Writing as Fugue

Laporte's literary enterprise is marked through and through by rupture and revision. Within individual works, propositions are advanced, metaphors offered, projects outlined, later to be rejected and, often, later still to be re-introduced in modified form; this is already the case in the texts of the 1960s which we have been considering, and, as we shall see, this process becomes even more manifest in Laporte's later work. Moreover, the process may also be discerned on a broader scale between the individual works which comprise Laporte's œuvre. Laporte destroyed his first significant literary endeavour, with the working title of Genèse d'un roman, retaining only the chapter later published as Souvenir de Reims. ¹ We have already noted the transitions between the early récits and La Veille, and between the latter and the two volumes of Une Voix de fin silence, and have seen that in each case the transition contained elements of both continuity and discontinuity. However, the break between Pourquoi? and Fugue appears to be the least ambivalent of all those in Laporte's literary itinerary, in Laporte's own eyes at least. In the previous chapter, we already noted some of Laporte's scathing remarks about the two volumes of Une Voix de fin silence. We might add here that, in answer to Jean Ristat's question as to whether he would like to erase these earlier works, Laporte in 1972 replied, 'Sije le pouvais, en effet', ² echoing a sentiment expressed in the Carnets in 1970: 'A la rigueur, je conserverais La Veille (et d'abord Une Migration) mais je voudrais anéantir Une Voix de fin silence 1 et 2: je suis et ne veux être rien d'autre que l'auteur de Fugue; c'est ainsi' (C 296). Yet, even at this stage, Laporte goes on to consider the possibility that he might one day regard Fugue in an equally disparaging light, adding that, although the possibility seems most unlikely to him at that time, on the other hand '"j 'espère" qu'il en sera pourtant ainsi, car cela prouverait le mouvement (le déportement), ma seule et dure loi' (C 296).