J’ai lu quelque part (je ne sais plus où ni quand) que la Trilogie newyorkaise, qui regroupe les
trois romans de Paul Auster mettant en scène le « détective » Quinn, portait
sur New-York. Elle se passe en effet (pour autant que quelque chose s’y passe)
à New-York, mais en fait, mais elle ne parle que de l’écriture sous toutes ses
formes (ou déguisements) : collecte de données, inspiration, recherche,
révision, hésitation et même blocage, le fameux writer’s block qui se traduit parfois par l’angoisse de la page
blanche, et parfois autrement… (Même si le premier roman, City of Glass, parle aussi de
New-York – et des États-Unis en général – d’une façon inoubliable – l’image de
la Tour de Babel y est portée à un niveau que je ne me souviens pas d’avoir
jamais vu/perçu ailleurs. Mais il s’agit encore de langage.) La citation qui
suit, extraite de The Locked Room, le
meilleur selon moi de ces textes, en parle de façon directe mais elle trace
aussi, me semble-t-il, le canevas du projet de la Trilogie.
Le narrateur (Auster?) est en train de préparer les textes de
Fanshawe (ses propres textes?) pour publication…
[With] checks suddenly arriving from one thing or another, all money problems
evaporated. Like everything else that seemed to e happening, this was a new
experience for me. For the past eight or nine years, my life had been a
constant scrambling act, a frantic lunge from one paltry article to the next,
and I had considered myself lucky whenever I could see ahead for more than a
month or two. Care was embedded inside me; it was part of my blood, my
corpuscles, and I hardly knew what it was to breathe without wondering if I could
afford to pay the gas bill. Now, for the fist time since I had gone out on my
own, I realized that I didn’t have to think about these things anymore. One
morning, as I sat at my desk struggling over the final sentence of an article,
groping for a phrase that was not there, it gradually dawned on me that I had
been given a second chance. I could dive this up and start again. I no longer
had to write articles. I could move on to other things, begin to do the work I
had always wanted to do. This was my chance to save myself, and I decided that
I’d be a fool not to take it.
