On the publication of Odala’s Temptation, Alix Lecomte answers questions from the director of Mondesfrancophones.
Odala’s Temptation offers an update of the Merovingian past, mixing different literary genres: epic, epistolary novel, confessions, prophetic visions. Based on a solid historical foundation, the text finds its argument in the life and surrounding of Saint Radegonde and her husband, King Clotaire I, in Poitiers in the 6th century. Radegonde (“Odala” in the novel, out of respect for the historical saint) is a fundamental figure: queen, then simple nun, she is the first female writer in Western history, the first female mystic and ascetic, the second founder of a female monastery in Europe.
The novel, however, “prophesies the past”, as Édouard Glissant would have said, by interweaving history with rich imaginary figures. Describing the transition from paganism to Christianity and its consequences, Odala’s Temptation addresses several problems that put it in direct contact with our modernity: our relationship to God, to holiness, to death, to the Devil, to sex and pleasure, to glory and power, to a humanity that survives despite its wickedness and stupidity, to the historical foundation of Christian individualism.
The novel is comparable to a Russian nesting doll, allowing readers of all levels to find food for thought in it
The desired effect here is not stylistic originality, but the display of a coherent vision, which is, itself, entirely original. To echo Proust: “Style is not a question of technique, but of vision.”
MH – Your story has very carnal aspects, is it to attract an audience?
AL – After all, we write books so that they are read… and, when we see the hysterical exhibitionism of Western society, my sexual spectacles are a drop of water in the sea of obscenities of all kinds on which we surf. Moreover, I abhor prudes and sexual hypocrisy.
But carnal scenes have a profound aim: it is about contrasting two radically different conceptions of sexuality, which often coexist in us. The first originates in Antiquity: sexuality is a means of uniting with a cosmos that is itself sexualized by the theory of elements; it is not linked to a singular body. With Christian Incarnation, for better or for worse, we now find ourselves with a singular soul that is irremediably tied to a single body, also singular.
Added to this is another theme, that of the radical asymmetry between male desire and female desire. To put it bluntly, following Jacques Lacan: A man wants to sleep with all women, a woman seeks the ideal man. Like Don Juan (mille e tre…), a man wants to add up all feminine pleasures to arrive at a mythical totality of THE woman, forgetting that each feminine pleasure is singular (another effect of Christianity, remember Galatians 3:28 where the woman, for the first time in the history of civilizations, becomes a singular individual, and not an infantile and weak subclass of the male). This is sexuality as the Merovingian king Clotaire experiences it, before he meets Odala, who will escape him. In fact, all the females in his kingdom belong to him by right, and he does not hold back.
I tried to convey all this in a novelistic form, without any didactics.
MH – At the same time, the novel seems very “Catholic” …
AL – If there is no Law, any transgression of desire is nonsense. As Saint Augustine says in the City of God, when he condemns the histrion theater that staged Olympian gods’ hardcore copulations of all kinds: “If this is the (divine) Law, where is the transgression?” Catholicism is of the time, it still fights, in the 6th century, against the remnants of mythology; this creates a tension essential to the very existence of subversion, whether Luciferian or human. Catholicism is the Law that gives rise to desire. This struggle is not over, we all still live with our little mythologies, Oedipus is an example. And I remind you that I allowed myself to rewrite Genesis. The Merovingian dynasty itself, this “fabulous race” as Gérard de Sède said, invents genealogies for fun that have nothing to do with Catholic dogma. So, I have little hope of landing on the Vatican’s recommended reading lists.
MH – The narration is nourished by deep historical information. Should Odala’s Temptation be classified among “historical novels”, “historical fiction”?
AL – I don’t like labels that lock books in little drawers. My book is an epistolary novel, a historical chronicle, with lyrical pieces, visions and mystical poems; the genres are mixed. I followed a certain chronological and historical framework. That said, for me, history, mythology and religion are the sources of powerful reveries and inspirations. For example, while reading Venance Fortunatus, the most famous writer of the 6th century, I noticed in the collection of his works that scholars of the last century attribute to him a long letter from his friend Sainte Radegonde, who inspired the figure of my heroine, Odala. I am convinced that Radegonde, a highly educated woman, is the author of this long letter to her brother, and that the scholars of the nineteenth century were blinded by their anti-feminism: they could not imagine a woman writer in the sixth century, the letter must have been written by a man, Venance. The historical Radegonde is a fundamental figure: a Merovingian queen, then a simple nun, she is the first woman writer in Western history, the first female mystic and ascetic, the second founder of a female monastery in Europe.
MH – None of your characters seem to have a psychology. Even mystics, who we can assume have an intense inner life, seem devoid of psychological depth.
AL – Indeed, and this is intentional. I believe that in literature, Proust is an unsurpassable summit, after which there is little more to say about inner life. He has exhausted its expressive possibilities: one only must read what comes after him in this field, it is always poorer and more banal. Enough of the exploration of the self! Literature is not there for the author to “express himself”, that is most often of no interest. More than a century ago, Nietzsche had already declared: “The self has become a legend, a fiction, a play on words; it has completely ceased to think, to feel and to will! What follows? There are no longer any spiritual causes at all! All so-called empirical experience has gone to the Devil!” The author’s task is to “impress” the reader. My characters are defined above all by acts, words, writings, which say what they are; they are all a little existentialist. There are ecstatic visions in Odala; but they do not relate to the “inner life”; Mystics all agree that mystical ecstasy projects them outside of themselves. Which is, according to Proust, who sanctified writing, the very function of literature: to put the reader and the author together “outside of oneself”, to envisage other worlds than that of a cramped ego.
La Tentation d’Odala, Éditions Tintamarre, Shreveport (LA 71104), 2024, 278 p.
