Édouard Louis is Staging a Coup Against Literature

Édouard Louis, one of contemporary European literature’s most vital figures, doesn’t fit in. The 25-year-old writer’s first book, 2014’s En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule – which arrived here in 2017 as The End of Eddy – saw Louis present the harrowing details of his upbringing in Hallencourt, northern France.

A brutal, and at times barbaric, account of the realities of growing up gay in the kind of town where growing up gay isn’t “the done thing”, The End of Eddy is a potent, powerful examination of how politics and poverty have a direct and undeniable impact on people, on bodies, on the very core of who we are and how we’re forced to understand the world.

“I’m writing for the working class, I’m fighting for the working class, the people I grew up with, the milieu I grew up in,” Édouard tells me outside the Barbican the day before the British publication of his provocative, incendiary and stunning second book, History of Violence. “But the paradox here is that the precise people I’m writing about are precisely the people who aren’t going to read my books.”

People like Édouard Louis – the son of a back-broken, racist former factory worker – do not find themselves in novels. And they don’t tend to write them either. “When I sent my first book to a couple of publishers, a few Parisians working at prestigious publishing houses told me they couldn’t publish it because no one would believe it,” says Édouard. “These are people who don’t even know the poverty I’m describing in my books exists.”

Like The End of Eddy, History of Violence is an attempt to force the readership to reassess their understanding of what a novel is, and what purpose – if any – literary fiction serves in an age of unceasing and unhidden violence.

When he writes in History of Violence about his experience of being raped by and nearly murdered at the hands of a stranger he meets on a Parisian street corner on Christmas Eve, 2012, he isn’t conjuring events for the sake of artificially constructing a place to discuss race (his assailant is Kabyle, and mis-ascribed as Arabic by the police when Édouard reports the crime he’s been a victim of), police brutality, sexuality and state-sanctioned violence: he is telling his truth.

“I really believe in the idea of objective truth. There are objective truths in our society,” he says. “We can debate for hours whether or not Toni Morrison is a better writer than William Faulkner. But the pain of a body that is sexually assaulted, the anger of someone suffering under poverty, the humiliation of a person of colour being insulted by a racist – these are spaces of objective truth. What I try to do when I write is to find these spaces and interrogate them.”

It is for this reason that literature, in his eyes, is something to be viewed with suspicion.

Writing is a means of establishing your very existence. It says you are here and you have experienced the world in this way, and that your voice is as valid as anyone else’s. “You need to think about what literature excludes in order to exist as literature. You have to stage a coup against literature,” says Édouard.

This is perhaps why the overriding sensation he feels when he sits down at his computer each morning is shame. Shame is etched into the books – the shame of being born into grinding poverty; the shame of being homosexual; the shame of living in a society in which turning a blind eye to the problems facing migrants, people of colour and every other excluded and marginalised group in society is somehow easier than it has ever been.

Shame, in his work, takes on physical properties, manifests itself in the world of the senses. Louis is one of the great writers of the body of his generation. Hands are scrubbed till they bleed, as if obliterating the body can obliterate the objective truths of the past.

Our bodies carry a history that we did not choose, he asserts. “My body reacts in ways I don’t expect because of my origins, my past, my childhood,” he says. “This is at the core of History of Violence; the way I behaved with this guy before he tried to kill me, my body was sending signs, behaving in certain ways I didn’t see, didn’t perceive in the moment.”

Insisting that he “can’t afford fiction”, as a consequence of growing up in a world where the very idea of creating character or plot was an unaffordable luxury, Louis sees himself as a writer dedicated to putting the very fact of what it means to possess a body that has been bent out of shape by forces beyond its control under the microscope.

The result is books that fizz with fury, that roil with injustice, that stand as eyewitness testimony to the world as it is, not as it should be.

“I’ve met so many bodies, so many people who deserved to exist in literature, to exist in the world of representation. I would need ten lives to write about all the people I want to write about. One life isn’t enough. I am so scared of just having one life.”

History of Violence is out now, published by Harvill Secker.

@bain3z