In an investigative novel, the historian Philippe Artières follows in the footsteps of his murdered Jesuit great-uncle. Crossroads, illegalities, usurpations, role plays: history becomes a field of investigation to understand where we come from and where we are heading.
The historian Carlo Ginzburg sees an analogy between the investigative methods of the art critic Giovanni Morelli, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the detective Sherlock Holmes. It describes an interpretive method based on marginal facts, discrepancies, which are the only ones considered revealing: the details, the evocative force of the infinitesimal and the snags, the sensitive – even esoteric – links that the expert maintains with them would allow him to grasp a deeper reality, impossible to grasp otherwise.
Philippe Artières is also a historian. He specialized in ordinary writing, that is to say, again, the often neglected, daily, unstabilized and sometimes difficult to read traces (correspondence, personal notebooks, drafts, diaries, mainly the writings of criminals ). In Life and death of Paul Gényhe returns to the death of his great-uncle, a priest and brilliant Christian intellectual, murdered in 1925 by a madman in a street in Rome. Paul Gény was an army chaplain. He fought in the trenches from 1914 to 1915, notably at Verdun. After the war, he worked at the university, taught philosophy, then directed the Higher Institute of Religious Culture and organized the Thomist Congress.
The Epiphany of Crime
Through this investigation “ wild and partial » touching on a murderous tragedy, Artières questions what the historian is tracking down: accidents, clues, symptoms ? It also poses questions of a genealogical, existential and literary nature: how to commemorate a disappearance that is both a family tragedy and a historical anecdote ? Artières desires “ to present today this ordinary memory, of events which have passed into oblivion and which nevertheless shed light on the past » (p. 49). But how to write a crime story ? How to make the operation that restores it both a quest, a tribute to the dead and a paradigm ?
If Morelli, art critic and collector, developed methods and developed techniques aimed at distinguishing copies from originals, Philippe Artières, through the literary restitution of the murder of his great-uncle, begins on the contrary with an usurpation, a disguise, a simulacrum, a little anachronistic theater: the author disguises himself as a priest and walks through the streets of Rome. He mimes and reproduces the gestures of his ancestor before the tragedy of 1925. Could the writer-researcher be first and foremost an actor, a forger? ? Does he want repeat what the master did » (p. 13), look for the same way to start, follow “ as close as possible to the painter’s gesture “, like the artists working in the workshops for “ become a painter as we were from Van Eyck to Delacroix » ?
In any case, it involves replaying the scene, copying it, donning the victim’s trappings – in this case a cassock. It’s about embodying him, following in his footsteps, via San Basilio, until reproducing the criminal event. Artières thus promotes its illusory restitution in Rome, to then provoke – no longer in the city, but in the literary and textual space – its unexpected epiphany.
The historian’s metamorphoses
Artières constantly oscillates between the profane and the sacred, the wild and the legal, academic rigor and delinquent temptation. The thug seems to him an anonymous fraternal figure, the ego ideal of the historian, the one who would ensure his creative vitality. Thus he presents his approach not only as that of a forger, but as that of a “ thief “, with a “ ugly “, with a “ looter “, for example when he photographs historical documents or consults Jesuit archives. Disguising himself as a man of the church to retrace Gény’s journey through Rome, the writer-historian explains that he fears nothing legally, as cross-dressing is not a crime. But, he adds, it was not always this way: “ Just after the Revolution, at the birth of the Penal Code, there existed an offense of usurpation, the illicit wearing of a costume or decoration » (p. 26).
The forgery or rogue act would also have a memory function. While waiting for an official plaque to recall, via San Basilio, the assassination of the priest, Artières wants “ force the memorial act » and draws up an inventory of the inscriptions – signs, engravings or graffiti – lining the walls of the city since its ancient origins. He creates posters which he places in the street, before the authorized honorary inscription is grafted onto them – a sort of urban palimpsest. Artières was arrested by the police.
He reinvents himself again as a sandwich man, to take the thoughts of his Jesuit great-uncle through the capital and projects one of Paul Gény’s quotes onto the walls of the Villa Medici. It tracks down possible transgression in a thousand ways as a path to accomplishment. Artières wants to free itself from codes, borders, frameworks (academic, aesthetic, legal), at the risk of certain forms of wandering. What interests him most, deep down, is perhaps the wandering temptation, the psychotic core, the part of madness or shadow that every act or every being conceals. Gény tells us through the author: “ Every error presupposes, at least in a man capable of perfect reflection, an element of will. There is no invincible error » (p. 88). Here we are: to think, you have to want to confront error. The perversity of the postulate proves fruitful: it leads us to consider that we need fault, even error, to overcome it and succeed in thinking, creating – living as a man.
In his book, the author paints a fragmented portrait of Gény, borrowing, at the risk of getting lost, “ crossroads » to flush him out, mixing and inoculating fragments of archives, newspapers, correspondence into the textual body, also starting from their blanks – from what they do not reveal – to try to imagine and understand who this man was that he did not know. But Artières also goes looking for the crazy killer. He addresses him as a lost brother. Artières invents a connection with the killer, in a happy blurring of identity. Through his historical and family quest, the author becomes almost a stranger to himself and suddenly seems to ask: who is Philippe Artières ?
Life as a field of investigation
Life and death of Paul Gény praises break-ins and illegal boardings. The author goes over the barriers of the archive center and almost gets locked up there to gain further access. Artières lives like a pirate. There is perhaps an adolescent naivety in believing so much in self-affirmation through delinquency. When his bike lock gets stuck, he panics at the idea of being imprisoned in the archives. Perhaps this image acts like a rosebud: the fear of letting oneself be limited, taken in, fossilized in one’s research, in a too narrow definition of oneself, freezes and frightens one. Artières never stops pursuing his own freedom through his ability to play, to subvert, to transgress.
President of the Michel Foucault Center, Philippe Artières is also interested in the history of madness. So if the physical sciences claim the scholastic motto according to which “ Individuality is ineffable » (of what is individual, we cannot speak), we understand that the historian, even if he refers to series of comparable phenomena, does not shine exclusively in objective analysis. Its cognitive strategy, like its expression codes, remains fundamentally individualizing. In this sense, the historian can be compared to the doctor who uses nosographic frameworks to analyze the specific illness of a particular patient.
As Ginzburg says, historical knowledge is always indirect, indexical, conjectural. It can become the place of intuitions, unexpected acts, strange enterprises, mediumistic visions. We sometimes also think of the metaphysician, Christian esotericist, René Guénon, contemporary of the disappearance of Gény and who died in 1951. He believed in the force of intuition, exposing point by point the imperfections inherent, according to him, to scholasticism and Thomism. He mentioned, in The Spiritualist Error (1923), the “ wandering influences » of some who have disappeared, the silent power of the gaps in a family history, polarizing the energy of the living and threatening them with hauntings, deviances, metamorphoses.
With Artières, the historian becomes a philosopher, an experimental artist, a shaman, a delinquent, a writer. He brings his internal contradictions to incandescence, reconstructs the history of his people, plays, reinvents his genealogy, draws existential equations from them, addresses the dead. He believes in subjective violence and in the fact that life can become a terrible and sometimes playful field of investigation to understand where we come from, what we are tending towards, and who we are.