Annie Ernaux in the age of social networks – L’Express

How can we explain such an anomaly, all the more surprising since it affects a public that reads little? Born in 1998, son of the populist politician and essayist Philippe Pascot, Panayotis is not unknown, without being famous. He started on TV at 17, playing the role of the quirky interviewer in Yann Barthès’ shows (The small newspaper Then Daily). We then saw him in a few supporting roles in the cinema and on stage, with his stand-up show Almost. Finally, let us add skillful use of social networks and in particular Instagram, where he is followed by more than 450,000 fans. From there to predict that Pascot would become a writer like his former colleague from Daily Lilia Hassaine (now published by Gallimard) and would explode as much as another ex-comrade of the Barthès team, Hugo Clément, one would have had to be a soothsayer…

In front of us, Manuel Carcassonne returns to the genesis of Next time you bite the dust : “The credit goes to Paloma Grossi, the editor of Stock who brought me the manuscript. I must admit, and this is a compliment to the author, that I had no idea who he was – not at all my life, I never turned on a television set. The first version of the text needed to be reworked, but there were moving, strong things, bearing a certain number of contemporary themes which could find an echo. When I met Panayotis, he amazed me: he was very concentrated, dense, he did not at all correspond to the image that I stupidly had of a modern young man who was a little airheaded. I had before me a serious being, speaking to me closer to existential questioning than to amusement. When there was the final version of the book, we saw that this is where it is good. Despite everything, it “It’s always difficult to predict success. As Cocteau said: ‘Since these mysteries are beyond me, let’s pretend to be the organizer.'”

It was Carcassonne which, finding that the literary season had too much of a tendency to “purr”, decided to program Next time you bite the dust at the end of August, positioning it as “a first novel like no other”. An event changed the situation. On July 4, Pascot announced on Instagram the upcoming release of his book, triggering 8,000 pre-orders on Amazon with this simple post. Comment from the boss of Stock, still speechless: “I remain amazed by the sobriety and commercial efficiency of the gesture… In my entire publishing career, I had never seen that.”

From summer, Stock reprints. The first week of September, Pascot appeared on the France Inter morning show opposite Léa Salamé and Daily, between Sandrine Rousseau and Ivan Jablonka. Constituting himself a sensitive character capable of self-deprecation, he made himself sympathetic. He has since kept the promotion to a minimum – despite our request, we have not been able to meet him. Fleeing most of the media, he instead organized a reading on October 2 at the Antoine theater, which was sold out. Basically, we know what we’re talking about Next time you bite the dust : a boy suffering from melancholic depression (the illness described by Emmanuel Carrère in Yoga) shares his relationship problems with his father, and the suffering caused by his homosexuality, which he denied for a long time before coming to terms with it. Formally, it’s poor. In a comparable vein, whether we agree or not with the ideas of Constance Debré, we can only salute her dry style, heir to that of Thomas Bernhard and the Jansenists of the 17th century. Pascot is not Pascal: thinking is not his strong point. He engages in self-flagellation in written oral mode. On page 139, he slips in this naked admission: “I think so, I’m shit.” Self-portrait which he specifies on page 156: “A little shit.” And finalizes page 220: “A piece of shit that promises itself that we will never treat it like shit again.” Basically, he uses the same strategy as Carrère (one of his masters): denigrate himself by believing the complete opposite. Because on page 119, Pascot gains confidence: “I would be a great artist, I was convinced of it.”

To find out where Panayotis Pascot comes from literaryly, since we haven’t been able to talk about it with him, we can watch an interview he gave to Konbini on YouTube. We see him wandering through a bookstore. He first mentions Memories of not much by Bukowski: “It took me a while to read, and I’m not very fond of novels… I understood thanks to Bukowski that literature can be in the nature of confession. He recounts his own decline and it’s cold in the back. I was 17 when I read this very dark book in one go. It shook me up” Then we are treated to the inevitable The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger: “It’s about a completely lost kid, magnificent! His way of speaking, very crude, left an impression on me.” Pascot finally evokes his favorite literary genre, autofiction, by praising Carrère, Debré and Annie Ernaux, The place And Simple passion having been “a punch in the face” for him: “It’s great for discovering literature if you don’t read a lot, like me, because they are small books.”

Return to Select. Manuel Carcassonne adds a reference: “There is in Pascot something of the rhythm and themes of Christine Angot. Let us remember that he is still very young. I have known many young authors, often in excess. He has a form of control over what he says, and how he says it. As if he fears what might come out of him…” Control is indeed a word that characterizes Pascot. Without calling into question his sincerity, we note that he knows how to play with his most intimate emotions to endear himself to a large audience, like the influencer Lena Situations when she stages her anxiety attacks on social networks.

Taking a step back, Carcassonne remembers the distant era, the 1990s, when, as a young editor at Grasset, he saw his boss Jean-Claude Fasquelle bring into this venerable house people who seemed improbable, such as Virginie Despentes. : “I learned a lot from what Fasquelle did. He was the pinnacle of the big bourgeoisie, in all that it was sometimes caricatured and funny on certain levels. But he had the right feeling that, if he didn’t pointed out that in its habits and in its environment, publishing would die. Publishing is not there to stand out and judge the times: on the contrary, it is there to accompany it, by bringing out new talents .” In 2023, they meet Annie Ernaux and Lena Situations.

Next time you bite the dust, by Panayotis Pascot. Stock, 232 p., €19.50.