…, j’échouais partout et il fallait trouver un type d’existence dans lequel un corps et une histoire comme les miens auraient été possibles, c’est tout” (translated by John Lambert as “…, I was failing everywhere and I had to find a type of existence in which a body and story like mine would be possible, that’s all”).[1] Necessity, agency and violence in a divisive society. This is a blog on Édouard Louis Changer: méthode (2021) (Change (2024) but literally ‘To Change: Method’; ‘Method’ here meant as if it were in an appropriate section of a scientific report).
I don’t distrust John Lambert’s translation of Édouard Louis’s Changer: méthode (2021) (Change (2024), for it reads beautifully in the tone of conversational English, as it must do so for a reader to understand the book’s formal structure as a series of almost intimate chats between its characters in the imagination of its narrator, or should I say narrators in order to include the many personae of Édouard Louis, including some to which he twice chats in an ‘imaginary mirror’. However, English has no easy way of translating French idioms such that it still sounds like conversation, particularly in its use of that phrase, one of the earliest I remember learning in Grammar school, ‘Il faut’. There is a tremendous webpage on this idiom which gives the necessary details and saves me from doing so. Find it here at this link.
The usual English translation, the one given in school is ‘It is necessary to … followed by an infinitive involving some human action of commission or omission. But imagine Lambert writing (actualising the past tense Louis uses): “…, I was failing everywhere and it was necessary to find a type of existence in which a body and story like mine would be possible, that’s all”. It doesn’t quite work in English, even if we vary the word ‘necessary’ for some other. Nevertheless, it changes things to import into the sense of the sentence in French the first person past tense verb ‘I had to find’. There is a reflexive sense of the necessity to act conveyed of course still but with some intervention of personal agency, as if the character speaking here was at the least in some control of their decisions and was expressing their agency in those decisions and consequent actions.
But necessity in that later formulation is a subjective necessity. At this point of the story, I think we have to believe that Louis is showing a character who feels shaped by necessities over which he has NO control, where we have to believe that the narrator is speaking of a fateful necessity, even though he rules out feeling himself to have certain forms of such fate: ‘non pas parce que j’étais plus destiné que qui que ce soit d’autre à cette vie-là’ (not because he was ‘more destined for that life than anyone else’). [2] Instead the necessity is NOT that of fate but of a desire prompted externally rather than internally, a desire of what he lacked in order to have being at all: ‘having got a glimpse of an existence in which I would have a place’. It is this same idea he expands in this paragraph and which I use tin my title: ‘j’échouais partout et il fallait trouver un type d’existence dans lequel un corps et une histoire comme les miens auraient été possibles, c’est tout” (translated by John Lambert as “…, I was failing everywhere and I had to find a type of existence in which a body and story like mine would be possible, that’s all”).[3]
The idea that desire is an impersonal drive (or apprehended as such by the desirer) is all important here as is also the belief that its imperatives are not under conscious cognitive control, though it can form ‘compromise formations’ (Freud’s name for the knowable (because they disguise their latent significance) content of dreams, slips of the tongue or symptoms) that disguise themselves as things that are unmotivated by anything other than an unknowable force of uncertain locus or to do with that which has no relationship to the object or subject of the desire it speaks of, either in content or emotional charge necessarily.
Louis’s wants are reflexive,at least when they are not identifying spaces into which he could fit, and which are therefore unlike those he inhabits currently and which he, and those observing him and commenting upon him, discern as not a fit match either for his body or his ‘story’ as he tells it. Even if a space is found that suits him apparently, he still needs to ‘change’, ‘transform’ or ‘metamorphose’ to ensure the rightness of the fit in his and others’ perceptions. And such changes can be treacherous to others, for they may continue to see him as they always did, however much he changes or applies appropriate ‘make up’. The idea of being ‘made up’, in the sense of being seen as another, a character that though it appear fictional aspires to becoming the truth of the person, runs through the work – sometimes it is innocently funny and based on innocent misunderstandings such as in his first interview on TV, where his self-persona trembles into emotional being in this new situation, ‘someone who was being made up in a studio’ ‘(une personne qu’on maquillait dans un studio’). When all realise that is merely regional TV all realise the error of this being any kind of enduring transition. But the made-up new person fails to impress his mother and her mates watching him on the political TV show on which he was invited and his father disliked his stance against migrant-focused racism.[4]
Sometimes fictive show lead to more fantastical error, as that scene where , as Elena, as a fictive character based on her, says in the monologue he also uses as a tribute to Jean-Luc Lagarce, the French queer actor, playwright and director who died of AIDs in 1995: “You decided to put on make-up because you hated your face’. The result:
You were ridiculously orange. / I looked at you and laughed. /…/ You weren’t hurt / You who were always so touchy / and got offended for nothing / You laughed with me. / I said: look at you, you’re orange’.
But I find this strange. Deliberately created as a fiction, the monologue seems to fill a time-space hard to enter, with as much reference to Lagarce as anyone. In a sense it is an illusion of how Louis wanted to appear to Elena as much as how he did. At its end he adds:
Est-ce que c’est une forme of pretention d’imaginer la douleur d’Elena. En verité c’est ma douleur à moi que je mets à l’interieur de ses mots imagines, mes regrets, ma nostalgie. C’set l’Autre Moi, celui qui aurait voulu rester, qui parle, et qii en parlant me fait des reproches’.
What Louis tells us is that there is no one ‘me’: for every move away from myself – from my father, my mother, the village, Amiens, Elena, there is a person who wishes that he ‘would have liked to stay’, and whose pain is the equivalent of those he felt the apparently external imperative of desire to abandon. In an earlier blog post, I tried to eradicate my own personal investment in trying to understand this paradox in persons driven to abandon and reject others (read it at this link). This blog was prompted by this fine passage of narrative reflection:
Est-ce que je devenais une personne mauvaise ? Est-ce que je reproduisais à Amiens la violence que j’avais exercée quelques années avant avec ma famille, quand je rentrais chez ma mère et que je faisais semblant de lire sur le canapé pour lui montrer qui je devenais ? Est-ce qu’en changeant je voulais faire comprendre aux autres que je n’étais plus comme eux, est-ce que j’avais compris que changer ne voulait pas seulement dire devenir quelqu’un d’autre, mais aussi ne plus être comme d’autres, et donc repousser ces autres, les abandonner, les mettre désespérément au-dessous de soi ? Est-ce que j’étais devenu une personne haïssable ?[5]
I hope we see here the same reflexive turning upon the self of many personae by other personae that inhabit his story and reflect on its progression as well as bring it back. It fears ‘becoming a bad person’ as much as it still questions it as unlikely; as if the judgement were a difficult one, that dubbed him a bad person or described him as ’hateful’, In fact the English translation is not clearly saying the same thing as the French. Louis asks if he is a person who merits hate from others (who is ‘hateworthy’). The meaning is there in the English but in strong competition with another meaning – that Louis has become a person ‘full of hate’ for others, precisely why is hate-worthy himself. I hope both meanings were intended to be carried. My French is not strong enough to know.
The issue at stake is that the self in a capitalist society becomes a site of struggle itself between the selves it demands we become variously in both space and time. People expect us to be ‘like’ their idea of us. Thus, paradoxically, this is illustrated in the mild surprise at the writer’s life-choices, of where he wishes to be seen, in an interview with Louis by Andrew Hussey in The Observer.
On a bone-chilling evening in early January, the bestselling writer Édouard Louis is nursing a rum hot toddy and sitting exactly where he has wanted to be for most of his life – at a discreet table at Le Select, one of the most famous literary cafes on the Left Bank in Paris. “I feel at home here,” says Louis, as I express mild surprise at his choice of venue, having expected the young iconoclast (he is 32) to favour the more fashionable drinking dens of the Bastille or Marais districts. “I know it is old-fashioned,” he continues, “but that is why I like this cafe. It is like a monument to French literature. Everybody has been here, and writers, publishers and politicians still come so it is also part of the present. It is a place where I can meet friends easily and connect with the world”.[6]
After all ‘hip’ political iconoclasts ought to have preferred the bustle and hustle of the Bastille or Marais districts, not to stay (‘rester’ in French) in the haunts of the old writers: the ones the older queer and former Northern working-class left intellectual writer from Reims Didier Eribon is said to introduce him to in Change, and whom that older writer knew personally (see the two together in the picture below – Didier on our left, Louis centre). The point is that change (or metamorphosis) is as much about the need of those who change to return, imaginatively at least, to the personae they once were as to move on, in order to understand the violence of the social dialectic that brought them into conflict and into their present synthesis of persona or person, for personae can become persons but equally persons can re-become personae as they are abandoned and rejected.
In Le Select sits a literary persona, surrounded by the ghost of the dead writers of the Left bank, and those who survived them like Eribon. Yet in there too Hussey finds, as the journalist performs his own name-dropping self-magnification:
Sébastien-Yves Laurent, a history professor from Bordeaux University. Édouard Louis is the best thing that has happened in French literary and political life for decades, says Laurent. “He reminds us of the falseness of our French lives, and why France is in trouble.”
And Louis is hated by some who thought he traduced them in his writing , such as the villagers of Hallencourt, near Abbeville, the setting of The End Of Eddy and the first chapter of Change. Even his own godmother ‘fiercely denounced his work as lies and a filthy slur on their poor but hardworking community’. But even if Hussey were not to have to told us this it was evident from Change where Louis’s father is imagined to say, actually in The End Of Eddy, that is quoted retrospectively at the point at which Louis is said to be actually writing it, that people who leave and not stay (and take responsibility) like his father’s own father, are hated, hate-worthy and seen as full of hate effectively (yet Eddy’s father left him too with his mother, just as Eddy abandoned BOTH father and mother (and a whole lot of other places and people too):
“My father never forgot, saying in front of me That fucking son of a bitch who abandoned us, left my mother with nothing, I’d piss all over him if I had the chance”.[7]
But the drivers to change, so often expressed in the novel, always entail such abandonment; abandonment sometimes accompanied with physical violence but always emotional and cognitive violence and with consequences on those left behind. The certainty is that one must become a bad person in some way in order to do the changing. Here is how I expressed it in the last blog:
Wanting to be like another person or set of persons, in brief, means abandoning and rejecting others who sustained the person one once was, for whatever duration and it does not only have to be the ‘long duration’, to invoke the French phrase. In the structure of the book as an auto-fiction Louis’s persona narrates the story by imagining an audience of one each time he takes the next progressive step away from the self-image he leaves behind to be a representative dramatis persona from his last life, the old and abandoned one. The metamorphosis that occurs is of self (called eventually Édouard Louis) but each self that one becomes must include new others surrounding it to then sustain that new self. He must move to something new and determinately different and separate, hence the importance of not just leaving people behind but also leaving PLACES: his home village for his lycée (secondary school), his lycée for his new home in Amiens, and then Amiens for Paris. Paris is large enough to allow secret changes between districts or to move even to Spain for a week, in the hope of it being forever in actuality, without the people you know in Paris being aware of that abandonment and feeling rejected.
https://livesteven.com/2024/02/18/the-feeling-of-rejection-and-abandonment-a-personal-case-study/
As Hussey points out Louis’s next two books about were also about his family:
The first, Who Killed My Father, was an account of his father’s decline after an industrial accident left him unemployed and the government cut his benefits. It was the state, says Louis, that destroyed his father. Next came A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, about the difficult life of his mother, Monique, whose “battles” included early pregnancy, a failed first marriage, and the long calvary of marriage to Louis’s father, the angry and disturbed Jacky, before her eventual departure for Paris. “The lives of my parents were full of silences and misunderstandings,” Louis tells me, “and now the distance of social class separates us, too. I needed to speak to them, and do it in my writing. Now that I have studied and live in Paris, I have become their class enemy. As a child I humiliated them because I was gay. I want to reduce all this violence, but you can’t do it by sheer force of will.”
The effect of violent abandonment ethically demands this return, as he does too with Elena in Change, to those whom we hurt to make reparation – although reparation is entirely in the world of the conceptual and real only as it invokes political action addressed to the violence that made those people you abandoned necessary to abandon, and to maintain relative distance therefrom. Thus when Louis says, as already cited: ‘Est-ce que je reproduisais à Amiens la violence que j’avais exercée quelques années avant avec ma famille, … . Est-ce qu’en changeant je voulais faire comprendre aux autres que je n’étais plus comme eux, … (‘Was I repeating in Amiens the violence I’d done to my family… . In changinging did I want others to understand that I was no longer like them, …’). To understand how the pain of another is like one own, one often reproduces the social violence that engendered the pain in the first place. Hence Louis’ attempt to understand the hidden ‘violence’ of a social and politico-economic situation that created his father and mother’s pain in the final instance. It is the violence Louis thought that Ken Loach understood in I, Daniel Blake.
He says so in a work in which the two artist converse about the hidden violence of capitalist reproduction of social relationships that makes for premature death (‘une mort prématurée’) amongst the marginalised – and not only in class terms:
Appartenir à une certaine catégorie sociale et politique, c’est, de fait, être exposé ou non à une mort prématurée. On sait qu’un ouvrier en France a deux fois plus de chance de mourir avant 65 ans qu’un cadre, que les personnes LGBT se suicident beaucoup plus que les autres, que des femmes meurent chaque jour de la violence masculine… Il n’y a sans doute rien de plus efficace pour saisir le fonctionnement du monde que de tenir la comptabilité des morts. Le plus étonnant, c’est qu’en effet, celles et ceux qui gouvernent savent ces choses-là, on ne peut pas l’ignorer. Tout le monde sait que les ouvriers vivent dans des conditions difficiles, tout le monde sait que la domination masculine existe ou que les Noirs et les Arabes en France sont très majoritairement assignés à la pauvreté, aux banlieues, à la précarité, aux violences policières.[8]
The source of the violence in the cycles of social mobility (of which the cogs are either ‘leaving’ home, class, one’s place or even persons or STAYING with them are easily known to working-class children who break out of what feels like a containing trap, as likewise LGBT+ teenagers or queer persons who stay in heteronormative relationships. The additional levers are based on that, in order to leave, one conceives those who want you to stay ‘behind’ with them as enemies of your progression, advancement or betterment. Their disbelief, or supposed disbelief in your capacity for mere has to be REVENGED by showing them very ambiguously that you are better than them, and are thought by ‘other people who matter in society’ to be better than them. This is part of what Louis does in his imaginary conversations with others – even his mirror-self (and ‘L’Autre-Moi’) who also need putting in their place.
Hence Elena: ‘I wanted to be your destination and I was only your starting-point’.[9] Louis perceives her now as ‘on the side of the dominated, not the dominant’, even by HIMSELF.[10] Gaining power in one’s own person is only meaningful as power OVER others after all, who claim to be like you, when you just feel you have to know you are better than them. As a child, Louis claims to his imagined fatherly auditor: ‘I wanted to leave the village and become rich, powerful and famous because I thought the power I’d gain … would be my revenge against you and the world that had rejected me’.[11] The terrible cycle of violence to each other appears because on a continual getting back in revenge to a person who may not be to be blame, and is indeed relatively too powerless to be the final site of warranted blame that is genuinely systemic. His mother initially uses Louis’ academic success to revenge herself against villagers she supposed to despise her.[12] Even Elena later tells him, unwitting that the same tool of revenge will be used against her during Louis’ emotional ‘mutations’: ‘Show them you’re better than they are’.[13] A book is written to ‘prove to the world that I was a somebody and that it had been wrong to want to put me down’.[14] When writing fails he looks out for a sugar-daddy, ‘someone through whom I’d take revenge on the past’.[15]
Apparently, the changes Édouard makes are, he says to rescue, redeem or save himself: ‘I must save myself’, he says at one point.[16] But the progression towards that safe place oft mutates one’s feeling about both place and persons in it. One might start by being wanted to be liked by the likes of Romain and Steve but ‘three minutes’ later you now your realise and say about Elena that ‘I’d made a mistake, what I wanted was for her to like me’.[17] These metamorphoses in ideas, feelings and sensations about self, others and their interactions are the stuff of the novel, perhaps of lives in their cycles of attachment and separation, especially in conditions of socio-temporal and socio-spatial fluidity. What changes too is the shape of stories. Elena, as we have seen thought herself the ending point of Louis’ story only to find that she was the starting-point of another story that does not include her, at least in the flesh. And likewise even Didier and Ludovic, although Louis sometimes employs lies and fictions to ensure that distances from them he makes can be reversed. We keep returning to family to retell their story. I think the point of all this is that teleologies (beliefs and stories aimed towards an end and driven by it – its purpose in other ways for that is another meaning of an ‘end’ – are necessarily scapes from traps into another potential trap, prison or place in which one gets unhappily stuck, hating all around you. Pacts, marriages and legal bonds are always such, such as that made by Elena: ‘Will we always stay together? I listen. I mean, you and I will never leave each other, right, we’re bound in a pact’.[18]
Speaking personally, I think I shudder at memories at having said the same to others, only to find that it was true only of my husband of near fifty years, whatever other mutative will-o’-the-wisps have undermined it, but not sufficiently. I recreate in the minds of others than he Eddy’s horrific metamorphoses mid-story, whilst he lives, as here as Elena becomes a token of a story’s termination in breathless sentences without termination in themselves:
I can’t go back there any more because going back is becoming what I was I can’t do that I have to find a solution anything I can’t go on like this it’s over it has to be over it has to end.[19]
Whilst I exhale to say: “O, Declan!” (look at the last blog to understand the in-joke for sturdy blog-readers) , we should note that these are drivers of the distance-making, enforced separations, professed stayers becoming leavers which drives the world of Change, and the world external to it too – although maybe with less clues to the process for the avid reader (though they are there if you WANT to see them) = at least if you do not become enslaved to the prompts of desire you feel to be external to you, or at least your abilities of self-regulation. Here is a book, that whilst it is full of wisdom of the kind I have outlined, still boasts of the advantages of moving on. It does so even in its photographs, such as this of the Hallencourt locus of the Belleguele family (you hear the sigh of relief in this being a photograph of his past ‘home’):
Likewise the pictures of the transformations of Eddy/ Édouard in body shape and size, appearance of face and limb, postural mastery and costume. In Hussey’s article we see this photograph of Louis (but not any others I show you in comparison, comparisons made initially by Louis):
Look at the pose, the studied look of reading, the slim body with its pelvic thrust, aided by a radiator, the Windsor knot in the tie that Elena taught him to make. But in the book is on a page just after one of Eddy as a fat boy, unaware of how to stand and look appealing – too keen on visibly asking to be liked whist being, as you can see he thinks of himself, UNLIKABLE. The book plays with these awful contrasts (see the collage below in relation to the photograph above):
We recall Louis’s programme for life:
Change my name (go to court?), Change my face, Change my skin (tattoo?),
Read (become someone else, write), Change my body, Change my habits, Change my life (become someone).[20]
Sometimes Édouard is clear about the cruel manipulations some might see in his life, though more usually he sees it only retrospectively. Amidst sleeping around and showing off, weaving fictions of his life he enchants Ludovic, who invites him in, gives him a near-permanent Paris home and wines and dines him. Ludovic praises him too praising the ‘signs of distinction’ in his ‘continuing transformation’. And yet: ‘(today I have to ask myself: was I using Ludovic? Did I get close to him because I understood that he could help me in my projected arrival in Paris? I don’t think so.)’[21] He may not think so. What do we think? Yet how brilliant of Louis to know there is an issue, and that Ludovic may, in truth, not have a role similar to Elena’s, though he never makes a pact to be broken. Queer men are, with exceptions like myself, not prone to such practices.
In a highly intelligent review of this novel, which now I read it, contains much in embryo that I have in this blog, Keiran Goddard makes a point that resonates but that I can’t decide upon as a truth. For him the novel is ethical in its intent, it critiques a policy of personal change that is only as deep as the exchange of personae between others – in relationships with self AND others. He expresses the moral point beautifully, as if the whole were about the nature of true and enduring love (I have yet to be convinced):
and while a person might be capable of receiving love, a persona is only ever capable of receiving praise. In the final reckoning, Édouard reasons that it is “time to go home and sleep”, leaving the reader to ponder what all the struggle has amounted to. A different bed, in a different city, a different face and a different way to make ends meet, a life undoubtedly more comfortable but still riven with violence and alienation, fighting “for a happiness never attained”.[22]
It is true that happiness is never attained, and that Louis himself does not get beyond the following almost infernal expression of abandoned hope: ‘Am I doomed always to hope for another life?’[23]
My own feeling is that this is a masterly work. In past blogs on Jon Ransom and Andrew McMillan (the blogs reachable via the novelist names), I have looked at themes in staying set against leaving in relation to localities and relationships. This is an essential text though to add to these on that subject. Nevertheless I must end with a point about the sensual beauty of some passages, especially of consensual sex that though based on known boundaries (of being extremely short-lived) and yet still exploits both old and lying or fictive tropes like: ‘We’re going far from here and stay together our whole lives’.[24] And yet both speaker and auditor realise that none of that need to be true and that the quick in and out of a predator might give the spice of a metaphor that excites because of its implied danger. This is a passage a previewer too called a passage ‘of magnificent sensuality’, quoting these brief moments from it, which I lengthen a very little, and use the present translation rather than the previewer’s own:
Then he said: I am a shark (Silence) Do you like sharks? (Silence again) I laughed and he eyed me: No? ….
(…) I felt his warm breath on the back of my neck. I thought: that’s the breath of a shark. I know sharks don’t have breath but I kept saying to myself, that’s the breath of a shark.
(…) Jean Genet says :”Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice….”.[25]
I just adore this book. So intelligent. So forceful. So necessary in understanding modernity politically in every single way: not least for its attack on binary thinking which I would tire myself too much with excitement in trying to elucidate and which I touched upon in the last blog but NOT so well as Louis. But read it.[26]
All my love as ever
Steve xxxx.
“
[1] Édouard Louis Changer: méthode (2021: 57) Kindle ed. (Change [trans John Lambert] (2024: 37) London, Harvill Secker.
[2] Édouard Louis Changer: méthode (2021: 56f.) Kindle ed. (Change [trans John Lambert] (2024: 37)
[3] ibid(2021: 197f.) Kindle ed. (ibid: 155).
It is here that
[4] ibid(2021: 197f.) Kindle ed. (ibid: 88). The double-meaning of make-up (to reinvent or disguise a person or apply cosmetics applies to the French verb #too)
[5] ibid(2021: 197f.) Kindle ed. (ibid: 155 for translation)
[6] Andrew Hussey (2024) ‘Édouard Louis: ‘All my writing is political – and all my life is, too’ An introduction to a pre-published extract from the novel in The Observer [Sun 28 Jan 2024 07.00 GMT) Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/28/edouard-louis-the-end-of-eddy-change-interview?ref=upstract.com
[7] cIted from the earlier novel in Change [trans John Lambert] (2024: 255) London, Harvill Secker.
[8] Louis in Ken Loach & Édouard Louis (2021: 13 of 67) Dialogue sur l’art et la politique Paris, Presses Universitaires de France / Humensis.
[9] Change [trans John Lambert] (2024: 194) London, Harvill Secker
[10] Ibid: 165
[11] Ibid: 19
[12] Ibid: 55
[13] Ibid: 83(see for Elena’s receipy of the same treatment ibid: 212.A book is written to ‘s
[14] Ibid: 150
[15] Ibid: 224
[16] Ibid: 173
[17] Ibid: 35
[18] Ibid: 74.
[19] Ibid: 97 Note. I checked. The absence of punctuation is in the French too, not just the English translation (p. 128)
[20] Ibid: 199
[21] Ibid: 175
[22] Keiran Goddard (2024) ‘Change by Édouard Louis review – the revenge of Eddy’ in The Guardian (Thu 8 Feb 2024 09.00 GMT) Available in: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/08/change-by-edouard-louis-review-the-revenge-of-eddy
[23] Édouard Louis (2024 trans op, cit: 265)
[24] Ibid: 221
[25]Translation is ibid: 219f. Preview from: Anon (2021) Edouard Louis details his “method” to “change”’ in The Teller Report (online) [09/11/2021, 10:12:34] at: https://www.tellerreport.com/life/2021-11-09-edouard-louis-details-his-%22method%22-to-%22change%22.Hy8qcYpwDY.html
[26] In ibid; 63 I could see the world was organised around binary principles: … ‘ To the end of the paragraph, if you only want this but not the whole book, That however would be a mistake.
Steve_Bamlett_blog 