Sam Sacks, The page is truth : the Small lives of Pierre Michon
Article paru dans The New Yorker, 18 décembre 2013.
"Most biographies operate on what we might think of as Newtonian principles. A life, they affirm, is a material thing, explainable by the laws of cause and effect. To the diligent observer, the sources of every milestone, of every decision, may be reasonably inferred, provided the right evidence survives in the archives. Facts have mass: compile enough research and behold the man.
This method works well when the meaning of the life resides in some physical accomplishment—the summitting of a mountain, the winning of a battle, the passing of a law. But it runs into trouble when the subject is an artist. Here the biography is obliged to use facts to somehow account for the creation and, even more, the significance of a sonnet or a sonata. Such books have no answer to the mind-body division between the high mystery of the art and the gross corporality of the artist. How does one come from the other? No one really knows, and every pretense to explanation is merely the formation of another myth.
(...) Against the rationalism of scholarly inquiry and against the insight of critical acumen, Michon bows before something occult, subjective, and phenomenological. To him, meaning is not found in the study of art, much less in the lives of artists; it exists wholly in the lightning instant of creation, a singularity that precedes empirical processes and, therefore, defies all efforts at comprehension (...)"
Lire l'article dans son intégralité : http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/12/the-page-is-truth-the-small-lives-of-pierre-michon.html