The issue of the use of so-called “sensitive readers” rebounded Thursday in France around Kevin Lambert’s most recent novel, That our joy remains, which found itself at the center of a controversy two days after being selected in the first list of the Goncourt prize.
It was the French writer and 2018 Goncourt Prize winner Nicolas Mathieu who launched the debate by publishing a post on Instagram where he criticized Kevin Lambert. He confided in an interview with his French publisher, Le Nouvel Attila, that he had called on the poet and professor of Quebec literature Chloé Savoie-Bernard in the process of rereading his novel, while saying that those who opposed to the use of sensitive readers (sensitivity readers) were reactionary.
“Making professionals of sensibilities, experts in stereotypes, specialists in what is accepted and dared at a given moment the compass of our work, that leaves us cautious to say the least, wrote Nicolas Mathieu in his post dating from Wednesday. Let us brag about it, this is amusing at best, but pitiful in truth. Let us discredit with a word those who think that literature has nothing to do with these customs of a new kind, and to imply that they are playing the game of the oppressions in progress, it is quite simply a crap . This type of outing is distressing as much by its self-satisfaction as by its intellectual dishonesty. »
The French daily Le Figaro picked up on Nicolas Mathieu’s comment, who then published a second post specifying that he was not reproaching the author for anything, but that he was reacting “to the absurd advertisement made by his editor on this subject and the surprising pride he seemed to derive from it”.
In Quebec, however, the use of sensitive readers does not seem to have the same resonance as in France. The literary director of Héliotrope, Kevin Lambert’s Quebec publisher, Olga Duhamel-Noyer, stressed that it is “something that is happening more and more.”
“But in Kevin’s case,” she clarified, “it’s such a continuum of his way of working that I look a little astonished at the way it’s treated in France. When he was writing Querelle de Roberval, he went to a sawmill to find out how it worked, the machines, the union struggles… In the same way, when he had a character of Haitian origin, he said to himself: “I I’m going to ask a reader who is also an editor and Haitian in addition to being from Quebec, it will improve my text.” But we certainly weren’t the ones who asked him that. »
In his opinion, Benoît Virot, the editor of Nouvel Attila, must have found this way of doing things interesting in itself to promote it on social networks. “We didn’t brag about it, but we didn’t hide it either,” she noted.
The literary director of Héliotrope specified that even for The Phantom of Suzuko, a novel by Vincent Brault published in 2021, someone “who knew Japan particularly well” was consulted. “It’s true that we sometimes do it – not so that everyone necessarily keeps their butts tight, but to just improve, enrich the text. »
The professor, writer, translator and columnist Chloé Savoie-Bernard, who worked with Kevin Lambert on the sensitive reading of his text, stressed to La Presse that she had done editorial consultation on his book after being integrated into the process published by Héliotrope. “We can call the work I did on this book “sensitive reading” if we want, but I prefer to keep in mind that I am a qualified person for any work on the text. I asked Kevin questions, I made suggestions to him (in fact, not only about the character of Haitian origin, but also about the general structure of the text). He of course remained the mastermind behind his sublime book, ”she told La Presse in an email exchange.
For his part, Kevin Lambert, currently in France, did not respond to our interview requests, nor did his French publisher, Le Nouvel Attila.
For the writer and translator Daniel Grenier, the use of sensitive readers, whom Le Figaro called “editorial minesweepers,” is a step in the right direction, and not censorship. “Sensitivity readers are people who are directly affected, either in their identity or in their philosophy, by the things that we, as writers, want to address. »
He explains that as a translator of indigenous literature, he tries as much as possible to use sensitive reading to validate certain of his choices and “take the pulse of a person who is directly concerned, who can accurately see the blind spots, the stereotypes that are there without us realizing it, the unconscious biases that we develop.” He also gives the example of Marie-Hélène Poitras, who consulted her friend Chris Bergeron for a trans character in her novel La désiderate. “She was clear that it had helped her; it hadn’t censored her. On the contrary, it refers to the limits of our own imagination as writers. »
“Long before, we did it without realizing it when we had female characters – we made her mother read to see if we weren’t talking nonsense. I myself already wrote some nonsense when I was 18, then I had my friend point them out to me. Was it a sensitive reader, my friend Maude who read me? “, he asks.
Contacted in France by La Presse, French writer Nicolas Mathieu refused on Thursday to comment further on the subject. “I’m not going to put a part back in the machine every time. If I start giving interviews – I have already refused several – it will take on proportions that it should not have. And then, I especially don’t want to harm him [Kevin Lambert]. That wasn’t my goal, to get him in trouble,” he said.
Nicolas Mathieu won the Goncourt prize in 2018 for his second novel, Their children after them. He grew up in a working-class environment in the north-east of France and often returns in his novels to questions of discrepancy between social classes and meritocracy, among others in his most recent novel, Connemara (published last year by Actes South). He regularly posts comments on Instagram that seek to provoke reactions. “I can imagine quite well what it was like for this young guy from Canada to have entered the maelstrom of prices and Goncourt. He has all my sympathy,” he also wrote in his second post on the subject.
