“Satie,” by Patrick Roegiers: Tiphaine Samoyault’s literary saga

MUSICIAN OUT OF TIME

"Ignore one's own presence" : the instruction given by Erik Satie to the performer on one of his compositions seems like a recommendation he would have given to himself. How to make oneself heard and disappear at the same time? This is the mystery that Patrick Roegiers, who has until now found his inspiration in painters or photographers, seeks to grasp by retracing the life of the musician. But as in Jean Echenoz's Ravel (Minuit, 2006), which he seems to want to measure himself against, the program of imaginary life goes haywire to give an existence less a factual and continuous narrative than a contrasting set of exaggerated features, in which one can read a truth of literature confronted with life: the weakness of bodies in the face of glory and death, the deregulation of clocks, the fault separating sensible time, lived time, and the time of history.

We also owe to Erik Satie this phrase that others had uttered before him, in various forms: "I came into the world very young in a very old time." Either he was of his time and his time was late, or he was moving forward, like a clock out of order, or even "he was avant-garde with a delay" : always out of time. The humor of his compositions, like his taste for witticisms, set him apart, made him count as a soap bubble. Patrick Roegiers manages to give a literary equivalent to this whimsical music, to translate the spirit of a composer who "created only short things, like the chapters of this book." He does this by distorting temporality, by introducing a number of anachronisms, but also by creating incongruities in the language. Anthology: "Silence was henceforth the language in which he remained silent." » About Honfleur (Calvados), where he was born in 1866: “It was a small town whose boats moved through the streets.” “He listened without reacting to the nasty things that were poured out about him, and concluded with a cheerful smile: “I prefer the music I like to the one I don’t like.”

You have 60.74% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.