Édouard Louis (Hallencourt, 1992) is 30 years old but has lived countless lives, from relating to princes and philosophers to prostituting himself with people who repelled him to pay for orthodontics. He always in a race to escape the poverty and insults of his childhood for being effeminate. And to prove to his parents, to his northern people, and to himself that he was more. Better. He ended up at the referential École Normale Supérieur in Paris. And he triumphed with To End Eddy Bellegueule, over the humiliations of his childhood. He now publishes Change: Method (Salamandra / Més Llibres), the story of his incredible physical, intellectual and social transformation. The reader will decide if he is a profiteer, as he sometimes doubts, or if there is appreciation in his exchanges and everything comes from the domination he has suffered.
Are you like Stendhal’s careerist Julien Sorel? The subversive Genet from the autobiographical Thief’s Diary?
I have reread these great books on transformation to prepare my own. Also Balzac and his Rastignac, many books by Zola, even La Traviata. Stories of metamorphosis and social transformation were central to the literature and have disappeared. I wanted to reactivate them. The transformation gives rise to very specific experiences and forms of violence. What does it mean to transform? When I presented the book they told me: “I come from the lower classes, I escaped my social destiny and I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t because I thought it was not my legitimate role.” Or they wanted to be university professors but it seemed too much for them and they are school teachers. Who speaks today of that violence, of the melancholy of transformation, of the impossibilities when you escape?
Do we not accept the transformation of the other?
If you come from the bourgeoisie, it is very likely that you will remain in the bourgeoisie, and when you are born in the popular classes, it is likely that you will remain in them. The school system already reproduces inequality, children from the lower classes are eliminated little by little, unconsciously. I wanted to talk about how this social reproduction occurs on an individual level every day. Foucault called it micropower. You try to transform yourself, to be someone else, and your environment tells you: that is not your place, who did you think you are, you are pretentious. Anecdotal phrases that together are a political technology to maintain social order.
Is everything that counts in the book are real experiences?
Yes, I am interested in the brutality of the autobiography, how it confronts the readers. All the time they ask me: “But you have introduced something fictional”, as if that could relieve them. Perhaps fiction today assumes a conservative function of calming the masses. The autobiography has a more important radicality. For me the body is the mirror of the truth of the world. My father’s body is 57 years old and he can’t breathe without a machine. He cannot be written any other way. From the body, what literature can say is formidable, an enormous power.
Where are you in the change process? At the end of the book he has melancholy from his harsh childhood.
My transformation has never finished. All my childhood I lived suffocated because the others called me a fagot, because of my father’s homophobia. He wanted to run away, like so many gay kids. In the years when my brain was being formed, my biggest dream was to escape. You can never break this. It was important for me to give room to this melancholy in the book. Many people told me that I couldn’t write it, that I can’t complain. If you come from a dominant milieu and you are melancholic, people see your poetry; if you come from a dominated milieu, you complain. We do not all have the same right to melancholy.
