Une voix sans voix off

Sur son blogue, Beth offre une réflexion très intéressante sur l’écriture du journal intime. En référence à Thomas Merton, elle dit :

He had left the academic world of New York in order to seek God and some sort of personal overhaul. He was aiming at authenticity, transparency, honesty, directness, egolessness… and yet he learned how the very act of writing — which he couldn’t help, couldn’t give up completely — became a trap for the ego. He talks about it a lot. This was his huge struggle: the need to say what he saw and felt out of the depths of his contemplative experience, to communicate it to others, and to try to make a difference in a broken world, but how writing can become performance that addictively seeks something else entirely: admiration, praise, fame. 

Ça m’a fait penser à un texte de l’autrice Helen Garner que j’ai lu récemment dans The Guardian. Elle raconte l’expérience pénible de replonger dans ses vieux journaux intimes :

A few years ago I had a huge bonfire in my backyard and burned all my diaries up to the point where Yellow Notebook begins. I did this because when I went through the cartons of exercise books one day, looking for what I’d written around the time of the dramatic dismissal of the Whitlam government, I found to my astonishment that I hadn’t even mentioned it.
That day, crouching over the crates in the laundry, I was soon so bored with my younger self and her droning sentimental concerns that there was nothing for it – this shit had to go. 

Elle a quand même fini par y trouver du matériel qui avait une certaine valeur de partage, mais le travail d’édition des écrits en question n’a pas été facile. Je n’ai pas (encore) lu le résultat publié, mais les réflexions qu’elle tire de ce travail sont d’une pertinence cinglante :

And of course I soon found myself, day after day, strapped into the straitjacket that is the very nature of a diary: it’s got a voice, it’s entirely composed of voice, but it has no voiceover. It exists in an eternal present.

By Martine

Screenwriter / scénariste-conceptrice