Fukushima ou la traversée du temps : une catastrophe sans fin

Abstract

Nul ne peut se promener au Japon aujourd’hui sans constater l’intense réflexion en cours, à travers l’art, sur l’événement que nous nommons « Fukushima » et que les Japonais désignent sous le nom du « 11 mars ». L’exploration de quelques œuvres interroge la relation à la nature, à la politique et surtout le rapport au temps. Y a-t-il encore la place pour un temps émancipateur, chargé de sens, à l’époque du nucléaire ?

Narrating Fukushima: The Genre of “Notes” as a Literary Response to the 3|11 Triple Disaster in Hideo Furukawa’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (2011) and Michaël Ferrier’s Fukushima: Récit d’un désastre (2012)

“…Brief portraits, sketchy and transversal, suggestive anecdotes, extracts from interviews and letters inserted in the text-intrusion of reality into writing-and fragments of poems torn in shreds to give a voice to ordinary victims, to people injured or trapped by the system, even to animals if needs be." 27 These remarks on "notes" writing seem to correspond exactly to Ferrier's own text, which belongs, according to the author, to "a genre in which poetry, autobiographical and essayistic writing are intertwined in the same form. " 28 The literary filiation between the two authors was confirmed by the title chosen for the Japanese translation of Ferrier's book, Fukushima nōto, which is a direct reference to Ōe's Hiroshima nōto, published almost fifty years earlier.…”

“…Ferrier also stresses the sudden and obsessive use in the media of the term "half-life, " which he considers, for his part, with a pinch of salt and defines as follows: "getting used to a constrained existence (deprived of its most simple pleasures: eating one's salad without fear, standing smiling in the rain), to a confined life, precarious and scattered, so that the nuclear industry can carry on its activities as if nothing had happened. " 31 To support his condemnation, Ferrier not only quotes several seismologists and nuclear specialists he interviewed, but also frequently refers to illustrious literary predecessors, be they japoniste or Japanophile authors such as Paul Claudel, Maurice Pinguet, or Richard Brautigan, renowned French writers like Arthur Rimbaud, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Guy Debord, or Japanese classic authors ranging from Bashō to Akutagawa and Tanizaki. Fukushima therefore also resorts to a compound of essayistic, journalistic, and literary means and sources in the face of unprecedented disasters, which justifies its kinship with the genre of "notes, " explicitly claimed by the author himself as we have seen.…”