Temps machine

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Temps machine is a book by the French writer François Bon that was published in 1993 and consists of six thematically loosely related texts in which memories of work in different factories are presented.

content

Temps machine brings together six short narrative texts, between 10 and 25 pages long, in which the places, machines and gestures of the world of the factory are described, which François Bons understood as disappearing in the post-industrial age. According to him, with you not only disappears an extraordinarily violent form of exploitation, but also a pride in the savoir faire of the workers and the beauty of the machines.

Structure and style

Despite their common theme and despite the numerous elements that can be found in the various texts, all six texts retain their autonomy. Each of the texts is based on a different principle of coherence formation, expresses a different attitude towards the factory.

The specialty of Temps machine is the special relationship that the text builds up between the writing and what is being described. The text is about the factory, but its real starting point is not the factory itself, as a sociological reality, but the memory images that François Bon associates with the time when he worked in different factories. In this context he speaks of a "huge plastic reserve of images" and such images of places, machines, situations and people make up the book. Through the work of memory and the literary form, these images are brought into the public area of ​​a book, whereby the individual memory receives a more general meaning and scope and thus this working world "inscribes for memory", as François Bon puts it.

As in Sortie d'usine , the stylistic principle in Temps machine , the structural and concrete violence that the factory does to people, is to be done to language at the level of writing and to develop a rough, sometimes bumpy or choppy language.

History of origin

These six texts, with which François Bon returns to a subject that he had described in his first novel, Sortie d'usine from 1982 , were written around the same time, in the years 1991 to 1992, and were not originally for one joint publication planned. Some of the texts were written during a stay in Stuttgart , where François Bon was staying on an author's grant from the Robert Bosch Foundation . One of the texts, "Retour usine", deals with the production of generators in a factory of the Bosch Group .

About their creation, François Bon says that he wrote the texts on the basis of dreams and memory images each in one night:

“Je n'avais pas l'intention d'écrire à nouveau sur cet univers de l'usine… Mais j'avais toujours ces rêves, des souvenirs occultés; à quatre reprises, il m'est revenu des écrits là-dessus. [...]. The six chapitres du bouquin sont nés comme cela, en une nuit chacun. Je n'avais pas l'intention de les réunir dans un livre, jusqu'au jour où je me suis rendu compte qu'il fallait passer au stade supérieur. Là c'était tout un travail de mémoire personnelle. Là-dessus, sur ce sujet, tout discours est disloqué. Ne restent que quelques images… »

Text output

  • Temps machine . Lagrasse: Verdier, 1993. 108 pages. (A German translation is currently not available.)

literature

Reviews
  • Aliette Armel. "L'enfer de l'usine", in: Magazine littéraire No. 310, May 1993, pp. 100-101.
  • James T. Day. "François Bon, Temps machine", in: The French Review Vol. 68, No. 2, Dec. 1994, pp. 364-365.
  • Jean-Baptiste Harang. "François Bon, Temps machine", in: Liberation , March 25, 1993.
  • Jean-Claude Lebrun, "François Bon, Temps machine", in: L'Humanité , March 31, 1993.
items
  • Jan Baetens, "Mot: travail, adjectif: bon, Notes sur le style de Temps machine", in: Esperienze Letterarie Vol. 21.1, 1996.
  • Dominique Viart, "Inscrire pour mémoire: Temps machine", in: Scherzo No. 7, 1999.
  • Sam DiIorio, "Chaîne et Chaîne: Representation as Corrosion in François Bon's Daewoo", in: SubStance Vol. 35, No. 3, 2006, pp. 5-22.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Cover text, French original: "immense réserve plastique d'images".
  2. ↑ Temps machine, 1993, p. 74: "inscrire pour mémoire".
  3. ↑ "La phrase, elle-même mutilée, exhibait les brisures à la semblance de celle des corps et des cœurs", writes Dominique Viart in his article "Inscrire pour mémoire: Temps machine", in: Scherzo No. 7, 1999, p . 45.
  4. ↑ Three of the texts were previously published separately in journals.
  5. ^ "L'écriture au corps à corps", interview with Th. Guichard, Le Matricule des Anges No. 3, April-May 1993, p. 2.