The Invisible Border — An Interview with Nathalie Azoulai

Les Manifestations (The Demonstrations) is your third novel; for my part, I hold it to be your richest, most accomplished work, but that is only a value judgement of no interest in itself; on the other hand, perhaps you will agree that it is your most ambitious novel and that it must, to a large extent, have caught off guard some of the readers of Mère agitée (Restless Mother) and C’est l’histoire d’une femme qui avait un frère (This Is the Story of a Woman Who Had a Brother). All of a sudden, you seem to step back, to set aside in part the exploration of family knots (motherhood, siblings) in order to approach the political question, on a terrain where doubtless your first readers did not expect you: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or more precisely (we shall come back to it, for it is essential) its repercussions in French society. Can you enlighten us first on the origin of this book? What led you to this apparent change of course?

— Indeed, there was a flagrant change of course at first sight, since I had the ambition of imagining a story engaged with the evolution of French society. In reality, this novel matured in me for several years from 2001 on, finally to appear in 2005 — four years, then. The readers who knew me were surprised and even disconcerted, for I was leaving a certain familiarity and a rather intimist manner. In fact, the genesis of Les Manifestations is that of a malaise, the one that gripped me after 11 September and the events that flowed from it: all of a sudden, French society no longer looked at Israel or the Jews as it had until then, that is, with benevolence, sometimes even complacency: an accusing finger was suddenly raised that aimed at America and everything under its wing, notably Israel; conversations became difficult, solitude grew, a certain muteness too, a speech that little by little went to take refuge on the side of fiction. Moreover, having reached my forties, I found myself confronted with a certain revision of feelings, in particular those of friendship, and it was there that the intimate intertwined with the historical. Finally, I wanted to try my hand at the exercise of the novel, of duration, to take characters and make them evolve in relation to one another, whereas, in the two previous novels, I sought above all to illuminate personal knots, images of myself that I certainly needed to dig into at the moment I did it. In short, Les Manifestations represents for me a turning point in several respects.

Before approaching the substance of the novel, I shall question you on what may seem a detail, but is perhaps not one. For whoever has read the book, the back cover is a little disconcerting. An idea of the novel is given to us… but one must wait for the last line for the word “antisemitism” to appear there; as for the word “Jew,” which occupies so important a place in the book, it is quite simply absent. At bottom, a somewhat hasty reading of this back cover could almost pass by what nonetheless constitutes the heart of the book. Should one see in this use of the implicit, of allusion, a sign or a symptom? Is it because, precisely, the point is to let the reader guess the word that hides in this story of lost friendship? Is it the sign, on the contrary, that the essential would lie elsewhere than in the everlasting Jewish question? Or, more trivially, is it a matter of attenuating this aspect of the work, of euphemising it, because one does not want to frighten the reader away?

— As you probably know, back covers are the prerogative of publishers. If the author has a say, the last word always falls to the publisher and, honestly, it was my publisher who wanted to present things in their generality, without designating what you call the heart of the book. Doubtless he feared too partial, not to say communal, a readership, which is a bad reason because, first, I do not believe that singularity is synonymous with communitarianism and, second, in wishing to flee singularity, one falls into generalities that thereby no longer concern very many people. So I rather agree with you that the back cover passes by the book or reveals only a thread of it too vague to capture attention. I could have insisted that it be otherwise, but perhaps I too had fears that I did not want to admit to myself. In any case, it is a pity, and if I had to do it over again, I would act differently.

Let us speak first of “craft,” literary technique, so intimately articulated here with “vision.” Two elements can be noted here. The first is the one that gives the novel its title: “Les Manifestations.” These are those “great marches” (Kundera) that constitute, in a way, the landmarks that punctuate the story of the three characters, the story of their friendship, of their common struggles, of their progressive separation at last. These demonstrations, moreover, are presented according to the order of remembrance and not in chronological order; likewise, there rub shoulders, in the series, historical demonstrations — the student demonstrations of ’86; then for Malik Oussekine; Carpentras; anti-Gulf War; the anti-Le Pen, anti-Iraq War demonstrations (2003); against antisemitism (2004) — and at least two demonstrations that arise from fictional invention and that are, in a way, the origin and the term of the series: that of the three friends for a North African comrade threatened with expulsion (Habib) before 1986 and, at the end, this demonstration against antisemitism at which Anne finds herself alone with her “madness.” One would have to add yet another, “off-series” demonstration, which appears at the end of the book: the great republican procession described by Péguy that accompanies the inauguration of Dalou’s sculpture “the Triumph of the Republic,” in the very midst of the Dreyfus Affair.¹ Can you tell us how this idea of structuring your novel in this way came to you and the benefit you drew from it?

— In fact, I wanted to create in this novel a double weave, a collective weave and an individual weave, to interlace singular voices and an indistinct clamour. Moreover, demonstrations have always exerted an attraction on me, not that I am a militant for anything, but each time, especially when I was younger, they confronted me with the question of commitment and of its visibility. Finally, it seemed to me that the evolution of the processions described was worthy of presenting a certain image of historical evolution. I also liked the idea of a scansion, and the different demonstrations you recall allowed me to install in the novel kinds of refrains, except that, unlike song refrains, they offered variations, changes, and reversals. This idea in fact came to me very quickly, I knew I had there a singular novelistic thread that I had not yet seen used in the novels I knew.

The other striking element of your novel is its polyphonic structure. Three principal characters: Anne Tolédano, from the Sephardic Jewish bourgeoisie; Virginie Tessier, the friend who is neither Jewish nor bourgeois; a third party: Emmanuel Teper, an Ashkenazi Jew and, one soon discovers, homosexual. If the trio is central to the story, it is the duo of women that structures the narration: you pass regularly from Anne’s point of view to Virginie’s, the Jew and the “goy”; one of the most interesting aspects of the book consists in the reinterpretation of a certain number of episodes according to whether they are lived by one or the other. There is obviously a stake not only psychological but ethical in this alternation of points of view (let us recall, for instance, that it is Virginie’s vision of Anne that closes the novel). Can you explain how this choice imposed itself on you and, possibly, the difficulties you were confronted with?

— It is the character of Virginie that imposed itself first, but she needed a counterpart, a reflection, her voice alone was not enough. Whence the invention of the character of Anne. In reality, the two characters function only together, in symmetry, and it is the back-and-forth that interested me most: changing point of view, place, without cease. I had some difficulty at times finding my way; I was even told that there were awkward confusions, but I did not erase them all, I wished the two voices to overlap, to encroach on one another, for one to take itself for the other and for one to be mistaken, because this confusion is part of the deal, because the identification of one with the other is symptomatic of the malaise of both, of their neuroses and their perversions. Moreover, I am in a general way very touched by the work of the voice in novels, by the freedom it gives and the illumination or the obscuring it permits. I like to write in the impulse of the voice, the pulsation; it seems to me that one touches there a living fibre, as in the work of Nathalie Sarraute, which I love enormously.

To define three characters in this way through their social and religious origin, through their sex or their sexuality, is obviously to expose oneself to the risk of the stereotype. It seems that your novel does everything to avoid them. The two female characters hold up a singular mirror to each other: it is Anne, the Jew, who is blonde with blue eyes; it is Virginie the Christian who resembles a Jew. And above all, each of these characters is animated, at her core, by a singular “self-hatred,” of her origins, of her family, and each more or less secretly envies what the other possesses, or what she believes the other possesses: rootedness on one side, the romanticism of exile on the other… This story of friendship is all in ambivalence, from the start…

— Yes, except that adolescence is often deaf or blind, as you like, when it comes to ambiguity. One prefers, when one is young and friendship is born, to do without the implicit, the ambiguous; one believes in generous and whole feelings. In the story of the two friends, there are from the start zones of shadow, rivalries, lacks, but, at the age when they meet, they are not yet capable of recognising them. It is not voluntary in reality, it is a question of maturity and experience. Only the years teach you to read things otherwise, more finely, and thereby to find there less noble things, more repressed, more sombre. It is only at the dawn of their forties that the friendship of Virginie and Anne begins to fray and is confronted with the ambiguities that have constituted it from the beginning.

It is one of the most manifest paradoxes of the book. On the one hand, an identity wavering, in Anne as much as in Virginie (even if Virginie, it is one of the leitmotivs of the novel, has resources to fall back on, will always land on her feet); on the other, a fatality, a terrifying form of determinism, which seems to ensure that, one way or another, each ends up regaining her camp, rejoining her own, even reluctantly. Can one say that, in the wake of a Silbermann by Jacques de Lacretelle or of the Solal of Albert Cohen, your novel posits the impossibility, if not of getting outside oneself, at least of freeing oneself from the laws of the tribe?

— I would not go so far, even if it is a temptation, but I fight it as I can. Let us say rather that historical events can inflect the course of things and bring back to this kind of determinism. In times of peace, it is simpler to brave certain fatalities, but my novel is set in a kind of war, even if it is latent, even if it plays out on other fronts, it is there all the same. It is customary to say that civil wars separate friends, neighbours, colleagues, etc.; it is a banality, but Les Manifestations sets the stage for a kind of civil war and forces one to retrace borders hitherto invisible, as you so well put it; the tracings then take on a relief that no one believed himself capable of paying attention to, and yet…

All this even though nothing seemed to predispose Anne to becoming the frenetic advocate of Israel. She has visited that country only twice, has never been a Zionist militant and still less an actor engaged in communal life. She seems the typical product of a French education: agrégation in philosophy, mixed marriage, absence of any religious practice. No more, moreover, than Virginie is a relentless third-worldist, a bleating pacifist, a fanatical anti-American: she seems rather to represent a right-thinking left. Nothing seems to condemn these two women to live this fracture…

— Indeed, they could have continued on their way without knowing the least deep disagreement, except that there were events, facts, a public clamour that they integrated, that caught up with them and that forced them to embrace causes at first improbable. Had one predicted to them what was going to happen to them, they would not have believed it themselves, but times change.

I suggested at the beginning that you were leaving the domain of the intimate to approach a political question. This is of course only a first impression. It seems to me in reality that one of the most fascinating elements of your novel is to show that this very distinction is no longer operative. Les Manifestations are also, without any bad pun, all the “manifestations” of politics at the very heart of intimacy. The friendship between Anne and Virginie collapses not for affective reasons, but for “political” reasons! For Anne, everything becomes political: even her flight into alcoholism, even the choice of her sexual partners, up to this perverse form of desire that consists in sleeping with an “antisemite” or a presumed one… (In passing, there are, moreover, some superb pages on female desire in your book.) The way in which what is most private in us is poisoned by a conflict supposed to take place “elsewhere,” this porosity — is this not the curse described in the book?

— Quite so, I believe that the limits between the intimate and the public are illusory or, in any case, fragile. History proves it ceaselessly. When the identity of individuals is to such a degree caught up in questions of territory and belonging, it wavers easily before public events. Just as one often says that love is not enough, I think that friendship is not sufficient either, that it needs similarity, sharing, and affinities. We all, alas, experience this in a less dramatic way when we meet up with old friends before whom we feel strangers with the years, the differences of life choices, of trajectories, etc. Friendship enjoys a kind of legend of eternity, of resistance to every trial; one sings it, one celebrates it, but I believe that one needs the illusions these celebrations convey in order to hold on, for otherwise one would feel oneself, as it were, melting in time, one would lack a footing in the time of one’s own existence; now, once again, life teaches us that time is made of sequences that succeed one another sometimes logically, harmoniously, without rupture, but most of the time with a crash and losses. And it is very difficult to accept that one is made of pieces, of agglomerates; one needs to have at one’s disposal the image of a cohesion, a coherence, and even if, often, one ends up reconnecting with a central thread, one cannot deny that this central thread is the prolongation of a thousand other threads.

Let us come to the modalities of the malaise, if not of the divorce. In the experience you describe, the rupture is accentuated during the “second Intifada.” (For others who have lived analogous experiences, it can go back to the first Lebanon war, or again to the first Intifada; others, older, have known this malaise since the Six-Day War: it seems that each generation has its own scansion of crisis.) Even before approaching the strictly political dimension, there is a very precise description of this discomfort that settles in little by little. A phenomenology of the little nothings that spoil a relationship, that poison an existence: a keffiyeh that exasperates, the subjects one wants to avoid and that one knows to be inevitable at evenings among friends, the fear of a slip that always ends up coming (“all conversations become steep”), the interpretation of words or even of silences… All these little details that end up tracing what one might call an invisible border, but terribly watertight, between individuals, between groups, between communities… So many signs that, it seems to me, political or sociological analyses often leave aside and that, you show, are the chosen terrain of the novel.

— Yes, I realised, moreover, in speaking with readers from older generations, that this second Intifada only reactivated malaises born on other occasions for them, which had not reached me because I was too young then, as if each generation had its lot, its hour. If I wished to write a novel and not an essay on this subject, it is precisely in order to dwell on these little nothings that make up the history of relations among individuals. I could never, moreover, have theorised about this malaise, I would not have been capable of it and, what is more, I would have arrived at no conclusion worthy of the name, nor even at interesting principles. My aim was rather to glean moments, frictions a priori innocuous that my own experience had made me observe, and to show how they could weave something more manifest, more visible, and more troubling, a dull rumbling that becomes, precisely, a clamour. I really wanted to propose a kind of traceability of the progressive, insidious, and irreversible poisoning, to show how one comes to no longer being able to look at a friend one has so dearly loved.

— And what, then, to say of this other formidable temptation, of which it would be quite presumptuous to say that it has spared many Jews attached to Israel: this mania of establishing, on every occasion, even in the world of “the mind,” of culture, this distinction between friends and enemies (of Israel, of Zionism, of the Jews)? The reaction you ascribe to Anne, this woman so cultivated, who ends up choosing Truffaut against Godard, Foucault against Deleuze simply according to their position with regard to the Jews and Israel…

— It is a formidable temptation because it forces one to make shortcuts, amalgams, and to abandon subtle observation in favour of crude adhesions or hostilities, but I must say that it is difficult to avoid at times. I had great admiration for the work of Deleuze, but what I read from his pen sent shivers down my spine, even if it was the era and the context that spoke too through him. Let us say that for minds of this stamp, him or Godard, I had difficulty “forgiving”; I could not tell myself that they had thought wrongly, that they had let themselves be carried away, or other things of that kind; I tended to believe that their intelligence, their clear-sightedness accommodated certain tropisms, that they were not exempt from them, that they ought to have had the intelligence to, but that if they did not have it, then it is that something else animated them, more visceral impulses, more personal, more intimate affiliations, that, to speak plainly, something in them refused to stand on Israel’s side, and that something cooled me. But beware, this prevents me neither from reading Deleuze nor from admiring films by Godard such as Le Mépris (Contempt), but I have kept from it a kind of distrust, my admiration has, as it were, been tempered, which sometimes, moreover, is no bad thing. To come back to Anne’s stances, they are situated at critical moments of her life where she loses her discernment, where she retains only what at that moment suits her, but these are only fits that will subside.

How to formulate Anne’s malaise politically? A “carnal” solidarity with Israel? An unconditional support? Or, more likely, the impossibility of joining the “pack” of anti-Zionists because one believes, one senses, or one knows (let us leave the question open) that there is “something” behind it? In your novel, Anne prides herself on having a “radar,” like a sixth sense that makes her see the abominable things that hide beneath the noblest slogans… And your novel does not decide, which, moreover, is one of its strengths. One may think that Anne is raving (the culminating point is doubtless reached by this fake antisemitic assault on her son, which nonetheless gives rise to one last demonstration!). But at the same time, some of Anne’s intuitions are borne out: just as Virginie, a young settled wife, gives in at one point to adulterous passion, she gives in at one point to a flirtation with antisemitic discourse: as if the jouissance were commensurate with the forbidden. Anne sees Auschwitz everywhere — like Jean-Claude Milner! — and her friends see it nowhere (except in the commemorations or in the ever-reborn and finally comfortable hydra of the far right). Is this the alternative: well-meaning sentiments ensnared on one side, the sense of the tragic to the point of madness on the other? Blindness or paranoia?

— No, I dare to hope that this is not the only alternative, but once again, I knowingly set the stage for situations of crisis that favour exacerbated and extreme attitudes. In normal times, these attitudes would not have had currency, but the novel is not set in normal time, it is a time of war, of confrontation, even if, once again, there are neither weapons nor collective violence. I found it interesting, nonetheless, to arrive at these amplifications because they have the merit of revealing buried things and of forcing the characters, forgive me the expression, to “spit it out.”

You describe this slow slide, this slope that draws Anne into open war with all her past mythology, the one accompanied, in your book, by the memory of Nos plus belles années (Our Best Years): the end of the anti-racist struggle to the very point that Anne herself is on the verge of sinking into anti-Arab racism; the end of the chivalric myth of “the left-wing intellectual”; the turn to the right (one of the turning points of the novel is the moment when Anne admits she voted on the right). Is this a diagnosis you are making of the general evolution of the Jews of France (one thinks of analyses such as those of Daniel Lindenberg, who titles one of the chapters of his pamphlet Le Rappel à l’ordre (The Call to Order): “when jews turn right”)? Do you think it is a durable evolution or an episode of a tumultuous history that will know yet other reversals? In the edition of Les Manifestations I have, there is no full stop after the last sentence, and I assume this is not a mere typo: how will the story end, in your view? Do the Jews and the left seem to you a story definitively closed?

— As you have rightly noted, I did not put a full stop to this story because it does not have one. Or if it has one, I do not know it. When I wrote my last lines, it imposed itself, I could not finish… I cannot tell you what will become of the alliance of the French left and the Jews of France, but these last years have worked in the direction of a clear rupture that a skilful politician like Nicolas Sarkozy was able to exploit in his favour. The Jews felt let down by the parties of the left, which could not manage to clarify certain of their affiliations with regard to the far left and to alter-globalism in particular. Each time it was a question of national politics, they could feel themselves of the left, but as soon as the international question returned, then there was, as it were, a gap, a deep distrust. I hope the situation will calm down and that the future leaders of the left will know how to show themselves clearer and thus restore their discernment to Jewish voters, but let us say that it will take time and many errors or blunders on the part of the right to seal the breach. This uncomfortable situation will only have installed one more quartering within French Jewish consciousness, as if it were short of them!

Let us perhaps approach a touchy subject, if you agree. Without making a naively biographical reading, there are indeed many elements that could make one think that, madness aside, you are not very far from thinking and feeling like your character (not only, of course: there is necessarily a Virginie in you!). Two elements lead me to think this. On the one hand, the dedication: “to my father.” It is of course very legitimate and moving, but, given what the novel says of the paternal side, is it not a way, for a woman who has shared all the struggles you speak of in your book, of coming to repentance, of saying almost, to paraphrase Sacha Guitry, “my father was right,” even in his prejudices?…

— The subject is not touchy, have no fear. While it is true that I dedicated this novel to my father and that a part of my history is found distilled within it, I nonetheless feel myself at a distance from the two characters, or let us say that I passed through crests that borrow from their trajectories, but from those crests, I came back down. Moreover, I would not say that the paternal figure present in the novel, notably through Anne’s father, is made only of prejudices, even if they are there in good part; one must also take into account the part of experience of this father who was driven from his native country, who experienced exile, deconstruction, and reconstruction; now these experiences also give lessons that owe nothing to prejudices. At a given moment, Anne’s experience joins that of her father, for she feels herself exiled in her own country, her own milieu, she no longer recognises her world; it is a suffering that, like all sufferings, distorts the gaze but also reveals things. Doubtless it is also, for Anne, the only means she has found to reconcile herself with her father, with her father’s past, to find a place of reunion, a common wound; it is an unhappy means, but it is the only one at her disposal at that moment of her life to wash herself of a certain guilt. It is always painful to leave the first world, one is never finished with this pain, as Annie Ernaux so well says.

Second element: there is this very disquieting figure of Omar. You have invented a kind of Arab and Maurrassian Silbermann… A handsome young man (this is important, for there is also an erotic dimension in the fascination he exerts on Virginie, his French teacher) who, from the age of fourteen, wallows with delight in the antisemitic literature of the French “great tradition” (Barrès, Jouhandeau, Céline…). Here is something that contrasts with the more conventional foil-figures: he is neither a young fundamentalist nor a pro-Palestinian “beur.” From what personal nightmare does this character emerge? Perhaps from a kind of improbable synthesis that would unite all the hatreds of the Jew!

— He is a character one would have trouble finding in reality, but the novel permits this kind of freedom and invention even if it is appalling, I admit. I did not seek to dig into this character, but my intuition was that he was seeking a kind of dignity and rootedness in the fascination that animates him, as if he were washing himself of all national indignity by espousing nationalist extremism.

Could one attribute to you what I shall call “the Werther complex,” in the sense in which one says that Goethe would have avoided the temptation of despair by delegating that despair to his fictional character, by “suiciding” him, in a way, in his place? Is Anne your Werther, is her madness her suicide? Was this book a liberation, a relief?

— Three years later, I have optimistic prospects for Anne, I like to think she will have come out of her madness to reconnect with calm and a certain serenity. On the other hand, I am ready to wager that she will have crossed out names on her list and that she will have knotted new friendships, which will lead to other disappointments, obviously! I had a visceral need to write this story to purge myself of certain terrors, of the assaults that prevented me from breathing freely, notably as a mother. In this sense, Les Manifestations will have allowed a relative relief, for I said what I had to say, what I could not manage to do in the real situations of life. This book will perhaps have allowed — but it is not even certain — a renewal in my way of binding myself to others, maturity also having a fine part in it, but the disquiet is there, in a corner, ready to flare up at the hazard of future events. For the moment, let us say that there is a lull, but I have learned that history knows how to make sequences of crisis and lull alternate. But I have certainly not finished questioning myself about friendship and the surprises it holds in store; I do not know why, but this question seems to me inexhaustible and fascinating, because I generally find people very much dupes, beginning with myself. I shall come back to it, moreover, again in my next novel.

Notes