Laurent Gaudé: “I do not make a conspiratorial reading of the world, I invite lucidity”

There is this enigmatic title, Dog 51, which immediately captures curiosity. It is the registration number of a cop – whose real name is Zem Sparak, an exile, cut off from his native Greece – which translates the dehumanization and violence of the world after, dominated by the sprawling power of a multinational firm. . With Laurent Gaudé, the Greek hero is tired, dispossessed, manipulated. However, he manages to incubate a secret rebellion. And this magnificent spark is enough to light up the darkness.

How was this dystopian novel born?

If there hadn’t been the confinement, I don’t know if I would have written Dog 51… Because, at that time, I had the impression of living in science fiction, of witnessing an incursion of SF into our present: it was no longer a projection towards a distant future. , but a possible vision of our world. The border became porous between the present and the future, anticipation and today. If we had been told that we would one day see the streets of our cities completely empty and silent like in a futuristic film, we would probably not have believed it.

SF is not my thing as a reader, and I never imagined writing it one day. I first produced a text for the theater, performed in Avignon in 2021, the Last Night of the world. I describe a universe kept indefinitely awake by neoliberalism: my first attempt at (light) anticipation. In writing, I experienced the same feeling of creative freedom as for my stories rooted in distant Antiquity… I restarted the machine with Dog 51.

Was your ambition to give weapons to think about our current fragilities?

The detour through anticipation is a way of questioning the present, that’s for sure. Dog 51 concentrates in a single world many elements that already exist here and now. Going back and forth with the future is an invitation to reflect on the current dysfunctions, which could lead to this nightmare – which does not mean that it will happen: I do not wish it, but it is one of the possible paths . When we bring together all our failings in a single imaginary universe, it becomes a foil. The city of the novel, Magnapole, frightens us with its three tightly separated zones, its checkpoints and its controls.

But Paris already operates in zones, even if there are no barriers prohibiting passage from one to another. The center does not have the same price as the distant periphery, the first ring being the intermediate zone. In London and Berlin too, there are money zones, segregated social zones. We don’t see them anymore, we got used to them. I only enlarged the line. Magnapole Zone 3 was directly inspired to me by Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, this workshop of the world where thousands of little hands work in mind-blowing frenzy and noise to produce cheap clothes for China or the Europe.

On reading Dog 51, we think of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s cult film: is it part of your personal pantheon?

I admit that this is the reference that I set for myself, for the color of the universe, a little dirty and dark. The urban landscape is not radically different from ours. There are haunts there, except for some new technological objects and a few new practices – “Love Day”, an official sex holiday, for example. But climate fear is not futuristic. In fact, we are there, at the time of acid rain, the search for protection and a reaction that we can hope for are global – the specialists alert us sufficiently to the multiplication of large fires, floods or cyclones.

As in any dystopian narrative, the question arises of who will rule. Answer: money, which is quite commonplace. But, once again, there we are, in our globalized liberal system, spurred on by merciless competition. Who would have thought a few decades ago that Elon Musk would privatize space with his satellites? Given the profits of Gafam compared to the GDP of some poor nations (such as Haiti), we could very well slide towards the takeover of an entire country by a multinational.

I don’t make a conspiratorial reading of the world, I just invite lucidity. The Chinese have indeed taken over arable land in Africa or the port of Piraeus. I chose Greece as the country from which my hero, Zem Sparak, is forced into exile: the images of the 2008 crisis marked us. And this is where the vibration was the strongest compared to the rich civilization of antiquity.

You invent the “cilarié”, the citizen and the employee becoming one…

It’s a new identity. Since Greece no longer exists, we are stateless. The only belonging that remains is that of his company, in an entirely privatized universe. What to wonder about the current confiscation of our lives by salaried work, many people spending more time with their colleagues than with their spouses or their children… The energy given to work often weighs on the little hours left to live with the family – I’m not just talking about those who have no choice or have to combine several jobs. There is more than ever an alienation of executives, who no longer see an end to their working day.

One must be available all the time; the border between work and private life has exploded so much with confinement and the permanent presence of screens that it is difficult to escape the company. In Dog 51, we have slid towards a repressive violence, that of control, of centralized and definitive organization. A violence that does not seem to be one… Social control in China today, with facial recognition and the citizenship points system, is already incredibly brutal, without being so ostensibly. There is a basic dehumanization there, a violence of the rule.

How would you define the human in the light of your story?

My character of Zem Sparak still resists, something in him hasn’t yielded and doesn’t want to fully embrace the world around him. He managed to keep a sort of intimate, inner and hidden backyard, which is of the order of an essential human quality. For him, it’s linked to the past: keeping the memory is a way of fighting against the pressure of a society that is more on the side of joyful amnesia, where everyone lives in the present of constraints, orders and the organization as it is rhythmic. The thread that connects Zem Sparak to his Greek past and to a long time is his ability to remember a world built differently: this is his way of remaining human. His young colleague Salia Malberg sniffs out this different man, she senses that he has something she doesn’t.

Beneath his boorish airs, he is richer than her. But she doesn’t know what, she tries to find out by getting closer. The human is memory, the ability not to give up everything to the time, to the present. Then, it is the possibility of the meeting, the real one: Zem Sparak and Salia Malberg recognize each other. At the end of the novel, their bond leads to a gift: he offers the young woman her memories, there is a transfer. In contrast, the “Love Day” is only an appointment organized by the multinational, where nothing can happen. The rebellion, carried in a somewhat deaf way by Sparak, is also supported by collective protest during the “Great Riots”: it is the capacity for freedom and the capacity to propose another scheme, a new utopia – not only anger.

So the human being is situated between memory and utopia? Two opposite directions of time?

Yes, it’s a point that we have in the back, the past as a base on which we can lean, and which creates a perspective. Being crossed by time gives strength – in contrast to an amnesiac society, which would think that everything is spontaneous and contemporary. Being able to connect to a place like Delphi is vital, even if it seems like an immense distance. There are magnetic places, which one cannot completely appropriate, even by going there 20 times.

In contrast to the world of Goldtex, the ruling mega-corporation that thinks everything can be bought: you just have to pay the price, that’s how you acquire a country with all the people who inhabit it… Delphi is a place that comes from afar, loaded with the mythology of oracles. The landscape is still preserved there, it is enough that a little wind rises and that some goats arise on the horizon: one does not know any more which time it is. I love those moments when time opens up.

Why did you make Delphi the anchor point of your novel?

What speaks at Delphi is beyond the human. The Greeks thought it was the gods. I find that there is, still today, something telluric. It is as if the men had seen that stones had to be laid to signal what is happening there. I have the impression, in this strange place, that we are actually confronted with something very old, which crosses centuries and millennia: is it nature? The life forces of the world?

I quite believe in these things: the energy of the wind, that of the trees, that of the sounds, that of the animal world, which vibrate around us and which we hardly feel. These voices to listen to, this speech to receive, the way of letting yourself be crossed by all this presence, it is undoubtedly also being human; because it means accepting a certain humility. The forces that inhabit such places are forces of harmony and beauty: everything is in its place. What I felt in Delphi can be experienced elsewhere by others. Everyone has their places of beauty and silence.

You are not a believer. And yet, you can sense a closeness to Christians. How to explain it?

I have a concern for humanity. And I defend humanist values ​​that I can very willingly share. I don’t spontaneously use the word spirituality, but the question of the sacred touches me a lot. There are places sacred to me, and Delphi is one of them. We are not all going to put the same charge behind the word. For me, it’s a place that belongs to no one, to no man, to no group; a place that goes beyond us, that tells us something precisely because it goes beyond us.

In the same way, I believe in the oath, in the word given, which is also sacred. So I have this little personal kitchen that creates a sense of common ground with Christians, and other people of diverse spiritualities. Single materialism is still infinitely sad!

Everything that makes us question our presence on earth interests me, as well as our personal ethics, which is played out at the level of the group and the fraternity. In common concern, we have the question of consolation and empathy, often present in my work, because I find it magnificent. Finally, literature has to do with the recognition of the other, with the invitation to share a look at the world.

In Dog 51, this look is very black. The dystopian genre demands it. Despite everything, why so little light?

I’m describing a broken world that I don’t necessarily want to save… I hope to create a shock effect, to show that we are heading for the worst: let’s not go there! But I don’t consider my hero’s end to be so hopeless: he dissolves into his memory and his past.

We can see this gesture as a return, like Ulysses, after a long life of wandering, who finally finds his home. Zem Sparak has returned home, albeit in the form of a vision. Just before, he was able to transmit. Salia Malberg is the other point of light: the character who takes over and who contains all the possibilities…

To read
Dog 51, by Laurent Gaudé, Actes Sud, €22.
Life really like.

Laurent Gaudé in five dates
1972 Born in Paris.
2000 Onysus the furious, his first play was created at the Strasbourg national theater by the Greek director Yánnis Kókkos.
2002 The Death of King Tsongor obtains the Goncourt of high school students.
2004 The Sun of the Scortas wins the Goncourt.
2016 Listen to our defeats is published, like all his texts, by Actes Sud.

Laurent Gaudé: “I do not make a conspiratorial reading of the world, I invite lucidity”