Une ressource audio authentique : l’interview de Nathan Hill

Nathan Hill est un écrivain américain originaire de Cedar Rapids dans l’Iowa, où il est né en 1975. Il a publié deux romans, The Nix, en 2016, et Wellness, en 2023. Il est venu présenter son roman lors de sa parution française à la librairie l’Armitière, à Rouen.

L’interview étant riche et les propos développés, les parties en gras peuvent être extraites du document et utilisées comme « citations » en fonction du niveau des élèves et des objectifs visés. La ressource a pour vocation à faire l’objet d’une compréhension orale.

[1] What’s your relation with the city of Chicago, coming from the Midwest yourself ?

I grew up in the Midwest in the United States, so we moved around a lot when I was a kid, but it was always in what’s called “the heartland”–so, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas. I lived in all those places when I was growing up. And when you live in the Midwest in the US, like...most of the cultural conversation happens on the coast : New York City, Los Angeles, and, the middle of the country is sometimes referred to as “flyover country”. It’s the spot of the country that you fly over when you’re going from one coast to the other. But in the Midwest, we have Chicago. And Chicago self-consciously thinks of itself as…you know…it’s not the cultural capital that New York or Los Angeles is, but it’s called “the second city” for a reason, because it’s not LA, it’s not New York, but it is the urban capital of the Midwest. And I grew up in small towns and suburbs in the Midwest and always thought of Chicago as sort of the place I wanted to get to one day. And then when I became an adult and I got married–my wife plays in a music festival in Chicago in the summers, and so Chicago became my summer home for I think 15 summers, I would go back, and when you go back and see a city only once a year, you really…you notice how it changes over time. The store that used to be the cool indie record store has now turned into a Bank of America, and you really notice those changes. So that sort of shaped my thinking of putting Chicago in both books.

[2] You write about Chicago and gentrification, can you tell us about it ?

In my second book, I wrote about that a lot. Wicker Park was sort of the epicenter of that turn that happened in Chicago where, for most of the 19th, 20th century, it was a labor town. And then there was this move to the post-industrial knowledge economy and Wicker Park, which was once filled with factories…a hundred years later, suddenly it’s filled with knowledge workers, people in technology and in media and in finance. It’s a strange place because it has the bones of one type of neighborhood and it has now become a very different type of neighborhood. And so what I like about the neighborhood is that you see these layers of history very clearly. Now in France, I mean, you see this all the time, but in America, that’s kind of unusual. So, I liked the idea of setting it in Wicker Park because this is a story about a couple whose marriage changes over time. And it struck me that, like, relationships between people can share a lot of similarities with a gentrifying neighborhood in that like little small changes over time add up to a big change eventually. So I thought the setting was ideal for a story about marriage over time.

[3] In your books, there’s also a discussion about reality versus virtuality…

It comes from my own interest in technology. I was, I mean, back in the mid-90s when I was in college. I guess I started college in 1994, and I think the first time I got on the internet was 1994. And I remember being so excited about it. I was one of those technology utopian guys. “All the information should be out there”, “Everything should be free”, etc. I was really, really looking forward to the future that this would bring. And then imagine my surprise when the future arrives and when all the information is out there, it turns out people believe just total garbage and the place is flooded with misinformation, and it’s mostly used by large technology companies to make enormous profit. So it didn’t end up quite where I wanted it to be, and yet, I love being online, I love video games, I love the connection that comes with technology, but I also am aware that there’s a dark underside, that video games can be a substitute for life, that you can place a lot of meaning in technology, like how many likes you get on Instagram or Facebook, that really shouldn’t be meaningful at all. And so I want to look at technology, both how it can serve us, but also how we’re serving it, and try to be as honest as I can about both those things.

[4] Does the “Great American Novel” still exist ? Do you feel you are part of that tradition ? Do you have a favorite one ?

It’s funny that the question of the Great American Novel is under so much pressure because I think it’s been wrapped up in this idea of…it comes from a usually male, usually white writer, and it’s kind of been reserved for guys like me forever, which is terribly unfair. The term came about shortly after the Civil War when it was just used to describe books about ordinary people in contemporary times, which can be written by anyone. And I think the category is opening up for more people, which is a positive thing. So when I was growing up, I always associated that term with like very big, chunky, long novels of the kind that I write now. And so, you know, something like Don DeLillo’s Underworld was a big deal for me. Something like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest I really enjoyed. But if I had to point to one book that really meant a lot to me, I think it would be The World According to Garp by John Irving, because it contains a whole life. It is from love and loss and sex and parenthood and being a child, it just contains, seems to contain everything. It’s dramatic. It’s also incredibly funny. I appreciate writers who tell jokes on the page. I really like that a lot. So, John makes me laugh constantly. And, as an Iowan, John Irving writes about Iowa City in a way that made me want to be a novelist, so I’d have to say Garp is one of my top great American novels.

Les liens avec les thématiques culturelles des programmes

Les liens avec les thématiques culturelles des programmes sont les suivants :
● Classe de 3è :
Voyages et migrations
● Classe de 2nde :
Axe 2 - Vivre entre génération
Axe 3 - Le passé dans le présent
Axe 4 - Défis et transitions
● Cycle terminal :
Espace privé et espace public
Citoyenneté et mondes virtuels
Fictions et réalités
Innovations scientifiques et responsabilité
Territoire et mémoire

Thématiques des spécialités :
LLCER - Imaginaire
LLCER - Rencontres
LLCER - Expression et construction de soi
LLCER - Voyages, territoires, frontières
LLCER-AMC - Savoirs, créations, innovations
LLCER-AMC - Représentations
LLCER-AMC - Environnements en mutation

Conclusion

L’article proposé s’inscrit dans une dynamique de projets culturels développée dans l’Académie de Normandie. Les ressources proposées par M. Locoge visent à initier l’exploration de nouveaux thèmes culturels au sein des classes grâce à l’utilisation de nouveaux documents, la variété des thématiques abordées permettant en effet d’enrichir la compétence culturelle des élèves.

Pour aller plus loin :

https://nathanhill.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Hill_(writer)
https://www.armitiere.com/rencontres/