Jean Carrière

Jean Carrière

Jean Carrière (born August 6, 1928 in Nîmes , † May 7, 2005 ibid) was a French writer and essayist .

Life

Jean Carrière was born in 1928 in Nîmes in Languedoc, the son of a pianist and a conductor. He was a bad student, at least at times. However, the father recognized his artistic talent early on. Jean's initial interest was in music. In 1953 he went to Paris to become a music critic, but returned home after only three months due to a psychosomatic illness. By now it had become clear to him that literary writing was his true calling. His father then put him in touch with Jean Giono . Jean Carrière spent six years (1954–1960) there to learn from his idol and mentor . He earned his living by selling records and doing odd jobs. Giono gave him the first opportunity to publish two stories in the regional literary magazine Cahier de l'artisan . Recognizing his instability, he obliged him to perform disciplinary tasks, in particular to publish a Giono biography, which Carrière did not complete until 1985.

His actual literary career did not begin until 1967 with his first novel Retour à Uzès (Return to Uzès), for which he received the prize of the Académie française . Five years later (1972) his second and most important novel was published: L'épervier de Maheux (The Sparrowhawk of Maheux), for which he received the Prix ​​Goncourt . That made him famous in France and far beyond. The book had a circulation of more than 2 million copies and it has been translated into 14 languages. This made Carrière one of the most successful Goncourt Prize winners ever. But the death of his father and further strokes of fate as well as the permanent feeling of excessive workload plunged him into deep depression. He published other novels, but they could no longer achieve the sales success of his first work. Only with the autobiography Le prix d'un Goncourt (The Prize) did he achieve a certain literary success in 1987.

At the same time, Carrière also developed activities in other media. On behalf of France Culture des French Radio, he recorded fifteen conversations with his literary foster father, Jean Giono. He made films for French television ORTF .

Carrière's work was gradually being forgotten, it was hardly read any more. Jean Carrière, who never left his homeland in the vicinity of the Cèvennes, which inspired all his work, lived in Domessargues near Nîmes until his death on May 7, 2005 .

It should be noted that despite the high level of awareness in France, the author and work have so far received little attention in Germany. He is not represented in the current German literature reference works.

plant

The sparrowhawk from Maheux

In this book, Carrière tells the story of the poor farming family Reilhan in the Cevennes in the south of France , who only get by on their remote Maheux homestead until things go downhill inexorably and the family finally falls apart. It takes place in the period before and after World War II, but especially in the mid-1950s. The author takes the reader into the strange world of the mountains, into the highlands , which seem to be more in the far north or in bygone times than in real proximity to the cheerful Mediterranean sun.

For a long time the family hoped to be able to secure their existence in the inhumane nature of the mountains through perseverance and hard work. But like in a bad dream, fate always only blows an icy wind towards them. The reasons for the migration of many highland dwellers to the warm cities of the south or the rich regions of the north quickly become apparent in this novel. So eating the Reilhans normally consists of only chestnut soup and bread, plus the occasional meager flesh of a self-made Jay and sour wine. Frugality and the ability to improvise are the virtues of the highland dwellers that are essential for survival - qualities that can change over time into devotion to fate and stupidity. Carrière describes this dichotomy using the example of the highland women:

The women are black from head to toe, and at the age of twenty they mourn their own youth. Constantly struggling with an existence that captivates them just as much as their clothes ... they give birth to their children hastily between two washing days, they bury their dead between two harvests, they never have what is available in privileged circles “for a moment to themselves " is called. ... Without transition they slide from a withered youth, as if burned out by an evil sun or emaciated by a fever, over into an active and ageless drought. At the end of their life they take up no more space in the house than a stool. You leave them in a corner and don't touch them until they go out easily.

The story begins with a deception: The last resident of Maheux, known as “Reilhan the Silent”, writes empathetic love letters to a distant cousin, the flowery texts of which he “takes” from the features of old newspapers in order to lure her into the wasteland of the mountains. Blinded by the poetry of what she believes is a noble character, she agrees to the marriage from afar. But the disappointment is bitter when she sees the poor conditions on site and has to realize that her taciturn husband is exactly the opposite of what the letters promised her. However, going back is no longer possible. Two sons are born, first Abel, who is strong as a bear but mentally retarded, and then Joseph - normally intelligent, but weak and lacking drive. Nonetheless, Joseph is the mother's favorite son from the start. After falling from a bridge, Joseph limps permanently. His mother secretly nurses him back with high-quality, expensive food that she withholds from others. In the end, she helps him - on behalf of her own wishes - to escape the wasteland of the mountains and to find a livelihood as an employee in a parish in the valley. When Josef sees the grandiose mountain panorama during a stay in Switzerland and gains insights into the beautiful, rich and educated world of the bourgeoisie, he begins to feel ashamed of his poor origins. He quickly developed an internal and external distance to his family. His home visits become rare and the mother gradually begins to wither. Abel, on the other hand, the coarse forest worker who comes after his father, endures the harshness of the climate and the privations of the highlands well. Only in the company of people does he feel insecure. After the father died and the brother moved away, he married the sullen Marie, the daughter of Depuech, his father's best friend, who was widely scorned by men. After that, it initially looks as if the two outsiders could start a new life in the mountains. But strokes of fate do not allow that. Marie has a miscarriage and cannot have any more children afterwards. Her mother-in-law - no longer normal for a long time - begins to dirty herself and to behave hostile towards Marie. The following year there is a major drought. The cistern in the yard is empty quickly and the search for water becomes an existential question. The last battle of the Reilhans for Maheux begins.

Although written in an exciting way, the real fascination of the book - that is, what distinguishes it from other books - is not so much the specificity of the plot, the story of the Reilhans and the details of their poor material and problematic social environment, but rather the manner the way this book is written, Carrière's distinctive writing style. This shows influences from Giono, but is very independent: B. long sentences with many individual observations and associations, immersed in a flood of flowing images, metaphors and comparisons. Precise naturalistic descriptions in lyrical language characterize larger parts of the work. Even things that seem banal are described by him with great devotion - in a style that the French call "flamboyant" (flaming). Example:

In the middle of August ... one sees the misery of things, one sees, as it were, their reverse side emaciated by the violence of the light, ash-colored paths, dirty surfaces of the rancid yellow of the African steppes, walls armored with slate that reflect the feverish, lead-colored shine of a thunderstorm day; Sheep farms crushed to the ground by the weight of huge slate bricks, on which the sun burns down and the debris of which pale like shoulder blades on the ground; Hamlets, eaten up here and there by hollow, thorn-blackened buildings, their whitewashed facades twist upwards in a busy nesting manner in order to be able to see what is happening in the distance.

His descriptions convey directly and yet poetically exaggerated what the protagonists must see, experience and suffer on site. What is used as a backdrop or decorative background wallpaper in "normal" novels often becomes the foreground in this book for many pages. But these are not boring digressions , on the contrary: the actual story often pales in comparison. The fragrance-filled, intense beauty of the mountain spring, the relentless heat and drought of summer and above all the force of the long winter with ice and cold, snow and storm, which leads to the loss of sight, orientation and finally hope and reason portrayed in the book with such a vivid, metaphor-saturated expressiveness that it is difficult to find comparable authors.

Similar to Jean Giono and Julien Gracq, Jean Carrière is a master of the description of external worlds, an unusual element of the novel in France, which is quickly dismissed by the pointed pens of literary critics in Paris with negative terms such as natural poetry and regionalism . It is overlooked that Carrière's book also deals with the basic components of human existence: work, rest, eating, praying, sleeping, illness, future plans, travel, sexuality, marriage, birth and death - things that are by no means the result of regional living conditions are, but can be generalized. The unbiased reader notices very quickly that the wishes, dreams, fears and disappointments of the Reilhans are representative - that they are different from his own in the concrete details, but not in principle.

It is also impressive how Carrière manages to penetrate very deeply into his characters, to credibly trace mental and emotional inner worlds. Just listening to the narrator, the reader gets into the protagonists' worldview almost seamlessly, starting with the mother, then Josef, finally the father, not skipping the family doctor, in order to see life and meaning through the eyes of the simple-minded Abel. With such changes of perspective, Carrière succeeds in bringing each of his characters to life; at the same time it shows that everyone has a logical, coherent concept of life for themselves. When trying to understand the protagonists' different views and desires and the resulting conflicts of interest, the reader realizes that terms like good and bad don't help: their scope is too limited, the claim too idealistic. In Carrière's novel there are no heroes, no one who can permanently win the reader's sympathy, and no happy ending either . The world will not be saved; it just keeps turning. Hard, sober realism against a background of extraordinary poetry characterizes the book, in which prose and poetry are convincingly combined.

The price

In the autobiographical work Der Preis , Jean Carrière traces important passages in his private and professional life. The book begins with a description of the scene in Paris where he and his wife and friends waited on the radio on November 21, 1972 for the result of the commission that would decide the winner of the Prix Goncourt. Carrière hardly thinks of any chances, and so winning the most important French literary award comes as a complete surprise: overnight he becomes a media star and his life changes radically. Carrière describes what is now beginning with:

The day exploded in my face, most deliciously murderous, and didn't give me the time to get away from all the noise. Moved, I fell from the handshake into the hug, from the studio to the editorial office, from the phone to the interview, carried away by a current I couldn't control, happily when I heard my mother cry for joy on the other end of the line.

The sales success of his book Der Sperber von Maheux breaks all records. Initially flattered and happy, Carrière is soon no longer himself. He loses his inner stability, wants to please everyone, becomes a willless victim of the literary business. Even if he can now fulfill his long-cherished wishes and money worries are finally a thing of the past, the price does not turn out to be his great luck. Rather, things are going downhill with him. It takes him fifteen years to recover from the Prix ​​de Goncourt .

So much for the framework. In a way, the title is deceiving. Because the price is not as much the focus of the description as the title suggests. Soon after the opening chapter with the description of the award ceremony, another reality emerges, which Carrière explains in the form of a sweeping flashback of life. There are more important things than losing your balance in the media frenzy. Two opposing components of fate collide in his youth: on the one hand, his great artistic talent, initially dedicated only to music, on the other hand, the destructive effect of a puzzling illness after a happy childhood. The latter attacks him overnight at the age of 18:

... suddenly a feeling of emptiness grabbed my heart, terrible, merciless, a disgusting feeling, as if one had to vomit up his soul ... The noises reached me as if muffled by the distance - a distance that was not spatial, more an inner distance . I was impenetrable, doubly locked within myself. ... I no longer digested. My thinness became so terrible that one could have believed that I had come from Auschwitz. I excreted my food in the form of a reddish water ... Fear rubbed my bowels.

For over thirty years this mysterious ailment kindled a kind of inner hell in him, and no doctor can help him. His fight against this disease and his at the same time insatiable longing for the lost happiness of childhood set free in him the energy that makes him restless and creative at the same time. The Prix Goncourt only exacerbates his already disastrous condition. The consequences are pill and alcohol abuse. After the award ceremony, Carrière soon found itself unable to cope with the pressure of public expectations. He feels exhausted and incapacitated by the professional literature business. The urban world with its assiduous, educated bourgeoisie, superficial eloquence and commercial staging is internally alien to him. It doesn't suit him, the wild outsider, who much prefers to walk for hours through the silence and solitude of the Garrique, in the constant attempt to find inner peace. His artistic creativity suffers greatly from the effect of the price. He has had a beautiful villa built in his new domicile in Domessarges near Nîmes, and his study with a view of the mountains is furnished with mahogany furniture. But inside he feels empty, has the feeling that he can no longer create a single sentence that meets his high standards. Always on the run from the white paper, he loves to do any other work imaginable, even if it is just digging a hole in the garden to fill it up again afterwards. Then his wife Michele collapses with a stroke. Her right arm is paralyzed and one eye too. It takes almost a year for her to recover. Jean takes loving care of her. Nevertheless, their relationship is permanently disturbed afterwards. Eventually they get divorced. After Michele, Francoise becomes his wife.

One of Carrière's constant problems is not being able to sleep at night. The fear of it has long since become a trauma to him. Tablets don't help anymore. Lack of deep sleep and dream processing at times bring him completely out of balance, lead him into the semi-darkness of obsessions and confused fantasies to thoughts of suicide. He becomes manic-depressive and develops all sorts of quirks, e.g. B. a spider phobia - every evening he searches the whole room for them and even turns over the pictures on the walls.

At the same time, the after-effects of the award are also affecting him from outside: He receives mountains of mail from all over the world every day, especially thank-you letters, letters of appeal and stacks of manuscripts asking for literary comments and protection . There are so many that his wife Michele has to give up her teaching position in order to be able to cope with the flood of mail and appointments as his secretary. His name is in demand everywhere for marketing purposes. Formerly a poor poet , a forest man, a crazy man - emaciated, eccentric, running after every woman's skirt, living on his wife's teacher salary and mocked by the neighbors - he is now respected and courted everywhere in the region. He is even welcome as a celebrity in the political election campaign . But his literary reputation is already a thing of the past. The sharp-tongued Paris press wrote it off long ago. In her inclination to derisive drawers she has demoted him to a sparrowhawk man . Since Carrière cannot go any further in literary terms, this judgment remains in public. The book ends with a happy twist. A doctor friend of mine prescribes a new kind of remedy that cures his insomnia. Carriere feels reborn and is also recovering from his depression. In 1987, at almost 50 years of age, he finally found his inner peace again. He then wrote the book The price as a life balance and justification for himself and others.

The price is an autobiographical but generalizable outline of the ambiguous nature of artistic work. Outsiders, illness-related drift, strokes of fate and constant material insecurity are the price to be paid for the creation of a literary work of lasting value - prose written under agony, confusion and privation - created by the sensitivity of a thin skin, whose inevitable downside is great vulnerability is. Carrière describes very openly and personally down to the smallest detail what it means to devote oneself to writing , to initially only meet with rejection, to burn one's manuscript, to leave another ten years in the drawer, but always true to oneself to stay and keep fighting. The book is enlightening in the sense that it gives a detailed look behind the scenes of success. However, it also has weaknesses. Carrière proves his ability to make poetic and visual excursions here, too, but this is lost in a frenzy of linguistically elaborate constructions that do not always harmonize with the otherwise rather sober reportage style. There are also weaknesses in the form. The division into numerous chapters without headings offers no orientation for the reader who wants to understand the course of the artist's development. The last chapters even give the impression that they were written down quickly. The author does not draw a conclusion. Given what he had to pay for it, was the price worth it for him? The question can only be answered indirectly. Nonetheless, the book is a source of revelation for anyone who is interested in the lives of artists or who attempts to write themselves. In this way the reader also learns why the remaining inhabitants of the Sperber von Maheux run out of water in the second part. Carrière had already written the first part in Manosque, but then didn't know what to do next. In narrative terms, he “ran out of water”. The transformation of the everyday metaphor into dramaturgical novel reality was Carrière's trick to push the plot forward again, to recharge it with tension.

Essays

Carrière's essay writing deals with Sigourney Weaver and his literary friend Jean Giono , for whom he worked as personal secretary in Manosque , and Julien Gracq ; The latter had already rejected the Goncourt Prize in 1951 and was probably a role model here. A volume of conversations with Maurice Chavardès , Le Nez dans l'herbe , appeared in 1981. Another exemplary work is the novel Feuille d'or sur un torrent , published in 2002; it records the odyssey of a pair of siblings from the Camargue to Labrador who want to escape the mediocrity of their world and rediscover a freedom that was believed to be lost.

Catalog raisonné

In French

• Return to Uzès. Paris (La Jeune Parque) 1967.
• L'Épervier de Maheux. Paris (Pauvert) 1972.
• La Caverne des pestiférés (2 volumes). Paris (Pauvert) 1978–1979.
• Le Nez dans l'herbe. Paris (La Table ronde) 1981.
• Jean Giono. Paris (La Manufacture) 1985.
• Les Années sauvages. Paris (Laffont / Pauvert) 1986.
• Julien Gracq. Paris (La Manufacture) 1986.
• Le prix d'un goncourt. Paris (Laffont / Pauvert) 1987.
• L'Indifférence des étoiles. Paris (Laffont / Pauvert) 1994.
• Sigourney Weaver, portrait et itinéraire d'une femme accomplie. Paris (La Martinière) 1994.
• Achigan. Paris (Laffont) 1995.
• L'Empire des songes Paris (Laffont) 1997.
• Un jardin pour l'éternel Paris (Laffont) 1999.
• Le Fer dans la plaie. Paris (Laffont) 2000.
• Feuilles d'or sur un torrent. Paris (Laffont) 2001.
• Passions futiles. Paris (La Matinière) 2004.
• L'Ame de l'épervier. (Omnibus) 2007 - posthumous compilation of 6 of his most important novels

In German language

• The sparrowhawk from Maheux . Heidelberg (Wunderhorn) 1980.
• The price. Heidelberg (Wunderhorn) 1988.

Web links

• Noël Blandin: Qui est Jean Carrière? - La République des Lettres December 24, 2008 (French)
• Jean Carrière in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• Katharina Zimmer: The price for the price - Zeit-Online - 1988
• Friderike Beyer: Prix Goncourt. The winners 1903-2002 - TourLiteratur
• Literature by and about Jean Carrière in the catalog of the German National Library