It's all about connecting
Si je ne savais pas déjà pourquoi j'aime autant Richard Powers je l'aurais compris en lisant l'essai de Joseph Dewey, Understanding Richard Powers.
Le livre publié à la fin du XXe siècle, juste avant la sortie de The Time of Our Singing, ignore les derniers ouvrages (The Time of Our Singing, The Echo Maker, Generosity) de Powers mais tente une mise en perspective des sept précédents romans, tout en les analysant tour à tour. J'ai donc sauté les chapitres concernant The Gold Bug Variations(il est près de mon lit depuis un certain temps et je ne vais pas tarder à m'immerger dans ce que d'aucuns considèrent être le chef d’œuvre de Richard Powers), Wandering Soul et Gain, pour ne lire que ceux consacrés à Three Farmers on Their Way to A Dance, The Prisonner's Dilemma, Galatea 2.2 et Plowing the Dark.
Le regard de Dewey est un regard américain sur l’œuvre de Richard Powers, donc sensiblement différemment du mien (il est d'ailleurs plus préoccupé par l'architecture des œuvres, la structure générale de la narration et le message qui est transmis que par le "style" dans son acception la plus pure, alors que pour moi Powers est aussi avant tout un styliste avec un "son" particulier), et c'est également un regard professionnel puisqu'il est spécialiste de littérature contemporaine - ce que je ne suis pas - aussi j'ai redécouvert certains livres sous un angle que je n'avais pas forcément envisagé à la lecture (The Prisonner's Dilemma en particulier mais aussi Plowing the Dark). Au-delà de l'enrichissement que procure ce type de "commentaire composé", j'ai aussi apprécié de voir formuler noir sur blanc ce qu'inconsciemment je devinais; ce qui affleurait dans mon rapport à l’œuvre de cet auteur, mais qui n'avait pas été totalement exprimé jusqu'ici; ce qui fait que l'écriture de Richard Powers résonne autant en moi.
Je recopie ici quelques extraits du premier chapitre qui sert d'introduction à l'étude des sept œuvres.
"Loneliness, then, haunts Powers's awareness. It is even part of his intricate narrative structures. Powers believes that narrative form is visceral, so that how a story is shaped reveals characters and theme. Design always hovers about the reader's awareness. Powers' s narratives are each accomplished designs in contrapuntal narration. Two (and sometimes three) narrative braids are offered polyphonically, told side by side, creating a narrative harmony that is as much vertical as it is horizontal[...] They are narrative lines that do not touch each other, that do not refer to each other, or that are only lightly linked - to the unprepared reader they may initially appear to be entirely incompatible. Yet they come to complement and deepen each other. Narrative structure itself becomes an exercise in his dominant theme: the search for connection among isolates.
That search goes further. Each novel defies the terrifying implications of closure by directly inviting the participatory reader to contiue the tale, to invent the next episode - writer and reader are joined via the agency of cooperative creation."
"The sheer scale of the techno-world can terrify and compel a withdrawal from its evident brutality and massive facelessness into the clean, simulated spaces of aesthetic refuge, traditionally books and museums but lately movie theaters, computers and other virtual geographies, theme parks, and television. But the reader, responding to the entire reach of Powers's fiction, understand that either impulse - engagement or withdrawal - necessarily draws its urgency from the other; thus each new nove is itself directly linked to questions that raised by the previous work, despite not sharing charcaters or settings or plot, in yet another exercise in connection."
"After a century bent on diminishing the individual amid a colossus of forces whirring about a universe far bigger and emptier than the mind can conceive, Powers cannot accept the endgame or despair nor the logic of cynicism. He is a vision that draws its disarmingly emotional sense of affirmation from the conviction that individuals are bigger than the spare shadow they manage to cast, broader than the love they manage to stir, and deeper than the few lives they manage to touch. His narratives remind readers that they are never as alone, never as apart, as they may feel. Each and all are engaged in the rich ad-lib of the enterprise of living itself, the stunning mystery of animated matter - and that alone justifies affirmation and wonder and demands nothing less than the narrative itself to remind people whenever they are most deeply bruised just how fabulous that enterprise is."
Le livre publié à la fin du XXe siècle, juste avant la sortie de The Time of Our Singing, ignore les derniers ouvrages (The Time of Our Singing, The Echo Maker, Generosity) de Powers mais tente une mise en perspective des sept précédents romans, tout en les analysant tour à tour. J'ai donc sauté les chapitres concernant The Gold Bug Variations(il est près de mon lit depuis un certain temps et je ne vais pas tarder à m'immerger dans ce que d'aucuns considèrent être le chef d’œuvre de Richard Powers), Wandering Soul et Gain, pour ne lire que ceux consacrés à Three Farmers on Their Way to A Dance, The Prisonner's Dilemma, Galatea 2.2 et Plowing the Dark.
Le regard de Dewey est un regard américain sur l’œuvre de Richard Powers, donc sensiblement différemment du mien (il est d'ailleurs plus préoccupé par l'architecture des œuvres, la structure générale de la narration et le message qui est transmis que par le "style" dans son acception la plus pure, alors que pour moi Powers est aussi avant tout un styliste avec un "son" particulier), et c'est également un regard professionnel puisqu'il est spécialiste de littérature contemporaine - ce que je ne suis pas - aussi j'ai redécouvert certains livres sous un angle que je n'avais pas forcément envisagé à la lecture (The Prisonner's Dilemma en particulier mais aussi Plowing the Dark). Au-delà de l'enrichissement que procure ce type de "commentaire composé", j'ai aussi apprécié de voir formuler noir sur blanc ce qu'inconsciemment je devinais; ce qui affleurait dans mon rapport à l’œuvre de cet auteur, mais qui n'avait pas été totalement exprimé jusqu'ici; ce qui fait que l'écriture de Richard Powers résonne autant en moi.
Je recopie ici quelques extraits du premier chapitre qui sert d'introduction à l'étude des sept œuvres.
"Loneliness, then, haunts Powers's awareness. It is even part of his intricate narrative structures. Powers believes that narrative form is visceral, so that how a story is shaped reveals characters and theme. Design always hovers about the reader's awareness. Powers' s narratives are each accomplished designs in contrapuntal narration. Two (and sometimes three) narrative braids are offered polyphonically, told side by side, creating a narrative harmony that is as much vertical as it is horizontal[...] They are narrative lines that do not touch each other, that do not refer to each other, or that are only lightly linked - to the unprepared reader they may initially appear to be entirely incompatible. Yet they come to complement and deepen each other. Narrative structure itself becomes an exercise in his dominant theme: the search for connection among isolates.
That search goes further. Each novel defies the terrifying implications of closure by directly inviting the participatory reader to contiue the tale, to invent the next episode - writer and reader are joined via the agency of cooperative creation."
"The sheer scale of the techno-world can terrify and compel a withdrawal from its evident brutality and massive facelessness into the clean, simulated spaces of aesthetic refuge, traditionally books and museums but lately movie theaters, computers and other virtual geographies, theme parks, and television. But the reader, responding to the entire reach of Powers's fiction, understand that either impulse - engagement or withdrawal - necessarily draws its urgency from the other; thus each new nove is itself directly linked to questions that raised by the previous work, despite not sharing charcaters or settings or plot, in yet another exercise in connection."
"After a century bent on diminishing the individual amid a colossus of forces whirring about a universe far bigger and emptier than the mind can conceive, Powers cannot accept the endgame or despair nor the logic of cynicism. He is a vision that draws its disarmingly emotional sense of affirmation from the conviction that individuals are bigger than the spare shadow they manage to cast, broader than the love they manage to stir, and deeper than the few lives they manage to touch. His narratives remind readers that they are never as alone, never as apart, as they may feel. Each and all are engaged in the rich ad-lib of the enterprise of living itself, the stunning mystery of animated matter - and that alone justifies affirmation and wonder and demands nothing less than the narrative itself to remind people whenever they are most deeply bruised just how fabulous that enterprise is."