Conversations in Formentor. "The racist retreat we are experiencing is evident"
Before Guadalajara "You don't have to be very brave to write an autobiography"
Can a book on meditation, zen and yoga turn into a descent into hell (and with media controversy included)?
Yes, if the writer is Emmanuel Carrère (Paris, 1957).
What was to be a laughing essay, his particular philosophical and rogue version of the new age and self-help books, becomes the chronicle of his bipolarity: how he was hospitalized for four months in the Sainte Anne psychiatric hospital, how he submitted to a treatment with ketamine, electroshocks and lithium.
'
Yoga 'are two books in one: his spiritual and psychiatric autobiography.
Mix light and dark moments.
Is your ying yang literary?
Totally.
It is the same life, with its lights and darkness.
We aspire to a certain serenity, wisdom, a harmonious relationship with the world.
But we are also made up of painful and dark forces that sometimes overwhelm us.
We are the two poles and our life is made of that tension.
Hence the book, which is my particular story, has a certain universality: the tension between who we would like to be, an appeased version of ourselves, and who we are, a much more miserable version with which we live, is the everyone's story.
The goal of yoga is to reduce the ego, to minimize the self.
But literature, and more in your case, is it not a form of expansion of that ego?
It is a problem, yes [laughs] There is an apparent contradiction between delimiting the empire of the ego and a literary practice that tends the other way ... As for the contradictions, I am not here to solve them but to admit them.
The human experience is made of contradictions.
We are all anchored to an ego that is both tyrannical and wounded.
Lenin says that you have to work with existing material.
And the existing material is oneself.
I know that I write books in the hope that something will change, at least in me.
It may sound childish but I write to be a better version of myself.
He says that sex is also yoga.
And that the great moments of his life are building sentences and more sentences.
And sex.
Of course.
They are the two things that make you feel most alive.
You have the impression that you occupy your place on earth.
Interned at Sainte Anne, she experienced very hard times with suicidal ideas.
What memories do you have of those months?
The truth is that I have very few memories.
It is one of the side effects of electroconvulsive therapy, which impairs memory.
I have vague memories, a bit floating, things that my relatives have told me and the hospitalization document in which every day the doctors write down their observations of your condition, very precise and rigorous.
I have had to resort to all this to rebuild that dark period of my life.
Electroshock therapy sounds a bit egregious ...
We have a wrong idea of electroshocks, that of a barbaric and archaic treatment.
But today it has become a cutting-edge treatment in psychiatry.
What is the efficacy?
It varies depending on the people, of course.
It's hard to say which part of the electroshock has helped me heal.
You never know what the other way would have been like.
In the end, it is not the meditation that saves you, but the medication.
Yes, and it is somewhat disturbing for someone who has been analyzing for many years.
Some medications, especially lithium, are highly effective in so-called bipolar disorders.
Stabilizes a lot.
And that chemistry is so important is disturbing.
In this book there is a great absence: Hélène.
As a writer, why did you sign a contract that limited your creative freedom?
It is a question that I have asked myself many times in hindsight.
I did it in the context of a divorce, I had the impression that it gave my wife peace of mind.
But he didn't think he would use that clause in such a radical way.
Of course, it is your right not to want to appear in my work.
But it's a bit difficult to write an autobiographical book about the years when we were married and when she was the main character in my life.
There was nothing derogatory in what I wrote, on the contrary.
But hey ... He turned it down and I was forced to retouch the book.
If you had kept the passages you had to delete, would the book have gained depth?
In the end I tell myself that this kind of ellipsis is part of the identity of the book: it is the way in which the end of this marriage and this love is treated.
I think it's better than what I had written before.
It is not a harmonious and perfectly woven book.
I wrote another like that,
A Russian novel,
Same genre, a bit chaotic.
They are my only two really autobiographical books.
In
A Russian novel,
He admits that he crossed a line and exposed the intimacy of what was then his partner and his mother.
What line should not be crossed in the name of literature?
Very easy: do not harm anyone.
It's like the Hippocratic Oath, though in another way.
It is a very important obligation.
We can damage by inadvertent or carelessness, but we must be vigilant.
A Russian novel,
It is a book that I like but it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.
Yoga
, do not.
Not hurt anyone.
Do you still believe, like Van Gogh, that "sadness will last forever"?
One half of me believes it and the other half believes otherwise.
Both cohabit.
It doesn't seem too sad now.
No, I'm fine now [smiles;
in fact, he smiles most of the time] This book is not intended to be a great philosophical teaching but something you learn over time and through meditation practice is the constant alternation of states: everything fluctuates.
When you are bad and friends tell you 'calm down, everything will be better', they are right.
But when you are well they would have to say 'you know, it will go bad again'.
It is important to relativize the states and more when you suffer from bipolar problems, which is what happens to everyone but in an amplified way: the highs are higher and the lows are lower.
Why did you decide to go to the Leros refugee camp (Greece) in the middle of the depression?
People who do humanitarianism, and I don't mean it as a criticism at all, are often quite unsuccessful people, who have a lot of personal problems and drown them in altruism.
I was pushed to Leros in a moment of impasse, I found myself there because I was bad everywhere.
Actually, I didn't care, to be honest.
I collaborated in a writing workshop and these young people did well to tell their story, to be heard.
His stories were very emotional, they made you relativize sadness.
Within a few weeks of its publication in France,
Yoga
became a
best seller
and he already sounded like a possible winner of the Goncourt award.
Until his ex-wife, the journalist Hélène Devynck, publicly accused Carrère of betraying his divorce contract, of lying and of falsifying reality.
Hélène, who appeared in
Limonov
or
Of other people's lives
, I no longer wanted to be a Carrère character.
To continue reading for free
Sign inSign up
Or
subscribe to Premium
and you will have access to all the web content of El Mundo
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more