Lor Murat. “It is no coincidence that the vast majority of our writers are bourgeois.”

Born by his father to the nobility of the Empire and his mother to the nobility of the ancien régime, Lor Murat grew up in the world described by Marcel Proust. In search of lost time. When he read the writer (who knew his great-grandfather), he was 20 years old, and his life turned upside down. He realizes that he is developing in an environment where power and money have “gone hands”, in the words of his mother, only rituals, manners, codes, a world of pure forms remain. Read on The research liberates him and allows him to chart his own path, while confessing his homosexuality to his mother means he is ostracized from his family – says homosexuality is less unforgivable than the fact of celebrating it.

Became a professor of literature at the University of California, Los Angeles and a noted essayist (Goncourt Prize for Biography Dr. White’s house2001, Femina Prize Essay The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon, 2011), he tries with his admiration Proust, a family novel – where the chapters devoted to Proust and his family are alternated – to determine very precisely how the book can change your life… And signs a work that is as fascinating as it is enlightening, beautifully written and composed, a gem of literature that we would like to. put in everyone’s hands.

Madame Figaro. – The gesture of the waiter the bottom of the abyss was the beginning of an epiphany for you. Can you tell which one it is? ?

Laura Murat.– I realized only the next day that my emotion from the gesture of this waiter (who checks with a meter that the distance between the places for dinner is really the same for each guest) is related to my family. This gesture was a metaphor for mental and social structure in a universe of empty forms. I made the connection with the collection of articles on Proust I was planning at the time, because the style is common to Aristocracy as well as Proust’s work, although they use it very differently. The aristocracy is made up of people obsessed with the idea of ​​living in style, or, literally, the art of living, while we are in life with Proust for art, so the opposite is true. Among aristocrats, the original sense of honor evolved into a sense of etiquette. Now, if the protocol has meaning (for example, the places around the table), it does so in the same way as in an unstaged performance; these are numbers drawn in the air. The substance has disappeared, and only the form remains. The aristocracy indulges in a kind of objectless, aimless, disappearing performance when Proust’s work is inscribed in duration and generation.

How did this author set you free? ?

Another title of my book could be How Proust Changed My Life. I had a happy childhood, we lacked nothing (that’s the least we can say), but Proust put into words the discomfort I felt in a social environment of living a lie, where everything is just appearances. I had experience but no knowledge and he unlocked this knowledge. In Urica, By Madame de Duras, published in 1823, a little black girl, from Senegal and given to one of her aunts by a nobleman, grows up to be an aristocrat. He has the best manners, dances and chats great, and he doesn’t know he’s black. One day she hears her protector bemoan her fate (this poor little girl can’t marry, can’t become a slave again, her fate is forbidden), and suddenly she realizes that she is black. When I give this text for analysis, I ask the students what they think of this American proverb: Ignorance is bliss ” (“Ignorance is Bliss”): A part of the class always tells me that, indeed, ignorance is preferable, and I point out to them that if they are in university, it is because they still want to know. And that it’s better, even if it’s more painful.

Proust’s work is part of duration and generation

Laura Murat

Because knowledge allows for emancipation, which in your case was not only social…

Indeed. Placing homosexuality at the heart of his novel and all the discourses surrounding it, at the heart of homosexuals, the discourse held against them, and all the social dances around this taboo, which is considered a crime, but which is perfectly tolerated elsewhere (we return to the constant lie of the social environment), Proust offered me a second discovery. A critique of aristocracy that begins German side follows Sodom and Gomorrahand here again, it is a fantastic “position” on male and female homosexuality, a reversal of the Copernican view, where the homosexual subject, hitherto a minority, becomes universal…

You quote Annie Ernaux who had this phrase to define her original setting :” Reality without words. » How did he hit you? ?

He enlightened me by making me realize that I could describe the aristocracy using the opposite formula: “Words without reality. “The fear of life passed through a very fine and strong filter, which was the correction of the language, with a special pronunciation, delivery, wording. Not only did we live in a museum where everything resembled either the Napoleonic epic or the Luynes (my mother’s branch) relationship with the royal family, but everything had to be controlled by an order of discourse that had to contain all excesses, all of them. emotion.. “You don’t cry like a servant,” said my paternal grandmother. Annie Erno felt that there was a “reality” that was marked by poverty and the hardships of everyday life. When we do not have material difficulties, we can devote ourselves to sentences, and it is no coincidence that the vast majority of our writers are bourgeois, and even rentiers…

Annie Erno had the feeling that there was a “reality” that was marked by poverty and the hardships of everyday life;

Laura Murat

Is this book new to you? ?

My main job was to gain true legitimacy, not the genealogical one I was bombarded with in my childhood. Moreover, legitimacy is built on fiction (here there is always an adopted child, there a son who does not belong to his father, life wants it), and yet we must at all costs preserve this fiction of inheritance and long-standing prestige. titles, the aristocracy is the only caste where birth establishes inequalities. So my discretion is tied to my social background, even if I have never lied while working to gain academic legitimacy. If I talk about it today, it is through Proust and not to limit these questions only to the field of sociology. Literature opened up a space while I lived in a castle that was both very real (with a dungeon and a drawbridge) and fantastical; we were mentally and figuratively apart, and the rest of the world had to stay away. I continued to study the latter and gain the legitimacy I generated to be able to share what I learned. This story made me the teacher I am today, with this desire to convey the liberating power and unique comfort of literature.

Proust, a family novelby Laure Murat, Éditions Robert Laffont, 256p., €20.