For some years now, Édouard Louis (Hallencourt, 1992) has been one of Europe’s literary sensations thanks to autobiographical texts that explain his journey through the world. He started with Para acabar con Eddy Bellegueule (Salamandra, 2015) and the latest is Canviar: méthode (Més Llibres/Salamandra, 2023). In the meantime, he wrote Qui và matar el meu pare (Més Llibres/Salamandra, 2019), an eighty-page book in which he settles accounts with his parent while, in a way, redeeming him by seeing him subjected to a neoliberal machine that cut public aid to him until he died. The novel has had a long run in the theaters of Europe and we are taking advantage of the fact that it will come to the Temporada Alta festival (Teatre Municipal de Girona, October 28 and 29) to play itself, in a production directed by Thomas Ostermeier, for talk with him about theatre, tragedy and his short and intense literary career.
What did he hear the first time he 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 I could get through writing, or through the book. About my book, I have often said that what I was interested in was producing a debate around the confrontation. In the end, I wanted to force the audience to see or feel things that, deep down, they know exist, but they don’t 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. I, from literature, am interested in creating literature that, with formal tools, with the use of politics, of a certain language, a certain literary form, forces the reader to hear things he already knows, but does not want to hear . In the theater, the first time I stepped on stage, I saw that possibility multiplied tenfold. Theater, in fact, is the art of confrontation.
Do you always have the same feeling?
No. It all depends on the audience. I have done it in many very different places, in New York, Stockholm, Venice, Amsterdam, in Thessaloniki. Each time, the relationship with the public is not the same. But if there is one thing in common, it is the surprise effect. Especially when I tell the story of the politicians who have implemented neoliberal reforms, violent reforms, to worsen my father’s health. It doesn’t bother those who know my text, but most people who come haven’t read it and are surprised by my radical approach. Very strong reactions occur, both of attachment and rejection. There are people who leave, others who say that now we need to do theater like this. There is a lot of 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.
Everyone is nicer now.
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 to like Le Figaro. Today, perhaps because of the internet, social media and advertising, there is a kind of race to show that everyone loves you. These writers who say they are a New York Times bestseller, who have received such an award, who have loved me here and there. There used to be a kind of friction snobbery and now we’ve moved on to consensus snobbery. With Thomas Ostermeier, we share the need to create a theatre, an art, of friction. We are happy when there are people who are not happy.
Did you think, when writing the text, that it would end up being a monologue?
A little, because there were people who asked me. Stanislav Nordey [actor and director, director of the National Theater in 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 I was translating into French the Greek tragedies in Anne Carson’s versions: Antigone and Helen of Troy. He was very involved in the tragedies, especially those of Euripides, Brecht’s version of Antigone. And he said to 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.
In wich way?
The popular classes who do not have access to care, to hospitals that are closing, to social rights that are being cut more and more. This is the meaning of today’s tragedy. That is why the text became extremely theatrical: I explored the interior of the tragedy with radical tools that contemporary mainstream 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 Mom and Dad. It is said that literature should not be too sentimental and mainstream literature refers to pathos to talk about the absence of emotions, as if this is a positive thing. When it’s too political, they say it’s not literature. They say a book is great when it’s 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 are frictions, it is explicit, there is confrontation. Going back to antiquity, I found a way to put a bomb inside contemporary writing. That’s why I wanted to write Who Killed My Father That Way.
If we keep 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 I explored in Who Killed My Father, which we might call the paradox of domination. The father is someone who possesses the attributes of the dominant, who rules the house, homophobe. 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 man enough if you go to the doctor often… When he died, he was 58 years old, he could not walk , he couldn’t breathe properly. On the contrary, the mother was able to change her destiny precisely because she was even more dominated than the father. I got away with it, also because I was more dominated than my father. I suffered from homophobia, in addition to social class.
However, it is not easy to get out of it.
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, the 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 it alienation, that’s what. Mother, as a woman, never thought she had chosen anything. It was the father who told him he had to stay home, stay in the kitchen. It was the father who told him that he couldn’t wear make-up, or take out his driver’s license. The father told her that she had to raise the children and clean the house every day. He never had the illusion of freedom. And how did he get it? One day he thought he would take freedom the way he wanted… My text tries to think this complexity, domination, from a contemporary point of view.
Have you seen the other productions that have been made around Europe of his autobiographical essays?
I have seen Ivo Van Hove’s in Amsterdam, Nordey’s in France, Daria Deflorian and Antonio Tagliarini’s in Italy… The ones in Germany, Turkey… Many adaptations have been made. What interests me about them is how someone else takes up your struggle for you. It’s a kind of positive appropriation: your struggle becomes someone else’s. But there are many people who have suffered, wars, violence, who don’t want to talk, who don’t want to pass on a suffering they didn’t choose. It should be a fundamental right, not to explain suffering that we did not choose. That’s why it’s nice when someone owns your struggles. I never interfere in the work that others do. I never give my opinion about it. Do what you want, I tell them. This is why very different adaptations come out of it. 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 old texts, based on their own experience.
Have you ever been angry?
No. I always get good surprises. And that there are those who have made adaptations that are the antipodes of what I would have done. And they have always interested me. In fact, I went ahead with this version because Thomas Ostermeier suggested it to me and had already adapted my previous book, History of Violence. I admire him a lot. When he asked me if I wanted to play myself, I agreed. Thus he could push the political radicalism of the autobiography even further. I really admire Angelica Liddell’s work, how she uses autobiography to stage a war. I do it, obviously, in a very different way.
You don’t cut any part of your body, do you?
No, I’m not as brave as her. But for me it’s all part of a way to find political violence in the theater. As in the case of the Greek tragedy, which unleashed passion. I don’t think many people do that nowadays.
Was there a change between History of Violence and Who Killed My Father? It’s as if he had the need to explain things in a different way.
Yes, of course. Because when I wrote History of Violence I didn’t talk to my father, I didn’t see him anymore. We had not argued, we had simply drifted apart. He was a French worker who voted for the extreme right, a homophobe, who told me as a child that I was a ladybug. Yes, I was a homosexual who had gone to Paris to finish my studies and was active on the left. It’s not that he left with a bang, but that we had nothing to say to each other. When I published Eddy Bellegueule and History of Violence I wasn’t related, but one day he called me crying and told me he was proud of me. He told me that he had heard me on TV, on the radio, and that he was proud that his son was doing things. Her new colleague told me that she had bought my books and given them away to people close to her. 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 him again.
I hadn’t seen him in 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 This 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. I wasn’t canceling what I had said in the previous two books, because my father was also that, someone who votes on the extreme right, a homophobe and who told my mother that she couldn’t work and had to stay at home. Both views are true, but they tell different stories.
Change: method is the end of this family genealogy?
There will be one more, the last one. I’m finishing it. Last year my brother died. He was 48 years old. He died of alcoholism and poverty. When I was told 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 started with Eddy Bellegueule.
Has he written his Oresteia?
Totally. 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 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 these: Balzac, Zola, Proust…
