The writing of books is not just the work of one person. We use words that were invented by others; the language we use comes from other languages, more ancient or neighbouring, ultimately going back to the dawn of time. We use images and ideas from the surrounding culture, which itself is only the changing appearance of complex movements. Writers, poets, journalists, and the myriad practitioners of the written language have gone before us. We have our own lives as references, with their memories and their interactions. We work in collaboration with a publisher, and we listen to what to our readers say. In this presentation, I would like to begin by acknowledging that my words are part of this very rich context.
Les Chroniques infernales, along with the world of Vrénalik, constitute a project the idea for which came to me when I was a teenager. I did not have all the details, but I had quite a vivid impression of a whole series of stories. Characters and landscapes were immersed in a kind of concept of reality that was related to pre-Socratic mathematics and philosophies, - which, I realized later, are close to Buddhism in certain aspects.
It is only now, after the publication of Sorbier, the sixth and final volume of the Chroniques..., that I am presenting my old system of thought. Writing this article has given me a chance to reconnect with vrouig and tranag, ways of describing reality that I had set aside. Already, with Or, I had touched on topics that are very old for me - those correspondences between numbers and colours, which date back even earlier, to my childhood, in fact.
When I invent a story, I don't feel like I'm inventing it, but rather discovering it. Like a curtain you suspend from the rod to check what the pleats will look like, I let the elements of the narrative fall, waiting for them to combine with each other so that I could describe them. Like the proverbial Inuit sculptor who looks at the stone to see what spirit resides in it so they can make it visible to everyone, I look at what is happening in my head and I wait and see what I should do with it. My intention is to notice things others have not thought of and say them, in case they might be useful.
When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, something crucial happened: I decided I would write. I would do it by using my dreams as key elements, as Lovecraft had done before me. A realistic style did not appeal to me: in real life, people are never characters, they are more than that. They are their perceptions; they are their reactions; they are their world. In writing, I speak to a reader, that is, another world; I am not addressing a being that is predictable or easy to describe. The characters are something else. Therefore, I wanted to write in the field of imaginary fiction, where you do not even try to simulate the world of conventional everyday existence. The distancing created by a work in which imagination is part of the writing conventions naturally permits more distinct features, in which real characters emerge.
It was at the moment when I realized that I would write one day that my concern for the meaning of the world, the nature of reality, began. The two have always gone hand in hand. The aspect of existential questioning has, over about the last twenty years, found its reference field: Buddhism. As for the writing aspect, well, I found three facets of it, encompassing most of my literary production.
With the Vrénalik Cycle, and more specifically with
L'Espace du diamant, I stayed at the level of a single
world, fashioned through Shambhalian values of an enlightened
society (see Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior, by
Chögyam Trungpa). With the short stories on the theme of
the labyrinth (Le Traversier [The Ferry]), I started exploring
the cosmological dimension which is integral to the entire universe.
Then came Les Chroniques infernales. In the three first
volumes of the Chroniques..., Lame, Aboli
and Ouverture, I started to relax the style and the need
for clear values in favour of something more intuitive, funnier
too. Then, with Secrets, Or and Sorbier, I returned
to Vrénalik, to a polished style as well as to my first
love, cosmology. This return has been evident since I wrote Aboli,
the second volume of the Chroniques..., in which Fax-Sutherland
appears and in which I began developing the character of Rel
to make him coincide with Haztlén.
Genesis | Hell | Buddhist Sources | Christian Sources | The Structures | Anecdotes from writing and from readers | Sorbier (Rowan) | The Dreams | Rel | Lame | Sutherland | The ocean | The Man and the Sea | Lovecraft and Séril Daha | Classification in terms of literary genre | Apology for imagination | And what about the future?
© 2001 Éditions Alire & Esther Rochon
