that. Often it is fear that produces this crack…

What is your place?

I think it’s extreme attention to what’s happening. A non-relation to habit, which allows a slight unexpected event to arise… This vigilance is like fear but without the fear!

Are you afraid of the forces of the invisible? When you mention the “Colorado doll” purchased in Boulder in a street fair after it has been abandoned, we perceive a form of fetishism…

Since childhood, I have considered dolls as magical delegations of the forces that I try to avoid, or to capture… I have a natural relationship with games of doubling, with stories that double everyday life… When I travel, I buy dolls; I’m going to show you the most wonderful one, I found it in Japan, in Kone.

[Elle revient avec une poupée-œuf dessinée sur un bois rond, doux, dodu et lisse, dans un camaïeu de beige rosé, avec des yeux qui n’ont pas renoncé à la candeur, sans être dupes pour autant, juste un très léger cillement.]

For me, that’s genius! She is self-assured, but she doesn’t judge us. This straightener is incredibly spiritualized; we don’t stumble over it, we can enter it.

Have you ever wanted to have a child – to introduce them to dolls?

I felt without hesitation that it wasn’t for me, that it wouldn’t fit my lifestyle. Being with yourself is already a whole story! The break with the man I call Franck in this book is around this question…

When you decide to leave, is it always “in the name of the infinity of the world and its seductions”, as you write it?

It’s a talisman. It’s as if I had signed a pact with the infinity of possibilities, a sort of magical contract stipulating the requirement for future discoveries…

Between men and women, have you made your choice?

I like both. We can’t say that anymore without sounding like an absolute slut!

You have written a lot about tainted childhood; What inspires you about the complaint for “violent rape of a minor under 15 years old by a person in authority” filed against the director Benoît Jacquot – with whom you worked – by the actress Judith Godrèche? And the book* by actress Isild Le Besco where she describes the destructive influence this man thirty-six years her senior had over her?

It’s such a complicated subject… Benoît Jacquot said a thousand times that he loved young girls, that that’s what inspired him and that he filmed in a state of love. Of course this is very objectionable. They, for their part, wanted to be loved and chosen by the one who has power, believing they could not exist outside of his influence; now they are struggling with this… These are essential struggles. But we feel that there is also a violence among some of these fighters which will turn against everyone. If we want society to change, it is important to do it together, with men. The key is education.

* Say true (Of Christmas).

Journal of Arizona and Mexico, Chantal Thomas, Seuil, 192 pages, 21 euros.