Corps flottants by Jane Sautière
Les Corps flottants [Floating Bodies] are those fleeting shapes, those shadows formed on the retina that follow its movements. According to Jane Sautière, these specters, as they are called, are signs of aging, similar to the memories of the beings who haunted her existence and slowly faded away. Les Corps flottants is a hybrid text that borrows the form of an essay, taking on its distanced approached; the fluidity of a narrative; and the evocative power of a novel. Like Annie Ernaux, Jane Sautière’s memories are experienced both individually and collectively. Her personal story meets our common one, and it is at their junction that the story is maintained. From there, it observes, absorbs, and “confronts aging, what is collapsing, to see in the imprescriptible original forms.”
Among other things, the floating bodies represent Jane Sautière’s parents… Their relationship to the world – engaged and fleeting at the same time – will also determine her relationship to the world: “I remained linked to my class by fleeing it too.” The floating bodies are also those encountered from July 1967 to July 1970, in Saigon, where the author and her family resided: They are Jane’s brother and sister, who passed before her birth. The floating bodies are also the sensations of life in Saigon from July 1967 to July 1970, the taste of exotic fruits, tropical insects, wildlife, and local plants.
“Je gratte cette matière devenue sèche et n’en ramène qu’une poussière. Mort violente du passé, c’est bien par lui qu’on meurt en premier… Bien sûr ce n’est pas ça. il y a un lent recouvrement du passé. une histoire de couches successives. et l’étonnement de ce qui lui survit. Parfois des choses ténues et sans raisons précises.”
“I scrape this material that has become dry, bringing back a speck of dust. A violent death of the past, it is indeed through it that we die first… Of course, that’s not it. There’s a slow recovery from the past, a story of successive layers, and the astonishment of what survives it. Sometimes, tenuous things without any exact reason.”
Corps flottants, Jane Sautière, éd. Gallimard, coll. Verticales.
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Jane Sautière : Écrire une mémoire déchirée (Corps flottants)
Les corps flottants sont des fragments du corps vitré, des taches mobiles, présentes dans le champ de vision, difficiles à percevoir en elles-mêmes puisqu’elles se déplacent avec les mouvements de l’œil. Dans le récit de Jane Sautière, les corps flottants renvoient à un autre objet, le passé, à ceux et celles qui ont disparu, que…
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CHRONIQUE. Notre feuilletoniste fait avec ce livre, évoquant le génocide cambodgien, l’expérience de la folie, du désir, de la violence sociale, du racisme colonial.
