Diving into the Divine
A review of Noir Parfait, a novel by French writer Valentin Retz published by Gallimard in 2015
"The commercial distinction between fiction and non-fiction is, within the publishing field, a curious one. It is as if the supposedly non-narrative genre deserved only to be qualified negatively, via its supposed lack of fancy or unreality. The couple Non-fiction/fiction, in its pretention to encompass a major area in the commercial space of the bookstore, seems to dictate a double imperative: essays should not be too imaginative, and novels should not think too loud.
Many authors have disputed this simplistic dichotomy. Yet, it has always been rather difficult for a philosophical novel to be accepted by a mainstream publishing house. Not only because philosophical novels don’t sell that well or because they are hybrid objects, and therefore difficult to place in a shop, but also, let’s face it, because the numbers of readers that can endure a clear prioritisation of style and thought over action and narration are scarce. Yet, some niche collections still offer a space of expression for the happy and brave writers who manage to seduce their directors. These scarce collections publish what we would call philofictions or, following Bergson, fabulations: short and carefully crafted truthful divagations where metaphysics become a ballad, where lyricism is a meta-cognitive or symbolic demonstration, and in which usually one (in)dividual narrator can’t seem to digest the effects of the contemporary drug called postmodern life.
Noir parfait (‘Perfect Black’), by Valentin Retz is a stylistic phoenix that feathered its nest in the collection L’infini, a niche of preciousness, brains and lamenting, run since antediluvian times by Parisian icon Philippe Sollers. The book is immediately admirable – as are many texts in the collection –, simply by its refusal of the adolescent form of writing and the over-plotting that is nowadays favoured by marketing trends. With Noir Parfait, we are in neoclassical territory; in it French still believes it is the patrician lingua franca of Europe, as it used to be when Jean François Paul de Gondi, the Cardinal de Retz, wrote his Memoirs in the seventeenth century.
What is the plot of Noir Parfait by Valentin Retz? A singular masculine form of the first person, let’s call him I, finds the courage to singularise himself by interpreting and experiencing his life in a non-conventional but (subjectively) coherent manner. A major clue to understand this hallucinated diary is given in the first pages: ‘All makes sense in a way or another’, says I to himself. Confronted to a painful feeling of self-consumption, the narrator quickly discards the medical discourse to unveil his personal cosmological myth. He turns to Greece, to bohemians, to crazed homeless people, to historical buildings (that talk to him), and eventually to the dead, who give him the best advice, a crypto-religious one. The real plot is an idea, an adventure of spirit, a moral prophecy: if you follows your inner coherence at any cost, liberation will be the reward, although the (blinded) layman might consider your integrity as a manifestation of madness.
Stylistically, the text is well-crafted, and even slightly humorous (claiming Gombrovicz, among others, as an inspiration). It offers a pure spiritualist philosophy, in which our world is the projection of a form of cosmic consciousness. Our passage on Earth should be a journey of self-improvement, despite the temptations, and, today, the danger of being digitally duplicated by a set of virtual mirrors.
As all honest books, Noir Parfait is a poetical neuroimaging (by magnetic resonance) of a textual brain in constant transformation under the influence of a truth. This maturation is manifested through a co-creative dialogue between I and the Cosmos, in which words become clearer visions than ‘realistic’ images. Little by little, the illusion of social ordering of things, the Norm, decomposes to reveal the co-creative flow that is such stuff as our cosmic dreams are made on."
About the author of this guest post: Luis de Miranda – Founder and director of the Crag Before starting a PhD in 2014 at the University of Edinburgh, Luis was a novelist, an essayist and a publisher in France.