Sortie d'usine
Sortie d'usine (English: after work ) is the first novel by the French writer François Bon and was published in 1982 . The novel deals with the life of workers in and with the factory in the 20th century.
content
In the prologue of the novel, the narrator and protagonist describes his way to work, which leads through a noisy and hectic train station. When you arrive at the factory, you are given first impressions of it.
In the “Première semaine” chapter, the decreasing motivation of the workers and the monotonous everyday life in the factory are described, which drag on in the same, tenacious manner and is only interrupted by eating breaks or going to the toilet.
The section “Deuxième semaine” deals with dealing with death in the factory and the tradition of driving the dead through the factory with a forklift while making noise. In this death ritual, the bereaved express their pain through the noise they make with the help of their tools. This ritual can be seen as an escape from the monotonous everyday factory life and still gives you a feeling of being human.
The chapter “Troisième semaine” describes the charged atmosphere of the workers during a strike. It is not clear from the novel what demands workers make of employers, but it does deal with the dreams of workers and the departure of colleagues.
The chapter “Quatrième semaine” can be seen as a review of working life and the writing process. The protagonist feels uncomfortable with his work and tries to forget the futility of his existence as a person. He is constantly afraid of losing the meaning of his life when he leaves the factory. He realizes that factory work has made him weak and frail. After giving up his work in the factory, the protagonist returns there and reflects on his life and work in the factory.
Between autobiography and fiction
When François Bon was fifteen years old, he went through the phase of development that shaped him the most. He dealt a lot with literature. However, at the age of 17 he stopped reading as he worked in a factory in France, as well as in Moscow and India. When he left the factory at the age of 25, Bon began again to devote himself to his passion for literature. He now preferred to read Kafka's works. For this reason his first book Sortie d'usine was written . It is important to François Bon that his books are not about writing, because it is obvious to him that a book is always a metaphor for the creation of oneself.
In his opinion, an author always writes out of the border area of the imagination, because something personal flows into every work, whether intentional or not. He also emphasizes that it is not his aim to write about his life and life in the factory. Nevertheless, he could only convey the factory experience by writing when his body could assert itself against the factory and the body. For him the factory was not important as a place, he was mainly interested in the time structure of the factory and the fact that it is a closed place in which the bodies are forced into a kind of repetition.
The original phrase "On écrit toujours avec de soi" (Eng: "You always write with something of yourself") comes from Roland Barthes, but was often quoted by François Bon to express his attitude towards autobiographical features in the works of a Express author. Bon sees writing as an answer to questions that move him. For this reason, he does not have the choice not to publish what interests and surrounds him, because an author always writes a bit about himself in a work, but not about himself. According to Bon, something biographical and personal flows into every text.
These autobiographical features can, however, be of different nature. On the one hand, this can be an experience and thus give the text a personal note, on the other hand, texts are already personal due to the selection made by the author, which words and terms he uses in a text and which are not. In addition, while writing, an author creates images in his head that can influence the creation of the text.
Even if certain allusions in the novel Sortie d'usine point to an autobiographical topic, it can be said that the novel is not an autobiography, since François Bon does not adhere to the criteria of a traditional autobiography, such as those in Rousseau's Confessions finds.
Text output
- Sortie d'usine , roman. Paris: Minuit, 1982. A “nouvelle édition” appears in 1985 by the same publisher.
- After work , Roman. Translated from the French by Edgar Völkl. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, Edition New Texts, 1987.
literature
items
- Wolfgang Asholt. "Modern Mourning: François Bon". In: The French novel of the eighties . Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994, pp. 138–151.
Reviews (selection)
- Angelo Rinaldi. " Sortie d'usine ". In: L'Express , September 3, 1982.
- Daniel Rondeau. " Sortie d'usine ". In: Liberation , September 19, 1982.
- Nathalie Daladier. "Quand un tourneur prend la parole". In: Magazine littéraire 191, January 1983, p. 49.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quoted, among others, in Corinne Amar, "François Bon. Portrait", in: Observatoire de l'écriture ( Memento of the original of November 23, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , La Poste Foundation, Nov. 25, 2004
- ↑ There are at least three different versions of the French edition. The original edition from 1982, a “nouvelle édition” from 1985, as well as more recent reprints, the text of which corresponds to the “nouvelle édition”, but which no longer contain the reference to the changed text. The decisive difference between the first version and the modified version concerns the last chapter: in this chapter the protagonist has left the factory and returns there again to take a look at this place as an outsider and reflect on his story. In the first version, this part of the last chapter, like the rest of the text, is written in the third person, but in the second version, in contrast to the rest of the text, in the first person. In the second version, leaving the factory and the reflexive stance go hand in hand with the creation of a common first-person perspective of narrator and protagonist.
