The Brooklyn Rail

It is rare to meet a writer whose work is so striking that nothing can be edited, nothing can be changed, for the vision is so precise. When this writer is twenty eight years old, it is even more striking. Then, you see them develop, embark on new adventures, expand their vision, participate in their medium, and you are always more struck. That is the case with Théo Casciani. After releasing Rétine, his début novel, with the cult publishing house POL in 2019, he has been writing Model, which is to come out in 2025. The way leading to this architectural novel is paved by twelve readings, an unprecedented experience of constructing and deconstructing the book at the same time, opening-up spaces for literature in the very heart of the now. I wanted him to share more of his vision. Here is the work in progress.

This interview was made by phone, between Paris and Brussels, in March 2024. It was translated from the French by Gabriel Franjou and condensed for clarity.

Donatien Grau (Rail): Let’s start by saying that the book you are writing is a novel, a classical form that is sometimes said to be outdated. But you’ve chosen to link it to a series of readings that offer a brand-new literary apparatus. You are occupying a traditional field, and at the same time inventing a new way of disseminating it.

Théo Casciani: The novel is a good place to start. When I was writing my first book, Rétine, I wasn’t sure how to classify it; perhaps classifying it even worried me. Until the day when my editor, Frédéric Boyer, simply told me that it was indeed a novel. What I used to fear actually liberated me. Now that I know that it is novels that I write, I can reflect on the current state of the form and attempt to revitalize it. Though it is sometimes seen as old-fashioned, I think it’s mostly our use of it that is archaic. I’m convinced however that its potential has a place in the contemporary: novel allows to create the other time and space we need to imagine another world.

Rail: How do these readings fit into the challenge you’ve given yourself?

Casciani: The novel is a place of hybridization, of enlargement, of overflow. The desire to connect it to other mediums came naturally, by having a series of readings escort the long, solitary writing period of this book, divided into as many episodes as there are chapters in the manuscript. The idea was to find inspiration in a variety of gazes and sensibilities while I can still update the text, as well as to progressively install the fiction’s atmosphere. The book will be the end result, but the cycle of readings ended up becoming something of its own, a work in and of itself.

Rail: Were you immediately aware of the scope of this project? 

Casciani: Not at all, truth be told. I have to admit that the process started with a certain simplicity. It was more intuition than concept. It just so happens that I don’t only hang out with writers and I wanted to allow myself to do what everyone around me does. You of all people should know that it is increasingly rare today for designers, artists or who knows what else, to stay confined in their field; coming into contact with satellite spheres is precisely what feeds the core of their activity. When I listen to the music of Grimes, when I watch the films of Jonathan Glazer or the work of Forensic Architecture, I feel we authors are lagging behind.

Rail: And yet, step by step, the project ended up taking such a scale that it reached a tipping point.

Casciani: Yes, the plan was precise from the outset, we had quite an elaborate roadmap, but it’s only once the episodes started following one another that the project’s ambition became clear. There was a first one, LICHEN, in Marseille, among friends, a second with VERSION, a film I co-directed with Lou Rambert Preiss and that was shown simultaneously in thirty locations around the world, and then a third, VISA, a radio play recorded in London, at Reference.Point, and broadcast on Montez Press Radio. And along the way, it’s people outside the project that started telling me that something special was happening. I wanted to tell the story of this project, because through both our success and our failures, I believe we’ve taken the risk of trying something unheard of in the field of literature.

Rail: You speak of wanting to open up literature, but to me it mostly seems like an exercise in proliferation both in your writing and in the way you conducted this series of readings, alongside people, places and formats that don’t have much to do with each other.

Casciani: I’m afraid that literature is, again, running the risk of being confined. It’s as if Proust still hasn’t prevailed over Sainte-Beuve: many cling to the affirmation of a subject, a persona, or an identity. I’ve noticed a trend that asks of books that they remain in their place, and I feel claustrophobic. I’m scared of everything that turns literature into a fall-back point. And I’m not alone. I don’t want much credit because there are so many who tried to push the door that this cycle of readings is apparently opening. A scene exists, and when I teach at La Cambre, in Brussels, I notice that many young writers share a need for some fresh air.

Rail: Speaking in practical terms, this drives you to collaborate with artists and practitioners working in fields supposedly very different from what we call the “literary world.”

Casciani: Yes, and a good example would be the reading we worked on together when you invited me to the Louvre and I created a simulation, HYSTERIA, in collaboration with Marina Herlop, Aurore Clément, Michèle Lamy and McKenzie Wark, among others. I never believed myself to be anything more than what I am: an author, a writer, a novelist, who invent a story and try to tell it one way or another. In total, if my math is right, more than a hundred and fifty people have already contributed to the series. Nothing pleases me more than witnessing the text become a rallying point, both a platform and a network.

Rail: The method of these readings is both conceptual and social: you are published by P.O.L, a house that has been building up a prestigious catalog for forty years, but you’re aware of how far these circles are from other areas of contemporary creation. Worse, you feel creatively isolated in an era where forms tend to blend more and more. These readings speak to a desire to reconnect, on both human and theoretical levels.

Casciani: Looking back, I think publishing my first book made me a little melancholic. I was told that it has had some success, but mostly it made very clear what my limits as an author would be if I simply went down the usual path. When I was lauded for my youth, I couldn’t help but dread the boredom of being destined to do the same thing again and again for decades.

Rail: Do you mean that there is a form of fatalism in literature’s current relationship to its public?

Casciani: Of course. I get so tired of the judgments pretending no one is reading anymore, not only because they’re incorrect, but also because they’re lazy. We hear that our era is more interested in TikTok than in The Charterhouse of Parma, which is understandable, without ever wondering if Stendhal would have quietly resigned himself in this situation. The problem always comes from reception, but never from the authors, the editors, or the bookstores. It should be said that the model we’re told is timeless actually only exists, so to speak, since it stopped working.

Rail: What other moments in literary history are reference points for you?

Casciani: If I’m to take an example I might mention the nineteenth century, when the form of the novel was way more vigorous, perhaps even dominant. Well, if I correctly understood what I was taught in school, it was also a time when the novel was significantly more connected to other artistic and social fields than it is today. My project aims to update some of the tools from the time when the novel was going strong.

Rail: In which ways are you inspired by this period?

Casciani: The main reference is the feuilleton. Even when it’s a karaoke in Kyoto or a commercial in Charles de Gaulle airport rather than publishing booklets of the manuscript week after week in a newspaper, the intention is the same: to partition the writing of the novel and spread it to other audiences. I want the book’s melody to be heard before it arrives. It’s the publication logic that Balzac chose for his Human Comedy, Maupassant for A Life or Dumas for Queen Margot, not to mention Dickens and Dostoyevsky abroad. It also inspired the television series and video game franchises, and you don’t hear them complaining nowadays.

Rail: These last couple of years have seen a trend of off-book literature of which, perhaps unwillingly, you are one of the figureheads, and it could be said that your readings contribute to this movement. But to me, it feels like you’re providing an exhaustive overview of late modern and contemporary forms, which you interpret one after the other, so much so that these readings, like the novel itself, exhibit an almost totalizing aspect.

Casciani: Yes, but reluctantly. I have nothing against the trend you describe, but I find that all the forms that fit into it end up looking similar: someone is reading into a microphone. There are more possibilities. My curiosity is probably what defines me best. I’m hostile to systems of value between forms as they quickly turn into cultural hierarchies. As you can imagine, the literary field doesn’t respect having one of my texts read by influencers in Dubai as much as writing the libretto for a play at Théâtre de Chaillot. I’m interested in that gap, and I’m not against a little provocation. Choosing the formats of these readings was done by instinct, always keeping in mind the coherence between the chapter being read and the medium, as well as the desire to explore areas that raise important narrative questions. The totalizing aspect that you mention wasn’t planned, but when I look back at what we’ve done, I guess I plead guilty.

Rail: It is plain to see that there are two sides to this project: on one hand, we have the hubris of Théo Casciani, master and demiurge of this cosmogony, and on the other, the space for a collaboration between a text and people who feed, inform and transform your vision. How do these two dimensions communicate?

Casciani: Let’s go back to the novel: when I talk about my inspirations, from Virgil to J.G. Ballard via Constance DeJong and G.K. Chesterton, I realize it’s always about wide-frame literature, universes. People aren’t collaborating with me, but with the text. I felt it when two actors, Marc Susini and Félix Maritaud, took possession of a chapter in the Château d’If, off the coast of Marseille, for OPERA. I don’t want my guest to be reduced to a decorative role. I am the author of a world, complete with ambiances and situations, that people are free to inhabit. It’s a portal.

Rail: To what extent did the program follow your initial idea and whether it took advantage of outside invitations?

Casciani: The financial support we received allowed us to not depend on institutions to unfold the story as we planned. And in the cases where we did indeed honor an invitation, it was less out of need than because they fit into our equation: we’d been trying in vain to organize a group show in a data center, DEFINITION, and we finally had the opportunity to set it up at FRAC, in Nantes; while I was thinking about turning the TACTIQUE chapter into a lecture about Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist invited me to the Engadin Art Talks at Lafayette Anticipations, one of his buildings, as if destiny had led us to what we had envisioned months earlier.

Rail: Probably because this project is about the method and the system.

Casciani: Yes, indeed. The collaboration with Simon de Dreuille, who is an architect and thus considerably more aware of context than a novelist who might think he’s in his world, brought a methodology to an otherwise very systematic endeavor. With the creative support of SISSI (Elise Poitevin and Anne Vimeux), we’ve been speaking since 2021 about the tempo of this series, constantly adjusting our initial agenda to match the constraints of production, to face our fear of routine, and to satisfy our need of remaining agile and uncompromising to keep surprising people.

Rail: This method is something you would see in other cultural industries, but it is extremely rare in the literary field.

Casciani: Yes, and I’m proud of it. I am always credited as the author, which is to say that I give the direction and that I sign off, but I’ve been accompanied since the time when many people thought I was running myself into the ground by doing what many people now want to do as well. I like the idea of propelling a vision and inviting a group of inspiring collaborators to implement it with me. Writing becomes a collective activity.

Rail: There’s something a little strange, perhaps even a little out of time, in seeing a young writer with such faith that you made writing your job, going through with something as ambitious as accompanying a long novel by such a series of readings and going against French literary tradition, in that you seem to position your work in a wider cultural scene.

Casciani: Once again, just because literature is trying hard to commit suicide doesn’t mean that its weapons are useless. Recently, I worked on a dance piece by choreographer Damien Jalet and on a film project with director Albert Moya and musician Arca: even if it’s natural to me, I am always asked what the hell I am doing there. I know that it is a little unusual and intriguing. Some people who come to see the readings will never read the book and some people who will read the book won’t have seen a single episode. And that’s fine. It’s not a problem for me to be too much of a writer for the art world and too much of an artist for the literary world. However, I want to make sure that I am understood. Refusing an out-of-date system has its share of risks. I sometimes hear that my work is against the book: it’s the opposite. I’ve decided to fight for this gesture because I know that it creates a breach for many people, it opens the game.

Rail: Since this project revolves around you, that people identify and attribute it to you, I wonder about your personal position: in some readings you are here, like a character, and in others you disappear completely, hidden backstage, like a conductor. In you we find both the little boy who grew up in a small town without ever really finding his place, and the person he became a decade later, arbiter of elegance between Brussels, Marseille, Paris and London. How does this to-and-fro work, between an openness and a recentering around something that feels very intimate?

Casciani: I’m allowing myself to be more and more shameless, especially since I understood that I have fiction on my side. All I do is tell stories. I can only reach the intimate through navigating between all my versions; a fag from the south of France, a boy drowned in the cult of devices, a student at a school for world leaders or an emo writer looking for control. Perhaps this is what Lauren Berlant meant when coining “genres for life” or a driving principle of New Narrative as defined by Robert Glück and Bruce Boone. This might sound a little bombastic, but even though I’m still only just starting out, what I enjoy the most in life is feeling connected.

Rail: You embody another permanent tension, between a more classical character, fed by all that is timeless or “untimely,” to quote Nietzsche, and a fascination for the rawest form of the contemporary, the virtual, the flux.

Casciani: I believe in fiction’s power to contaminate reality. The questions raised by the novel, such as the way stories are crafted and environment formed, are timelier than ever, whether they are embodied in a book, become the script of a movie or a prompt for an AI. It’s something we often see nowadays in the hands of the financial masterminds, of political activists or tech leaders. It seems the very least for a novelist to not let that power slip between my fingers. It’s clear that my work has something to do with the future, whether it’s anticipation or science-fiction. I am just a romantic who thinks that the contemporary deserves its own mythology. As a reader of accelerationist and speculative materialism theories, I am convinced that literature should work alongside technology to create stories where fiction becomes the form rather than the tool. I like to find a slice of eternity in the present, to be everywhere at once but not to belong anywhere.

Rail: And finally, I would like to know how you envision the future, what will come after these readings once they are through.

Casciani: First will come the time for the book itself, alone. Then a third novel will be published soon afterwards, because it’s already written, once again to go against expectations. I don’t know what will happen then, but I’m sure it’ll be new. I guess people will keep on asking me what it means to be a novelist today, and I guess I’ll keep searching for ways to answer.