For a few years now, Édouard Louis (Hallencourt, 1992) has been one of Europe’s literary sensations thanks to autobiographical texts that explain his time in the world. He started with To end Eddy Bellegueule (Salamandra, 2015) and the latest is Cambiar: method (Salamandra / Més Llibres, 2023). In between, he wrote Who Killed My Father (Salamandra / Més Llibres, 2019), an eighty-page book in which he settles accounts with his father while, in a certain way, redeeming him by seeing him subjected to a neoliberal machine that is going cutting public aid until he died. The novel has had a long run in the theaters of Europe and we take advantage of the fact that it will be at the Montaña Alta festival (Municipal Theater of Girona, October 28 and 29) to play himself, in a production directed by Thomas Ostermeier, to talk with him about theater, tragedy and his short and intense literary career.
What did you feel the first time you did Who Killed My Father in a theater?
It was a very powerful, very strong experience, because I had the feeling that, on stage, I could create a greater confrontational effect than what I could obtain through writing, or through the book. About my book, I have often said that what interested me was producing a debate around confrontation. In the end, I wanted to force the audience to see or hear things that, deep down, they know exist but do not want to know. Everyone knows that there is poverty in the world, that there are social classes, injustices. And we live without looking at what we already know exists. As for literature, I am interested in creating literature that, with formal tools, with the use of politics, of a certain language, of a certain literary form, forces the reader to hear things that they already know but do not want to hear. In the theater, the first time I went on stage, I saw that this possibility was multiplied by ten. Theater, in fact, is the art of confrontation.
Do you always have the same feeling?
No. It all depends on the public. I have done it in many very different places, in New York, Stockholm, Venice, Amsterdam, in Thessaloniki. On each occasion, the relationship with the public is not the same. But if there is one common thing, it is the surprise effect. Especially when I explain the history of the politicians who have implemented neoliberal reforms, violent reforms, to worsen my father’s health. It doesn’t happen to those who know my text, but the majority of people who come have not read it and are surprised by my radical approach. Very strong reactions occur, both adhesion and rejection. There are people who leave, others say that now we have to do theater like this. There is a very great polarization, which I really like. I like friction. They are important, especially in art, because I think we are experiencing a very big transformation in art.
Now everyone is nicer.
In the sixties and seventies, artists were very proud that there were people who didn’t love them. If you were Jean Genet or Samuel Beckett, you didn’t expect Le Figaro to like you. Today, perhaps because of the Internet, social networks and advertising, there is a kind of race to show that everyone loves you. Those writers who say they are a New York Times bestseller, that they have received such an award, that they have loved me here and there. Before there was a kind of snobbery of friction and now we have moved on to the snobbery of consensus. With Thomas Ostermeier we share the need to create a theater, an art, of friction. We are happy when there are people who are not happy.
Did you think, when you wrote the text, that it would end up being a monologue?
A little, because there were people who asked me for it. Stanislav Nordey [actor and director, director of the National Theater of Strasbourg] had asked me several times for a text to bring to the stage. At first, I wanted to create a text about my brother. And Nordey’s desire pushed me to create a play, a direct, confrontational monologue. At that time he was translating Anne Carson’s Greek tragedies into French: Antigone and Helen of Troy. He was very into tragedies, especially those of Euripides, Brecht’s version of Antigone. And he told me: What would it be like to create a tragedy today? That’s why Who Killed My Father is very close to the theater. Because the tragedy of our time is not men crushed by the curses of the gods, but by the curse of politics.
How?
The popular classes that do not have access to care, to hospitals that close, to social rights that are increasingly cut back. This is the meaning of today’s tragedy. That’s why the text became extremely theatrical: I explored the interior of the tragedy with radical tools that mainstream contemporary literature does not deal with.
And he created a kind of diptych, with the tragedy of his father and, later, that of his mother, Struggle and metamorphosis of a woman.
I had to forget everything I had learned about contemporary literature to get closer to the father and mother. It is said that literature does not have to be too sentimental and mainstream literature refers to pathos to talk about the absence of emotions, as if that were a positive thing. When it is too political, they say it is not literature. They say that a book is formidable when it is not very explicit. And, in the end, literature becomes a tool to hide reality. On the other hand, in Greek tragedy the opposite of what contemporary literature told me to do happens. It is very political, there is friction, it is explicit, there is confrontation. Going back to ancient times, I found a way to put a bomb inside contemporary writing. That’s why I wanted to write Who Killed My Father in this way.
If we maintain the parallel with the tragedy, would his father be a man crushed by the gods and his mother a heroine?
Exactly. What is strange is the paradox that I explored in Who Killed My Father, which we could call the paradox of domination. My father is someone who possesses the attributes of the dominant, the boss at home, the homophobic. All the things that gave him power before became the reasons through which he was destroyed. The use and abuse of alcohol, doing dangerous things, not wanting to be cured, because in the popular classes you are not enough of a man if you go to the doctor often… When he died, he was 58 years old, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t breathe properly. On the contrary, my mother was able to change her destiny precisely because she was even more dominated than my father. I have moved forward, also because he was more dominated than my father. I suffered homophobia, in addition to social class.
However, it is not easy to get ahead.
No, because there are times when domination simply crushes you, kills you. But there are moments, which I am interested in exploring, when domination becomes the condition of liberation. Deep down, my father thought that all his suffering was a product of his freedom. He had always chosen. He drank because only real men drink… Marx calls that alienation. My mother, as a woman, never thought that she had chosen anything. It was my father who told her that she had to stay home, stay in the kitchen. It was my father who told her that she couldn’t wear makeup or get her driver’s license. My father told him that he had to raise the children and clean the house every day. He never had the illusion of freedom. And how did he have it? One day she thought that he would take freedom the way he wanted… My text tries to think about that complexity, domination, from a contemporary point of view.
Have you seen the other montages that have been made throughout Europe of his autobiographical essays?
I have seen the one by Ivo Van Hove in Amsterdam, the one by Nordey in France, the one by Daria Deflorian and Antonio Tagliarini in Italy… Those from Germany, Turkey… Many adaptations have been made. What interests me about them is how someone else takes your fight in your place. It’s a kind of positive appropriation: your struggle becomes someone else’s. But there are many people who have suffered, wars, violence, who do not want to speak, who do not want to transmit a suffering that they did not choose. It should be a fundamental right, not to explain the suffering that we have not chosen. That’s why it’s nice when someone takes ownership of your struggles. I never get involved in the work that others do. I never give my opinion on it. Do what you want, I tell them. Hence very different adaptations emerge. There are those who insist on sexuality, others on the father-son relationship, others on politics. Everyone has the right to say what they feel, even when adapting ancient texts, based on their own experience.
Have you ever been angry?
No. I always get good surprises. And there are those who have made adaptations that are the opposite of what I would have done. And they have always interested me. In fact, I have brought forward this version because Thomas Ostermeier suggested it to me and he had already adapted my previous book, History of Violence. I admire him a lot. When he asked me if he wanted to play myself, I agreed. In this way he could push the political radicality of the autobiography even further. I greatly admire the work of Angelica Liddell, for how she uses autobiography to carry out a war on stage. I do it, obviously, in a very different way.
No part of the body is cut, right?
No, I’m not as brave as her. But for me it’s all part of a way of finding political violence in theater. As in the case of Greek tragedy, which unleashed passion. I don’t think there are many people who do that nowadays.
Between History of Violence and Who Killed My Father, was there a change? It’s as if I had the need to explain things differently.
Yes, of course. Because when I wrote History of Violence I didn’t talk to my father, I didn’t see him anymore. We hadn’t argued, we had simply walked away. He was a French worker who voted for the extreme right, homophobic, who when I was little told me I was a sissy. Yes, I was a homosexual who had gone to Paris to finish his studies and was active on the left. It’s not that he slammed the door, but that we had nothing to say to each other. When I published Eddy Bellegueule and History of Violence I didn’t relate, but one day he called me crying and told me that he was proud of me. He told me that he had heard me on television, on the radio, and that he was proud that his son did things. His new partner explained to me that he had bought my books and had given them to people close to him. He had the courage to give my books to people to whom he said: this is my son’s book, my gay son.
And he saw it again.
I hadn’t seen him for many years. I remember opening the door and seeing a man completely destroyed. He was 50-51 years old, he couldn’t walk or breathe. So, I asked myself: What happened? Who killed my father? That pushed me to take another look at my father that was not the same as in my previous books.
With a more direct look?
Yes, and trying to understand what had happened to him. It didn’t cancel out what I had said in the two previous books, because my father was also that, someone who voted for the extreme right, was homophobic and who told my mother that she couldn’t work and had to stay at home. Both views are true, but they explain different stories.
Change: method is the end of this family genealogy?
There will still be another, the last. I’m finishing it. Last year my brother died. He was 48 years old. He died from alcohol and poverty. When they told me that he had died, I had not seen him for ten years, because he was an extremely violent person. I want to know what happened, how a 48-year-old person dies. This book will close the family cycle that I began with Eddy Bellegueule.
Have you written your Oresteia?
Completely. Greek tragedy has many interpretations, it always depends on the book you read. Creon, for example, is an executioner in Antigone, but he is not one elsewhere. Each tragedy is an angle… All these books constitute a kind of cartography of a popular class family in the 21st century, as Zola did in the 19th. I have always admired people who have made maps of the world like those: Balzac, Zola, Proust…
