Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

Un livre terrifiant !

La puissance de l'écriture de Yates est telle que les premières pages laissent sans voix, sans souffle. Son écriture passe au vitriol la psyché de ses personnages comme je l'ai peu lu. Il ne leur passse rien, ne leur cède rien, il est sans concession quand il s'agit d'exposer les tréfonds de leurs âmes, leurs motivations bonnes ou mauvaises qu'eux-mêmes, peut-être, ne se savent pas avoir. C'est à lui sans doute que la représentation de l'écrivain comme un géant soulevant le toit de maisons convient le mieux. Il n'écrit pas tant qu'il dissèque, qu'il passe à l'acide. Richard Yates fait peur par ce qu'il laisse entrevoir des hommes et des femmes.

Ce livre est d'autant plus destabilisant, - et réussi ! - qu'il ne prend pas parti. Il n'y a pas de personnage absolument positif qui puisse offrir un modèle, il n'y a ni condamnation, ni jugement, ni punition; que les faits dans leur succession brute, et les pensées des personnages mises à nu. Son roman est un monde sans Dieu, les personnages ne croient en rien, et la figure de l'auteur, si elle est omnisciente, si elle voit tout, laisse le lecteur livré à lui-même. Nulle condamnation morale qui, par défaut, montrerait la voix à suivre. Yates ne fait que montrer des hommes, les uns après les autres, pour ce qu'ils sont, juste ce qu'ils sont, face à ce qu'ils se pensent être, ce qu'ils se veulent être, ce qu'ils essaient d'être. Face à la façon dont les autres les perçoivent.

Ce monde est terrifiant parce qu'il n'y a que nous-mêmes, pour ce que nous sommes, ce que nous croyions, ce que nous nous disons. Revolutionary Road montre dans toute sa splendeur l'écart entre ce qu'on veut, et ce qu'on fait. Il découvre les petits jeux qu'on fait avec soi-mêmes, les mensonges quotidiens dont on tisse notre vie et dont on a besoin pour s'aimer. "Oui-oui, je vais reprendre l'espagnol, c'est certain, je vais en faire un petit peu, tous les jours, plusieurs fois par semaines." Yates montre ce que chacun de nous fait pour s'aimer, se rendre supportable, nécessaire, justifié à ses propres yeux. Le révélant pour ses personnages, fatalement, il nous retourne la question. Combien de fois nous disons-nous d'un accommodement qui nous déplaît, "c'est temporaire", pour le mieux supporter ? Parfois c'est vrai, parfois c'est faux. Mais on se le dit sans savoir, on se le dit parce qu'on a besoin de l'entendre, de créer un là-bas, un au-delà pour supporter l'ici. Ce livre, c'est chacun créant son petit dieu personnel à son image, l'être qu'il voudrait être, et qu'il entretient tous les jours, en se disant qu'il est ainsi, et qu'il n'est pas comme cela, en s'accrochant à une routine, à des rêves, en tissant chaque journée de ce filet d'illusions qui sont inévitables, pour survivre, mais qu'on se donne à penser comme véridiques, quand elles ne sont précisément que chimères.

Dieu est mort, dans Revolutionary Road, il n'y a que les hommes, des hommes qui quoiqu'ils en croient ne valent pas mieux qu'eux-mêmes...

"So what's the problem, Frank ? I thought you'd be back in Europe by now."
"Big joke. April's knocked up."
"Oh Jesus."
"No, but listen; there're all different kind of ways of looking at a thing like this, Sam. Look a it this way. I need a job; okay. Is that any reason why the job I get has to louse me up ? Look. All I want is to get enough dough coming in to keep us solvent for the next year or so, till I can figure things out; meanwhile I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I'm most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered "interesting" in its own right. I want something that can't possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen old corporation that's been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for every job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is they're supposed to be doing. I want to go into that kind of place and say, Look. You can have my body and my nice college-boy smile for so many hours a day, in exchange for so many dollars, and beyond that we'll leave each other strictly alone. Get the picture ?"
(...)
But when Frank saw the awesome name of Knox Business Machines being added to the list he thought there must be some mistake. "Hey, no, wait a minute; I know that can't be right -" and he gave a brief oral summary of his father's career, which caused the philosophy student to enjoy a pleasant chuckle.
(...)
But Frank, as he walked into the shadow of the Knox Building with the ghost of that other visit crowding his head ("Better take my hand here, this is a bad crossing..."), decided it would be more fun not to mention his father in the interview at all. And he didn't, and he got a job that very day on the fifteenth floor, in something called the Sales Promotion Department.
"The sales what?" April inquired. "Promotion ? I don't get it. What does that mean you're supposed to do ?"
"Who the hell knows ? They explained it to me for half and hour and I still don't know, and I don't think they do either. No, but it's prety funny, isn't it ? Old Knox Business Machines. Wait'll I tell the old man. Wait'll he hears I didn't even use his name".
And so it started as a kind of joke. Others might fail to see the humor of it, but it filled Frank Wheeler with a secret, astringent delight as he discharged his lazy duties, walking around the office in a way that had lately become almost habitual with him, if not quite truly characteristic, since having been described by his wife as "terrifically sexy" - a slow, catlike stride, proudly muscular but expression a sleepy disdain of tension and hurry. And the best pat of the joke was what happened every afternoon at five. Buttoned-up and smiling among the Knox men, nodding goodnight as the elevator set him free, he would take a crosstown bus and a downtown bus to Bethune Street, where he'd mount to flights of slope-treaded, creaking stairs, open a white door so overlayed with many generations of soiled and blistered paint that its surface felt like the flesh of a toadstill, and let himself into a wide clean room that smelled faintly of cigarettes and candlewax and tangerine peel and eau de cologne; and there a beautiful, disheveled girl would be waiting, a girl as totally unlike the wife of a Knox man as the appartment was unlike a Knox man's home. Instead of afterwork cocktails they would make afterwork love, sometimes on the bed and sometimes on the floor; sometimes it was ten o'clock before they roused themselves and strolled into the gentle evening streets for dinner, and by then the Knox Building could have been a thousand miles away.
By the end of the first year the joke had worn thin, and the inability of others to see the humor of it had become depressing. "Oh, you mean your father worked there," they would say when he tried to explain it, and their eyes, as often as not, would then begin to film over with the look that people reserve for earnest, obedient, unadventurous young men. Before long (and particularly after the second year, with both his parents dead) he had stopped trying to explain that part of it, and begun to dwell instead on other comic aspects of the job: the absurd discrepancy between his own ideals and those of Knox Business Machines; the gulf between the amount of energy he was supposed to give the company and the amount he actually gave. "I mean the great advantage of a place like Knox is that you can sort of turn off your mind every morning at nine and leave it off all day, and nobody knows the difference".
More recently still, and more particularly since moving to the country, he had taken to avoiding the whole subject whenever possible by replying, to the question of what he did for a living, that he didn't do anything, really; that he had the dullest job you could possibly imagine.