“Je contre”: Tangential Speech in the Writings of Lydie Salvayre

Je cherche un évadé, l’homme qui est un chacun. Le problème est que rien ne le distingue d’un autre.¹

Quand on me contrarie, on esveille mon attention, non pas ma cholere; je m’avance vers celuy qui me contredit, qui m’instruit. La cause de la vérité devroit être la cause commune à l’un et à l’autre.²

Lydie Salvayre’s Contre stands apart from her other works. It was created in response to an invitation from the radio station France Culture for the 2001 edition of Les Rencontres de La Chartreuse,³ and was thus written to be read publicly, to the accompaniment of an original score. It borrowed from musical theater, and involved collaboration between the writer and the two musicians. Contre was performed by two voices—Salvayre’s own, and a male voice, presumably that of one or both of the two accompanying guitarists.⁴ It was aimed at a cultivated audience, since the Rencontres, like the Festival d’Avignon where they take place, offer widely diverse international artistic productions, aimed at encouraging participants and spectators to reflect upon current cultural production. Such details are not superfluous, since they reveal that Contre was created expressly for this “select” audience and that, unlike the readers of Salvayre’s other narratives, the listener is not faced with the difficult task of finding just the right intonation for each voice. Here, the tone is provided: for each of the two voices, it is calm and collected, almost a drone, muffled at times by the electric guitars and spoken at a moderate pace, maintained until the final crescendo.