Munro, la nouvelle et la critique

Je viens de terminer la lecture de Runaway, un recueil de nouvelles de l’auteure canadienne Alice Munro, et comme c’est le cas à chaque fois que je la lis, je suis sur le cul. Ça a l’air bête à dire comme ça mais c’est la meilleure image que j’arrive à trouver pour vous exprimer l’effet qu’un talent pareil peut me faire.

En faisant des recherches sur Munro je suis tombée sur une critique de son travail écrite par Jonathan Franzen dans le New York Times. Franzen, lui-même romancier, a rédigé une critique absolument géniale, presque aussi brillante en fait que l’objet de son attention. Il s’agit d’un texte plutôt mordant où il explique en 8 points pourquoi la renommée de Munro n’est pas à la hauteur de son immense talent. Un exemple:

1. Munro’s work is all about storytelling pleasure. The problem here being that many buyers of serious fiction seem rather ardently to prefer lyrical, tremblingly earnest, faux-literary stuff.

En plus de réussir à bien décrire la beauté du travail de Munro, Franzen chante aussi les louanges de la nouvelle comme style littéraire, un style malheureusement sous-estimé. Il réussit du même coup à faire un texte critique sur la critique littéraire telle qu’elle est pratiquée de nos jours.

Je me permets de citer de longs extraits ici, au cas où vous seriez trop paresseux pour aller lire l’article en entier.

When I close my eyes and think about literature in recent decades, I see a twilight landscape in which many of the most inviting lights, the sites that beckon me to return for a visit, are shed by particular short stories I’ve read. I like stories because they leave the writer no place to hide. There’s no yakking your way out of trouble; I’m going to be reaching the last page in a matter of minutes, and if you’ve got nothing to say I’m going to know it. I like stories because they’re usually set in the present or in living memory; the genre seems to resist the historical impulse that makes so many contemporary novels feel fugitive or cadaverous. I like stories because it takes the best kind of talent to invent fresh characters and situations while telling the same story over and over. All fiction writers suffer from the condition of having nothing new to say, but story writers are the ones most abjectly prone to this condition. There is, again, no hiding. The craftiest old dogs, like Munro and William Trevor, don’t even try.

Reading Munro puts me in that state of quiet reflection in which I think about my own life: about the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve done and haven’t done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death. She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion. For as long as I’m immersed in a Munro story, I am according to an entirely make-believe character the kind of solemn respect and quiet rooting interest that I accord myself in my better moments as a human being.

Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There’s always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can’t. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you’re unhappy about the hatred that’s been unleashed in your heart, you might try imagining what it’s like to be the person who hates you; you might consider the possibility that you are, in fact, the Evil One yourself; and, if this is difficult to imagine, then you might try spending a few evenings with the most dubious of Canadians. Who, at the end of her classic story »The Beggar Maid, » in which the heroine, Rose, catches sight of her ex-husband in an airport concourse, and the ex-husband makes a childish, hideous face at her, and Rose wonders »How could anybody hate Rose so much, at the very moment when she was ready to come forward with her good will, her smiling confession of exhaustion, her air of diffident faith in civilized overtures? »