The advent of the digital age has led to an onslaught of audiovisual content that has slowly but surely besieged us for years. The effects, both negative and positive, will not be debated here. However, if there is a more objective observation on which we could agree, it is that we have been, for more than a decade already, drowned in the extraordinary.
This extraordinary, whether on request or not, true or falsified, follows us everywhere and at all times. It is external, on our screens and internal, in our thoughts in preprint mode, as we observe our lives through the prism of network formatting. Like the boundaries of the imaginary, those of the ordinary are blurred and subjective. The extraordinary of one will be the ordinary of the other. On Instagram, we skilfully mix the spectacular photo with a caption that plays on the banal, a feigned self-mockery, cognitive twist, which, by force, has become a discursive norm.
Define yourself through the prism of the extraordinary
Not easy to find who we are when we let ourselves be invaded by an entity, virtual or real, which tells us who we should be. It’s not easy to touch happiness when you’re looking for yourself, caught up in sets of codes that you decode little or badly, trying to match this extraordinary standard, to be worthy of clicks, worthy of three seconds of attention.
As a young man, seeing television stars and Disney princesses, I wondered if I was extraordinary or if I was a secondary character. Over time, I ended up abandoning this very normative questioning for the much more complex Quis ego sum. Who am I ? It took me 40 years and many misadventures for Charlebois to tell Elise what God said to Moses: I was simply ordinary. Ego sum qui sum. Nothing extraordinary there.
The ordinary inherited
My parents weren’t rich. And still aren’t. But since childhood already I receive their precious inheritance. Among this heterogeneous set of psychogenealogical stigmata, character traits and political and philosophical beliefs, I received their common and immoderate love for ordinary things and their talent for telling it in something extraordinary. This is where my parents are most alike.
Normal then that being a writer has become a natural, satisfying, even exultant occupation for me. It was not an easy path, and I first undertook it on the path of so-called “sustained” literature, or at least an attempt at it. After all, I wasn’t going to do “popular” literature… And why not? I finally said to myself. This literature which is sometimes called “popular”, but which is increasingly designated by the term “literature of the imagination”.
Anyway, as a writer today, I have acquired in the gesture this humility that I will never be able to be as inventive as reality and that my stories will never come close to the lives that my parents told me. . It will always be the triumph of the ordinary.