Julien Gosselin is a director. With his company If you could lick my hearthe notably created in 2013 the Elementary particlesbased on the novel by Michel Houellebecq and, in 2016, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. Defending the constitutive impurity of theater, he explains how the contemporary stage must become a place of reflection on the violence of the world.
Images and shooting: Thibault Jeanmougin.
Photographs reproduced with the kind permission of the company If you could lick my heart. Copyright Simon Gosselin.
Interview transcript
La Vie des Idées: What type of theater is needed to adapt this total novel that is 2666?
Julien Gosselin: Before working, I never know what type of theater I am going to produce, in the sense that I do not have a preconceived idea of the theater I am going to do based on the work. So I am extremely open. When I read Bolaño’s work and started rehearsals, I knew that I needed a scenography that would allow me to do as much as possible. I had the very practical feeling that with the number of places to explore, characters, different situations and eras, I was going to have extremely diverse work to do. The five parts of 2666 are written differently, with very different literary styles and story styles. For example, the third part is more of an American film style, the fourth part is much colder, and the first has the elegance of “old Europe”. So I was going to have to represent all these parts, and for that I had to have the maximum number of possibilities. I was therefore aware that I would have to produce a more or less total theater.
I actually had the desire, or the pretension, to create a total theater or a world theater, and that is exactly why I went to look for this book. I share Houellebecq’s dream – which we see at work for example in the Elementary particles – where sociology, Wikipedia-type literature, narrative literature, “sagaesque” so to speak, pure poetry, can all contribute to making a novel, to making a work. In the same way, if we push the idea a little bit, we could arrive at pure data, figures. All this could create literature: we know that with Houellebecq we are often moved by a pure and simple technical description, as with Balzac but in a more poetic way. My theatrical dream, although completely inaccessible, is essentially the same: I would like to be able to move people with data. I would like to create something where, at a moment, the totality of literary means could coexist with the totality of the emotional means offered by an art like theater.
Theater is an impure art, an art of combination: it is poetry, music and singing that coexist. This is why it is quite “stupid” to complain that there are sometimes too many videos in shows: it is the very nature of theater to operate with the greatest impurity and to look within arts of the present time. I want to make the most of this impure aspect of theater to create a more or less total work, and a novel like 2666 offers me this possibility.
La Vie des Idées: What place do you give to writing the story?
Julien Gosselin: Reading plays often upsets me much more than when I see them performed, because the incarnation at one moment breaks something. This is why I really like seeing foreign language plays with surtitles, because we have both the possibility of total incarnation and the freedom of the novel reader. I also try to have this relationship in my productions: I look for a very physical incarnation on the part of the actors, a sound which is always at extremely high levels, with very strong bass levels, so that the emotion is direct, pure, powerful; and at the same time a literary relationship, where we still have the notion of the book. The viewer has enough of an intuition that what he sees comes from a book, from the mind of a writer. It’s bringing him even more into fiction and making him even more intelligent than giving him the possibility of always knowing that he is dealing with literature. The power of the theatrical work comes from literature.
I don’t believe that fiction as such, the characters who tell a story, are the starting point of my work: there are actors who play characters who tell a story, but that is not the aim of my work. To please me, people say to me: “You are a director who tells us stories,” but that’s not what I’m trying to do. I try to create an extremely physical and direct relationship with literature. When you are at home, when you read, there is music, a particular light, you manage to create a combination between all these elements, all this information, and something is created which is of the order of an emotion very fine, very precise, in a fleeting moment. Reading the book will be modified by this moment that you experienced: if you read this book the next day on the train you will still have this feeling, this warmth, these colors. I try to create that feeling in the viewer, at higher levels of intensity, but not so much to tell stories.
La Vie des Idées: Is it then a question of redefining theater?
Julien Gosselin: When there is narration, I try to find a form, and I don’t care if it bears the name of theater: even if there is only video, only music, if there is no There are more actors – which is the case at one point in the fourth part of the show – it’s not my problem that it no longer looks like theater. The importance is that a work is created: if it’s contemporary art, if it’s cinema, even music, I don’t care. I was talking to you about the obvious impurity of the theater, it is there.
I very rarely think about the public. I work as a writer, with something that interests me. When I find something that interests me, I often feel like the show is over. But I come from a generation that is obsessed, in a completely internal and natural way, with public reception.
Theater is the only art today that is so concerned with how it will be perceived by everyone. I don’t know why, I, a director, and those who do the same job, should be obsessed with the idea that our work pleases as many people as possible. Why should we be advocates of popular education? I don’t think it’s my job. Sometimes, by chance, it works: something happens with the audience. But my job is not that. No musician, for example, will tell you that his job is to educate the people. His job, like mine, is to make art.
Today we are obsessed with the idea of pleasing, or of justifying ourselves for doing theater, this art that is so ignoble and so tiring for everyone. Against this, we must offer the most radical experiences possible – someone who has never been to the theater can be transformed by a very radical experience, even without having the culture, much more than by a usual experience theater. We all remember, in class 4eof having gone to see a Molière in a completely worn and painful costume. The strength of contemporary is also very important. Stanislas Nordey often says that Molière was a young contemporary author at the time he was writing. Theater must be in this place where we can create works, without playing professors, in relation to the world in which we live.
La Vie des Idées: Should contemporary theater reflect on the “violence of the world”?
Julien Gosselin: Violence has invaded space so much that it is almost no longer visible. It is no longer considered violence, which in fact is at a peak. It would take time to trace the origins of this violence. There is a form of extreme barbarity in a civilized, civilized society. Violence has poetically covered a lot of things: it has been everywhere and it seems to me that it is one of the first areas to question on a theater set.
When I look 2666 on performance evenings, I realize the great ease with which people enter the fifth part, which is a historical part on the Second World War, on the Shoah, as if it had almost become fiction today today, or at least of the story that we tell, à la Alain Decaux. On the other hand, spectators are shocked by the fourth part, which is comparable in violence – although nothing can be compared with the violence of the Shoah. This contemporary violence upsets people, completely shocks them, because it confronts them with something much more real. I’m always surprised by it myself when I watch the fifth part, which takes place from the 1920s to the 1950s: I have the impression of being faced with a fable. We must question violence today: diving into the contemporary is necessarily diving into violence, without which I have the impression that we are not doing the work, which is not reflection. If we dive into the contemporary simply with the decorum of today, there is something that is not being done. My next work will focus on migrants in Calais. I know that if I work well, this project will also talk about the violence we inflict on other human beings.
La Vie des Idées: How do you make this violence sensitive?
Julien Gosselin: When I see the play there is something that upsets me, that I didn’t quite grasp at first, it’s a character who seems minor in 2666 : Rosa Méndez, the young friend of Rosa Amalfitano, the daughter of the philosophy professor, therefore the intellectual elite. Rosa Méndez is a worker in a maquiladora on the border of Mexico and the United States: we know that she is a potential target of drug traffickers, that she can be raped and killed, that she can be this cannon fodder which is described in the fourth part of the novel which follows. I find the idea overwhelming that the joy, the poetic power of living, which appears in this third part, comes largely from this girl who is the first potential victim, who is also the example of poverty and misery. These are not only sensitive or romantic elements, they are also sociological elements. What upsets me is that Bolaño treats the issue of ignorance and poverty as what could lead to something magnificent and which will in fact end very badly. It’s a negative view, but still powerful.