Those who make a living out of writing know this: this task, despite appearances — pushing a pencil is indeed more relaxed than playing a jackhammer — is not necessarily easy. There are the ideas to clarify, the rules of the language to respect, the style to refine and the arrangement of all that to do in a final text of which we do not know how it will be received. Writing, especially if it is a long-term work, is an ordeal.
Some authors claim to enjoy writing. I doubt their sincerity or the quality of the result. “Do not believe those who say they write easily: they are impostors”, notes the philosopher and pedagogue Philippe Meirieu in Why is it so difficult to write? (Bayard, 2007). “We never begin to write serenely, he explains, because, essentially, what we write does not pre-exist the writing. This is why it is (so) difficult to write. This is also why writing is so important…”
The great Foglia, who wrote more than 4000 chronicles for The Press from 1978 to 2015, shared Meirieu’s opinion. There “is no pleasure in writing”, he confided to his readers in 1997. “There is only the pleasure of having written. He takes the words out of my mouth.
Yet, despite the difficulties of the enterprise, despite the inevitable failures, many of us persist. Why ? Where does this libido come from, in the Jungian (ie extrasexual) sense of the term? Where does this irrepressible momentum come from that pushes us to line up the words in the hope of being read by others who will understand us?
The most beautiful, the most accurate answer to this question – the one that suits me the most, in any case, as a writer of chronicles and essays – is that of the English intellectual George Orwell (1903-1950), recorded in 1946 in why i writea short text of about ten pages, which has just been republished in a small book of the same name in the Folio 2€ collection.
Best known for his novels animal farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), Orwell was also a remarkable reporter and political columnist engaged in the fight against totalitarianism, right and left, and in the defense of intellectual freedom against the temptation of censorship.
“Wherever one orthodoxy has been imposed—or even two, as often happens—it is the end of quality writing,” he noted, before adding that “the modern literary intellectual lives and writes in fear of public opinion — less, moreover, of public opinion in the broad sense than of that of the group to which he belongs”. There are things that do not change, unfortunately.
In why i writeOrwell, after recounting the circumstances of the birth of his desire to tell stories — he was a lonely child, inhabited by the desire to describe for himself the world around him —, retains four reasons which would explain, according to he, the libido of the prose writer.
The first, he says somewhat abruptly, is “pure selfishness”, that is to say “the desire to be interesting, to be discussed, to pass on to posterity”. This temperament, notes Orwell, would also be found in artists, scientists, politicians and entrepreneurs. Most people, he explains, are content to be like everyone else, to fit into the mould, but not writers, who insist on “being whole individuals.”
Next comes “aesthetic enthusiasm”, the feeling of the beauty of the world and of the language that inhabits us and that we wish to share with others, as well as, third reason, “historical momentum”, that is- that is, a desire to discover and speak the truth of the world.
The ultimate reason, the main reason for Orwell and for me, is “political intention”, that is to say “a desire to push the world in a given direction, to change the idea other people of the kind of society they should be fighting for”. We cannot escape it. Even those who reject this intention, in the name of art for art’s sake, express a political opinion.
Orwell, who wanted “to make political writing a true art”, says that all his texts, given the historical circumstances that accompanied his life, were written – always with an aesthetic concern – against totalitarianism and for socialism. democratic. I am thinking, in the same spirit, of the sublime formula of Fernand Dumont, who claimed to have written all his work to explore his itinerary as a learned sociologist born in the working-class milieu of Montmorency.
If I had to summarize the main intention that animates my texts, I would say that they were written against the erasure of French Quebec, for social democracy and to sing the joy of living in the company of literature.