Pauline P. Raybaud
Vers le Roman
Les 32 cartes
This book is a metaphorical novel turning around three narrators, three tenses, while all being a meta from the same dissociative identity.
To reconstitute the character's different journeys while enhancing one or the other of her personalities, the main protagonist, Chloé, has to reassemble a card deck from a game that was been played between her alter egos and left half way. The clues to find one card after one another are left by a character she calls Louise, while Alyzée is the one in charge of recalculating the different trajectories and make them coincide, for her, and for the reader.
The cards are shaped on a theoretical numerology relation invented by Louise, and disposed by her following the physical map of Chloé’s journey through Paris, while she was ‘falling in love’ with her other self, following the physical and mental shifting in relation to number, places, significations and correlations.
The mapping
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To pattern the book, the order of the chapters is also applied to the mapping itself.
Each chapter is in relation to a card number, following not the order of the discoveries recalled by Alyzée, but the physical journey order experienced by Chloée.
For Alyzée, putting herself as a third character discovering the past interaction of the two protagonists –being other hers- the aim is to put together the whole mental game, explaining it to the reader as if she was talking to him.
To make her solving clear, she follows a third time the same journey, capturing on her way the places where cards have been left to find. In the line of the pictures she recreates the pattern of Louise’s map, the linear directions of the whole physical journey through Paris, and it is in the reader’s hand to reconstruct the visual maze and numerical correspondences offered to him, and be a part of the game.
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Some examples of Alyzée's photographs, and the linear correspondence to visually overlap Louis' map.
In the making of this book, a series of performance have been realized, in which my trial was to accentuate the concept of a meta.
The back and forth of the process of making, and of the protagonists themselves, and of the constant recalculations, theorizing, doing and redoing of the map, ordering and reordering of the numbers, going and leaving of the same old places, all physically resonated on my way of writing the book, of creating the game and the rest.
The pattern came so close to my body and mind that I wanted to retranslate this psychic over-mapping within a performance: the metaphorical live reconstruction of the mapping process.
As a meta within a meta, I wanted to act the main protagonist: immobilize myself within my overthinking, pinch my body onto the wall with the strings of my own map, the same way my protagonist looses herself within her insane research for logic.
