Le blog des 1L1 du lycée Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (lyon croix-rousse)

Here are the much-delayed answers to your questions-

*To what extent  is your novel autobiographical ?

This is a question often asked over the years and justifiably so. It is certainly true that I was homeless as a teenager. That I came from a very working class area in Belfast. That I had troubles with my family and that I studied at Cambridge University. Perhaps even more autobigraphically I was definitely very pretentious and annoying when I was a young man.

There is a theory that all fiction is autobiographical so that if I write about a woman or an old man I'm still basically writing about myself. I've always felt there was at least some truth in this.

*Why do authors like Dickens and Wells appear regularly in your novel ?

It's not Wells but George Orwell. They are the two great literary models for writing about dispossession and poverty in the British Isles. And certainly, in the case of Dickens, an enormous influence upon my writing. Dickens invented the English novel (though well after Cervantes had invented the novel itself). He wrote beautiful English - he was in fact incapable of writing bad English and showed clearly how developments in the modern novel and the modern city were contiguous. Anyone who shows any interest in the English language should read Dickens.

*Did you imagine yourself as a tramp before writing Ripley Bogle ?

I didn't really need to imagine myself as a tramp before writing this novel since I had already experience the state of being SDF. And there parts of that experience that I don't think I could have imagined. Particularly how it changes your relaionship with your city. Since you sleep on the streets you have a deeply intimate view of those streets. Think how well, how intimately the average person knows their bed or their pillow and that is how the tramp knows their city. That is not something you can really guess.

*Have other authors inspired you ?

The list of authors who have inspired me would take many pages to write. In a sense all the authors I have ever read have inspired me. You can learn almost more from the bad ones than you can from the good ones. When you ask of Balzac, Tolstoy, Rushdie or Hrabal why is this so good, the question is often unanswerable. But of bad writing the question why is this so bad is often more clearly detectable. And that is what you try to avoid.

But briefly, Tolsoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Balzac, Zola, Maupassant, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Austen, Camus, Heller, Salinger, Joyce, Svevo, Rushdie and Martin Amis.

*How do you justify the hardness of the descriptions of certain events ?

Ex : the death of the father, Deirdre's abortion, etc.

I don't need to justify anything. Justifying is not what novelists do. Sometimes things are just the way they are and the only answer the writer can give is because I say so. These events are harsh but these events could hardly be treated in any other way. When the novel first appeared in America there was quite a lot of complaining about all the disgusting physical details. The guy was filthy and always vomiting, the whined. And I found this extraordinary. He's homeless after all. What did they expect? (By the way, in English the abbreviation for example is always Eg. Thank you for the one tiny opportunity to correct you)

*Why does the story take place in four days ?

And especially, why does it begin one Thursday ?

I want you to answer this question, not me. An author has to retain some mystery. I'm sure you could come up with something with your sparkling English.

Hope these are ok.

Robert Wilson

" "Ripley... ?"

(Imaginez la scène : un édénique petit déjeuner bogléen, parmi mioches et nichons.)

"Oui, m'man ?"
-Ripley, j'ai quelquechose à te dire. Tu sais ce que c'est que l'école ?"

Je me souviens parfaitement qu'en entendant le mot "école", je ressentis un curieux mélange de terreur et d'excitation. Je me demandai brièvement quelle sensation adopter comme ligne politique, mais l'habitude l'emporta et je choisis aussitôt la terreur.

"Alors, sais-tu ce que c'est l'école ?
-Non.
-Ben l'école, c'est là où tout le monde va pour apprendre."

Classieux non ? Un ange passa, qui me permit d'assimilier cette splendide information.

"Pourquoi ?" couinai-je.

Légèrement décontenancée, la maman.

"Ben, pour que tu sois capable de savoir lire et écrire comme ton père et moi."

(Douteux dans le meilleur des cas.)

"Pourquoi ?"
-Parce qu'il faut que tu saches lire et écrire quand tu seras grand... sinon personne t'aimera."

Après cette définition malthusienne, je réfléchis brièvement avant de reprendre mon numéro d'aimable chiard émerveillé enquiquinant ces malappris d'adultes avec ses questions adorablement précoces et sans réponse. Cette comédie m'avait déjà rendu maints services.

"Pourquoi ?" répétai-je.

(J'aurai sans doute pu trouver une variante.)

"Je viens de te dire pourquoi, éspèce de petit emmerdeur !"

J'essayai de rassembler mes troupes pour mener une charge de cavalerie sur le flanc de la tendresse maternelle.

"Est-ce que tu seras là, m'man ?
-Sois pas stupide. Bien sûr que je serai pas là !"

Cette réponse me vexa un peu, mais dans mon optimisme j'interprétai son côté abrupt comme un simple écran destiné à dissimuler le conflit qui ravageait sans doute le coeur maternel. J'accordais à cette pause tout le charme alangui de l'enfance, avant de bêler piteusement :

"Je crois pas que j'aie envie d'aller à l'école, m'man."

Bon dieu, jétais déjà un sombre crétin à l'époque. Car, inutile de le dire, ma chère maman réagit aussi sec et, après m'avoir botté le cul, elle me dévoila le pot aux roses.

"Très bien monsieur le têtu ! Mais fais gaffe de pas saloper ton pantalon aujourd'hui, parce que..." -elle avait eu la faiblesse de m'informer à l'avance du début de ma carrière scolaire - " ... parce que tu vas à l'école dès demain.
-Oh", fis-je assez raisonnablement."

Thank you.

I seem to be spending increasing amounts of my time in thinking about my birth. This is, I freely admit, a futile thing to be doing. The event was, alas, poorly documented and my own recollections of it are ranged upon the impenetrable side of hazy. However, that is probably how it was-more or less. I feel it in my bones.

It must be said that now is not a good time for birthly thoughts. The world is but little like a womb at the moment, for me at any rate. For instance, a slow, inexorable pulse of cold shivering is in the process of threading its way from my coccyx to my liver and I'm damp and dribbling and dank. I've run right out of fags and I have not eaten in rather more than three days. Now, does that sound womblike to you? No, indeed.

June. Lovely frozen June. Curiously enough, a large proportion of English folk tend to think fondly of the month of June as being situated during the summer. This is patently bollocks. Admittedly, the trees mount a spurious verdance and people endeavor to play feeble cricket on a variety of blasted heaths but I can assure you that there is no way in which the term 'summer' can be justified. No way! Only we - we the destitute, the homeless, the vagabonds - only we know the Siberian truth of an English June. We are its allies and confidants. We are on first -name terms with its frozen strangle and frosty grip.

Thus, here I am in the middle of that month, with frostbitten testicles and iceberg feet, doing serious hand-to-hand with hypothermia. I'm so cold I'm not even hungry, for chrissakes! (Though Malnutrition and Attenuation coyly beckon with mild eyes and smiles urbane.) Yes, the cold is bad but fading slowly. I'm ignoring it as best I can. This seems the sensible course. Anyway, after a while, real cold - the proper Arctic assault - becomes theoretical. Like a disquieting intellectual conviction, it nags but fails to irritate. It anaesthetises against itself. Which is nice of it. All this give the business of frostbite a kind of grotesque ascetic repeatability but I could still do without it--that's just how I am.

Just at the moment, I'm sitting on an icy parkbench in St James's Park, grimly satirising the shoddy prismatic glimmer of evening. This is, I concede, a wildly emetic thing to be doing but my menu of alternatives is not exactly encyclopaedic just now.

Two curious things to be noted.

First; despite the arse-numbing temperature and general high discomfort, I can't help feeling rather sentimental about this particular parkbound glide of twilight. I hate to say it but it looks as though the world has really dressed up for me tonight. It must be going somewhere nice. If I knew it a little better I'd try to cadge a fiver or something. Now, that's aestheticism for you. I won't though. The world and I are a little sniffy with each other these days.

The second thing to be noted is the fact that I am sitting on this frozen bench, threatening to flop over at any minute and die of pure poverty and all the while I am less than three hundred yards away from Buckingham Palace. (This thought has an annoying tendency to make me giggle hysterically.) The Queen is in there. Jesus, maybe she's even sitting there at one of those rigid, blinking windows right now, watching me! Laughing at me while I get all Belsenesque and pissed on. (It's raining now. Fucking rain.) It wouldn't surprise me in the least. I mean, the merest mutts in that place are better fed that I am. Well, then again, the merest mutts in most places are better fed than me, for that matter. (Here I giggle again like the true arsehole that I am.) It occurs to me that I am better educated better looking and a nicer person than the Queen and yet I am still starving to death in her front garden. What would Charlie Dickens have said about this, I wonder?

Actually, there is a third curious thing to be noted. The most capricious and witless of all and that is that I don't really mind too much about any of this. Not really. Not desperately. I mean to say, the fact that I am a filthy, foodless, cashless tramp doesn't' seem to be bothering me in the way I'm sure it should. I must be off my chump. Since when has indigence been a breeding ground for blithe insouciance? But there it is. In the midst of my poverty and degradation I am strangely, nebulously happy. Prat and irrepressible little cutie that I am, I sense that things aren't after all so very bad. Needless to say, I am hugely mistaken. Things are very bad indeed and set fair for getting worse. Nevertheless, I view myself in this pure, cool moment; chastened and made lean by hardship. The fight is on but I'm standing still. Ducking and weaving is not for me. I leave that to the well-fed, the wise. Okay, so I may well be missing the old bedless, malnutritional, frost-bitten point here but it matters little.

MacLiam Wilson’s Biography

An Irish  writer, Robert McLiam Wilson was born in Belfast in 1964. Originated from a Catholic workmen district, he flees a conflict-torn Ireland to go to London. Despite a very hard journey and  chaotic studies, he gets a scholarship to Cambridge, where he studies English literature. After two years, he gives up his studies to devote himself to writing. At the age of 24, he publishes his first novel : Ripley Bogle, the story of a tramp who particularly looks like him, and for which he was awarded many prices. After Ripley Bogle, his other novels will know a great success. He taught too, for three years, at the Ulster University. He produces many documentary films for the British television, among which the adaptation of Eurêka Street. He now lives in Belfast where he still writes .

« Ouah ouah aboient les chiens, les mendiants arrivent en ville. »

Telle est l’exergue de Ripley Bogle, autobiographie fantasque d’un affabulateur superbe et cynique. Fraichement expulsé de Cambridge, « Ripleyirlandaisanglaisbogle », comme arrivé à une étape de sa vie, revient sur les évènements qui l’ont amené à errer dans les rues froides et humides de Londres. Après une enfance chaotique en Irlande, qui a fait de lui un alcoolique arrogant, et laissant derrière lui les cadavres d’un père, d’un ami et d’un enfant, il quitte son ile natale, mais « même dans le trou du cul du monde, on dégote toujours un coin de l’Irlande éternelle. ».

Tout en flash-back et en digressions, Robert McLiam Wilson tisse la chronique baignée d’humour noir d’un clochard magnifique. « Il n’y a rien de plus irlandais que le mensonge. Mais quand les Irlandais mentent, ils appellent ça créer un mythe. ». Et le mythe irlandais, l’auteur connaît, vu qu’il a passé une jeunesse semblable à celle de son personnage, entre une Irlande déchirée et violente et un Cambridge austère et vaniteux.

Entre deux cigarettes trempées et un café moulu à la main par un vieux sans abri mourant, Ripley Bogle aborde sans détour des thèmes essentiels de la nature humaine. « L’amour est la cape de soie qui masque la lévitation animale du pénis. ». Cru et provocateur, mais toujours pertinent, Ripley Bogle semble servir d’exutoire à Robert McLiam Wilson. « Je tiens néanmoins à ajouter que l’immense putain de majorité d’entre nous ment comme s’il n’y avait pas de lendemain. » Ripley Bogle ne déroge pas à la règle, ainsi à la fin du livre, c’est avec le sourire pesant du menteur satisfait qu’il lève le voile sur son imposture.

« Drôle de chose, la vie, et drôles de gens qui la vivent. »

Alexis Mitelberg, Timothée Nicolas, Marie-Nirina Metz, Justine Benali, Camille Ichou, Eléonore Riondet

“Woof, woof, the dogs are barking. The tramps are arriving into town.” Such is the epigraph of Ripley Bogle, the temperamental autobiography of a superb and cynical fibber. Recently expelled from Cambridge, “RipleyIrishEnglisBogle”, seems to have reached a step in his life, and comes back on the events which have led him up to roam in the cold and damp London streets. After a chaotic childhood in Ireland which has changed him into an arrogant drunkard, and leaving the corpses of a father, a friend an a child behind him, he goes away from his native island, but “Even in the back of beyond, we always dig up a small corner of ever- lasting Ireland”

With a lot of Flash-backs and digressions, Robert McLiam Wilson spins the chronicle bathed, in black humour of a Celestial bum. Nothing is more Irish than lying. The only thing is when the Irish lie, they call that to create a myth. And the Irish myth is something the writer knows about, as he has spent his youth in the same way as the character, between a torn and violent Ireland and an austere and vain Cambridge.

« Aaaaaaaaeeeeeiiiieeecchhh ». Ainsi commence l’histoire de Ripley Bogle, héros atypique à la fois provocateur et attachant, mythomane et séduisant. Etouffé par son milieu, il fuit l’Irlande selon lui responsable de tout ses échecs, devient vagabond et échappe ainsi à la médiocrité qu’il semble reprocher à l’ensemble de l’humanité. L’arrogant personnage de Ripley Bogle est adepte de l’exclusion sociale. Il est adepte de l’exclusion sociale, se complait dans le malheur et cultive un personnage solitaire et persécuté qui lui est difficile d’abandonner.

Avec cynisme et arrogance, il retrace son parcours tumultueux entre rue et les bancs de Cambridge. Epopée qui n’est pas sans rappeler celle de Robert McLiam Wilson, lui-même issu d’une famille ouvrière, catholique Irlandaise. Ses origines sont d’ailleurs évoquées par le personnage de Ripley Bogle, à travers les yeux duquel on découvre un pays fragilisé par la guerre civile. Témoignage troublant et fascinant d’authenticité sur la condition des sans abri, raconté dans une écriture fragmentée entre présent et passé. L’insolence de l’écriture interpelle sans cesse le lecteur, confident avec lequel Ripley Bogle entretient une certaine complicité. Il détaille avec réalisme les aspects les plus terribles de la vie de vagabond. Néanmoins, il n’hésite pas à dévoiler certains passages sombres de son existence, quitte à transformer la réalité. Il parvient ainsi à dissimuler quelques unes de ses lâchetés mais, rattrapé par sa culpabilité, il finit toujours par nous les avouer. Atteint du complexe d’Hubris il semble n’approuver aucune considération pour quiconque croise son chemin.

Loin des clichés du vagabond anonyme Robert McLiam Wilson, dresse le portrait d’un personnage au destin tragique voyageant entre une Irlande déchirée par la violence et une Angleterre sinistre et crasseuse. A travers ce récit passionnant, le lecteur fait la rencontre d’un personnage ambigu qui nous dépeint son parcours chaotique non sans humour et dérision.

Robert McLiam Wilson cherche à dénoncer toutes les hypocrisies du monde et les fausses idées véhiculées sur la pauvreté, à travers des ouvrages militants comme Ripley Bogle, publié en 1989, Manfred’s Pain, sorti en 1992, Dispossessed qu’il a écrit en collaboration avec Donevan Wylie édité en 1992 et enfin Eurêka Street publié en 1996. Dans ses œuvres, il affiche un intérêt particulier pour l’univers urbain et ses exclus, et fait de la ville un personnage à part entière avec lequel les plus démunis entretiennent une relation quasi charnelle. Les personnages, dont il dresse des portraits touchants et souvent déchirants, se débattent avec les problèmes de chômage, violence, difficultés de logement, d’éducation, ou encore des conflits politiques comme celui entre l’Irlande et l’Angleterre.

Ecrivain Irlandais, Robert McLiam Wilson est né à Belfast en 1964. Issu d’un quartier ouvrier catholique, il fuit une Irlande déchirée pour Londres. Malgré un parcours difficile et une scolarité chaotique, il obtient une bourse pour Cambridge, où il étudie la littérature anglaise. Au terme de deux années, il abandonne ses études pour se consacrer à l’écriture. A vingt quatre ans, il publie son premier roman : Ripley Bogle, épopée d’un vagabond qui lui ressemble particulièrement, pour lequel il reçoit plusieurs prix littéraires. A la suite de Ripley Bogle, ses autres romans connaîtront un grand succès. Il enseigne aussi, durant trois ans, à l’Université d’Ulster. Il réalisera plusieurs films documentaires pour la télévision britannique, dont l’adaptation d’Eurêka Street. Il habite aujourd’hui Belfast où il continue d’écrire.

Robert McLiam Wilson,auteur du livre Ripley Bogle qui participera prochainement aux Assises Internationales du roman organisé a lyon par la Villa Gillet .

Ce blog contiendra une petite présentation de notre classe , ainsi que des informations sur l'auteur  (biographie , bibiographie , et également des articles sur le livre ...)  fruit du travail des élèves 1ereL1 du lycée St-Éxupéry.