Read more  Hélène Gaudy, getting involved in “the soft matter of stories”: the place, the image and the trace Study day – Friday April 21, 2023 / Université Grenoble Alpes – Salle Médiat / 9 a.m.-17:30 p.m. Organization: Maud Lecacheur (Université Grenoble Alpes), Laurent Pagès (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and Université de Bourgogne) and Marion Grange (EHESS). 9:9 a.m.: Welcome of participants. 20:9 a.m.: Introduction of the organizers. 30:10 a.m.-30:10 a.m.: Collective writing practices and literary affiliations - Jean-Marc Baud (Université Sorbonne Paris-Nord): Hélène Gaudy, uncultured writer - Karine Légeron (Université de Montréal and Université Paris Nanterre): Literature as a “partner of intellection” in Une île une forêt: sur Terezín by Hélène Gaudy 30:11 a.m.-11:12 a.m.: break 30:2 a.m.-12:30 p.m.: Writings of the investigation and uses of fiction - Esther Demoulin (Sorbonne Université): From the composition to the recomposition of reality: on the choice of non-fiction in Une île, une forêt - Mathilde Buliard (Université Bordeaux Montaigne): Tracking down chimeras, probing reality: investigating with and against fiction - Dominique Carlat (Université Lumière Lyon 14): “Une étoile encore to draw”: how writing in motion fights against the lies of frozen images14:15 p.m.-15 p.m.: lunch16 p.m.-16 p.m.: Approaches to places- Chloé Baudry (Aix-Marseille University): Looking for the place: dynamics of writing and ethics of the gaze- Mathilde Roussigné (Sorbonne Nouvelle University): “Showing the ice once it has melted”: Hélène Gaudy and the states of water16 p.m.-30 p.m.: Space and living- Laurent Demanze (Grenoble Alpes University): Grands lieux, “an intimate and collective cartography” – Manon Delcour (Saint-Louis University – Brussels): Nesting houses, grand places and burning cabins: studying the motif of living in the work of Hélène Gaudy16 p.m.-30:17 p.m.: break30:XNUMX p.m.-XNUMX:XNUMX p.m.: Interview with Hélène GaudyThe day will be punctuated by readings by students from letters from the University of Grenoble Alpes ***
Below you will find the call for participation at the origin of this day; it sheds light on the major issues underlying it: 
A trained visual artist, exhibition curator, member of the Inculte collective, author of novels, stories, children's books and art books – the many faces of Hélène Gaudy speak of the unique place that the writer occupies in the contemporary literary landscape. For around fifteen years, Hélène Gaudy has been building a rich body of work with multiple furrows, the contours of which this day would like to trace. From Views of the Sea to A World Without Shore, the writer explores a double aspect, both novelistic and documentary. While the first texts (Vues sur la mer in 2006, Si rien ne bouge in 2009 and Plein hiver in 2014) deploy a fictional vein, the three books that follow are in line with the writings of the investigation: diving into the city of Terezín, a place of memory that served as a "model ghetto" during the Second World War (Une île, une forêt, Inculte, 2016); surveying of the Grand-Lieu lake near Nantes (Grands Lieux, Joca Seria, 2017); a look back at the failure of the Andrée expedition in the Far North at the end of the 2019th century (Un monde sans rivage, Actes Sud, XNUMX). While taking the measure of these changes in Hélène Gaudy's writing and practice, this day invites us to highlight the main themes that underlie her work as a whole, without neglecting the writer's links with the world of art and her texts for young people. Because from the first stories, the central themes and issues already appear which resurface until A World Without Shore: attention to the place, the attraction of the landscape, the opening of the investigation on the imagination and reverie, the relationship of the text to the image, the question of memory or even the quest for a writing which gives pride of place to the gap, to the void and to the blank. These multiple questions can be broken down into a few axes: (1) "The spirit of places": space and livingFrom Une île, une forêt to Un monde sans rivage via Grands Lieux, Hélène Gaudy's stories are drawn to the triple question of place, space and living, extending the spatial turn of contemporary literature while contributing to the rise of the challenges of ecopoetics [1]. In these three texts, the writing seeks to capture an enigmatic place, the object of multiple layers of discourse and practices, conducive to investigation as well as to reverie. Each story is closely linked to an investigation or even an immersion in the field, which combines first-person exploration and meeting inhabitants or users of the territory [2]. However, in Hélène Gaudy's work, the place is never the object of a univocal and definitive apprehension. Contributions may question the way in which writing reveals this thickness of the territory. Thus, An Island, a Fortress and A World Without Shore present themselves as two stories of the uninhabitable and of survival: even though they are centered on extreme experiences (the Nazi ghetto and the polar expedition of no return), the two books shift towards a writing that attempts to capture ordinary life, scrutinizes the attempts to recreate everyday life and to appropriate places where human beings are doomed or exposed to death. As for Grands Lieux, the text invites us to study the intersection of these issues and the framework of the residential system [3], since the book results from the experience of an artist residency set up by the association “L'Esprit du lieu” around the Grand-Lieu lake [4]. Once again, the striking oscillation between concrete exploration and the opening onto poetic reverie is replayed. Elusive, the places explored by Hélène Gaudy call to be apprehended from a multiplicity of perspectives and give rise to their own kaleidoscopic writing. How do the texts confront the gesture of exploring the place and the leafing through of the representations that make up the territory? Added to this multiple capture is a powerful driving force of writing, which touches on the inscription of these spaces in time and in History. Fragile and covered, the places to which the writer is attached threaten to disappear, the writing bearing witness to the "sure and progressive disappearance of these territories [5]" while exploring the links between place and memory (how is memory inscribed in places in the form of traces and how, in return, are places inscribed in individual and collective memory?). This dynamic of erasure and this urgency to record traces before it is too late run from An Island, a Fortress to A World Without Shore, where the disappearance of the explorers gives way to the destruction of the landscape, caused by the melting of the ice floes and the alteration of the Arctic territories. This latest book thus suggests an evolution in the attention paid to places: does the emergence of the ecological question mark a shift in the way of approaching the motif of disappearance [6]? However, beyond the latest books, the attraction to places arises well before the investigative stories, constituting a continuous bass of the work. From Vues sur la mer, the story opens with the dream of the hotel, a chronotope which crystallizes both the desire to escape and the desire for a place of one's own, a mental construction and support for the reverie which the book presents in seven different forms. In If Nothing Moves (where the plot takes place on an island, a place with multiple meanings that resurface from one book to another), and especially in Full Winter, the novel is constructed around a place that goes beyond simple decor. In Plein hiver, an atmospheric novel, the city of Lisbon in the north of the United States, the negative reverse of the Portuguese capital, is conceived as a character in its own right which exerts a power of magnetism and repulsion for the figures evolving in this "narrow universe" marked by cold, boredom and freezing. The epigraphs of each part, borrowed from North America by Ivan T. Sanderson, also prefigure certain issues of future investigations: interest in the cartographic representation of the territory and its deformations [7], attraction to the North and its dangers, or even tension between the real place and the opening onto fictitious places as a refuge. On both the novelistic and documentary sides, Hélène Gaudy's books call for tracing the continuities and inflections of the writing of place in all its forms.(2) Practices and writings of the investigationThis second axis is closely linked to the first, insofar as the reflection on places most often passes through the method and form of the investigation: Hélène Gaudy's practice combines investigation in the field and work based on visual and written archives, particularly salient in Un monde sans rivage [8]. In this respect, if the writer's first texts belong to the novelistic genre, the last three are more clearly part of the context of the inflation of the investigation in contemporary literature [9]. How does Hélène Gaudy use the model of investigation throughout her stories? How to define the contours of one's practice? Here again, the question of the investigation invites us to explore several avenues. First, that of an investigative practice and writing attentive to sensitive experience, which gives a central place to the sensations of the investigator as well as to the bodies of the protagonists on whom the investigation focuses. Then, that of the relationship between the investigation and fiction. Although they are part of the rise of "documentary narratives [10]", Hélène Gaudy's investigations reflect less the advent of a new "documentary realism [11]" than the desire to open documents and archives to the work of the imagination. The incomplete nature of the sources (partial or unreliable) and the insufficiency of the traces (due to their alteration or disappearance) serve as an impetus for imagination and reverie. Around the trace therefore emerges a double movement in tension, between the desire to fill the gaps to reconstruct a story and the concern to work with the gaps and the blanks, without completely resolving them. From then on, fiction intrudes into the interstices of the sources: we think, for example, of the dreams attributed to explorers, or of the two possible versions of the biography of Knut Frænkel, the most elusive of the three protagonists of A World Without Shore. We still think of the work of association and superposition in Une île, une forêt, when the investigation multiplies the links between figures of the present and those belonging to other eras and other stories. This tension resurfaces in the very form of the writing of the investigation, which oscillates between narrative momentum and the model of fragmentation or constellation: the enterprise of reconstruction seems doomed to incompleteness, as symbolized by the recurring motif of the unfinished puzzle to represent the investigation or the book to be written. Finally, the writing of the investigation replays and displaces the reflection on memory and forgetting: both because it questions the modes of reconstruction of the past, and because it is driven by the concern to remember, to retain and to keep a trace. In this regard, the dialogue established by Une île, une forêt and Un monde sans rivage with the challenges of museography reflects this bundle of questions.(3) Arts and literature: the exploration of imagesReflection on the museum refers to a third axis, which concerns the dialogue between the arts: since Vues sur la mer, where each of the seven stories plays with a collective repertoire of images (the postcard, the miniature, the watercolor, the American television series), images and references to the visual arts are omnipresent in Hélène Gaudy's books [12]. How are text and image articulated? What is at stake in this relationship between literature and images? This ongoing dialogue between literature and the visual arts is first and foremost due to the writer's career. Trained at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg, Hélène Gaudy is also a photographer (as evidenced by the photographs in Grands Lieux), author of art books at Palette (L'art de l'ailleurs in 2013; Picasso, le magicien des formes in 2013 and Matisse, l'éblouissement de la couleur in 2011), and exhibition curator, like "Zones blanches: récits d'exploration", organized in 2018 in La Roche-sur-Yon and which gave rise to the publication of a book [13]. Focusing on the theme of exploration and the disappearance of terra incognita, the exhibition brings together works by visual artists and texts by contemporary writers. It is also the antechamber of A World Without Shore, since Hélène Gaudy already explores the most illegible photographs of Nils Strindberg that have come down to us from the Andrée expedition, in dialogue with the artist Joachim Koester. In some books, the images function as the story's clutch: the investigation of A World Without Shore comes from the discovery of the photographs of the expedition, exhibited in 2014 at the Louisiana Museum, near Copenhagen, and which exert a powerful fascination on the writer. But in Hélène Gaudy's texts, the image often proves to be profoundly ambivalent: if photography bears witness and safeguards, the uncovering of its history often reveals a desire to capture and refers to the desire to conquer and possess space and time. The image is still ambivalent in that it obeys a double regime: often manipulated, as in the propaganda film shot by the Nazis to deceive the Red Cross about the fate of the Jews and to which Une île, une forestière keeps returning, the image can obscure certain aspects of reality or falsify it. It both veils and reveals, gives access and acts as a screen, so much so that it arouses a certain mistrust, calling for its exploration through writing.(4) Children's literature and thematization of youthThe last axis invites us to highlight the attention that this work pays to youth. First, because Hélène Gaudy is the author of numerous works for young people published by Rouergue, Cambourakis or Gallimard Jeunesse, whose themes and issues we would like to trace, from albums in collaboration with illustrators (Je veux sortir la nuit in 2015, Mon tout petit pays in 2016, Minuit, le chat du bois perdu in 2019, or Je veux manger mon frère, to be published in January 2023) to young people's novels such as Atrabile (Rouergue, 2007), centered on the runaway of a teenager. How do the writer's concerns with distant places, images or the in-between circulate between works that are intended for a young audience and those that are not?
The line between writing for young people and writing by young people is undoubtedly tenuous: this is demonstrated by two of the writer's novels, Si rien ne bouge (2009) and Plein hiver (2014), which in turn focus on capturing adolescent figures, questioning the passage from childhood to adulthood. Youth, in these two novels, moves away from the vitalist representations found, for example, in the work of Maylis de Kerangal, to favour a chiaroscuro capture of adolescence which examines multiple areas of shadow. The relationships between beings (filial relationships which reveal the ambivalence of parental figures, the formation of gangs of adolescents playing cruel games) explore the complexity of the relationship with others, where desire is often mixed with control. Through the work on points of view, on chronology and on narrative tension, If Nothing Moves and Full Winter interweave psychological analysis and play on the codes of the thriller, each plot taking on a hallucinatory dimension and allowing a large part of mystery in the outcome. In these stories, far from embodying a form of plenitude, the writing of adolescence raises the question of the indecision of the face and therefore of identity: the texts probe the anxiety of an age where the malleability of bodies oscillates between the threat of emptiness and the promise of a plasticity that opens up the possibility of reinventing oneself.   [1] See for example Alison James and Dominique Viart (eds.), “Field Literature”, Fixxion, No. 18, 2019; Michel Collot (eds.), Landscape Thinking, Arles, Actes Sud/ENSP, 2011; Pierre Schoentjes, What is happening. Essay on ecopoetics, Marseille, Wildproject, coll. "Bare Head", 2015.[2] The writer returned to the importance of places in her article: "On places: building, finding one's bearings, making, surveying", Devenirs du roman, Écriture et matériaux, vol. 2, Paris, Inculte/Naïve, 2014, p. 193-204.[3] See Mathilde Roussigné, “Inhabiting time, publishing locally: poetics of the contemporary writer's residency”, COnTEXTES, Varia, 2020, online: https://journals.openedition.org/contextes/8795.[4] See the residency website: http://lespritdulieu.fr/residences-d-artistes/#:~:text=Comme%20la%20r%C3%A9sidence%20d'auteur,aux%20plans%20national%20et%20europ%C3%A9en. [5] Hélène Gaudy, Grands Lieux, Nantes, Joca Seria, 2017, p. 69.[6] See Hélène Gaudy, “The metamorphoses that our world is undergoing are changing our entire value system, and language itself,” interview by Johan Faerber, Diacritik, September 11, 2019, online: https://diacritik.com/2019/09/11/helene-gaudy-les-metamorphoses-que-subit-notre-monde-changent-tout-notre-regime-de-valeur-et-le-langage-lui-meme.[7] See on this point the article by Manon Delcour, ““Photocartographic” traces in Un monde sans rivage by Hélène Gaudy,” Literature, No. 207, 2022, p. 76-92.[8] See the article by Laurent Demanze, ““The eye is a photographic plate”: melancholic resistance of the archive in Hélène Gaudy”, Minuit, Critique, n° 879-880, 2020, p. 706-717; see also Laurent Pagès, “Today’s investigations into past polar explorations: the story of an Arctic expedition in Un monde sans rivage by Hélène Gaudy”, Klincksieck, Études Germaniques, no. 301, 2021, p. 117-133.[9] Laurent Demanze, A new age of investigation, Paris, Corti, coll. “The Essays”, 2019.[10] Lionel Ruffel, “A contemporary realism: documentary narratives”, Literature, no. 166, 2012, p. 13-25. [11] Ibid.[12] The Matricule des anges file devoted to the writer insisted on this point. See Chloé Brendlé, “Hélène Gaudy, photosensitive”, Le Matricule des anges, n° 207, October 2019.[13] White zones: stories of exploration, Marseille, Le Bec en l'air, 2018.[14] Hélène Gaudy, “W or Potential memory”, in the collective work Face à Sebald, Paris, Inculte, coll. “Monograph”, 2011, p.  

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