« La phrase magique »

« La phrase magique » is Éric Reinhardt’s name for writing at its most inspired: a sentence that bears the force and apparent inevitability of genuine creation. In a letter to Bénédicte Ombredanne, he describes the loss of that enchantment as a crisis in his identity as a writer, and the making of a 500-page novel as both an effort to recover it and a passage toward renewal.

The Lost Enchantment

Reinhardt tells Bénédicte that for a long time he has not written a magical sentence. He believes he has become absent to writing’s spells, left with a merely surface-level relationship to the work: one of will, effort, tools, contour, and form. The contrast is not between writing and idleness but between two modes of writing—one that feels like skilled construction, and another that carries an almost inexplicable grace.

He makes that estrangement bodily through an image of seeing bodies through the window of a peep show without being able to touch them. The comparison gives his crisis the character of frustrated proximity: writing remains visible and available as an object of work, but its former intimacy and power have withdrawn. He says that he spent weeks weeping in his office while the new book matured, afraid day after day and month after month that he had lost himself as a writer for good.

A Novel as Attempt

The completed novel becomes, in his account, an attempt to undo that defeat. Across five hundred pages, he has repeatedly tried, day after day, to make one magical sentence and recover the grace of his previous book. The scale of the undertaking sharpens the paradox: a vast work is organized around the hoped-for arrival of a single sentence, while the desired effect cannot be guaranteed by duration, labor, or technique.

The letter’s surrounding circumstances emphasize how personally exposed this confession is. In April 2011, after a year of silence, Reinhardt writes to Bénédicte to ask how she is and tell her that he has finished a substantial novel. He jokes that, unlike the dart they had discussed in spring 2008, this book might pulverize a reader’s rib cage; beneath the joke, he admits that he fears it has not reached the level of its predecessor. He says he will send it to her after it leaves the printer, with a discreetly coded dedication so as not to arouse her husband’s suspicions. His account of the magical sentence is thus offered as a private confidence to someone he regards as uniquely able to know what the book and its making have cost him.

The Tomb and the New Beginning

Reinhardt ultimately describes the novel as a monumental tomb, built of cut stone: a tomb for the self he had been during two and a half years of doubt. The image turns the desired sentence into more than a stylistic achievement. Its absence has threatened his sense of himself; the book records that period of threatened loss, even as its completion allows him to imagine surviving it. He allows that others may find the novel magnificent, but that external praise does not erase the private struggle its pages contain.

The tomb image also makes room for a beginning. Reinhardt suggests that passing through this book of marble may have been necessary to be reborn as himself. Although he still likes the novel, he says that this is not the central point: he now feels ready for a new start. The phrase therefore marks both a lost creative grace and the possibility of returning to it. It does not certify that the new novel has recovered the earlier book’s magic; it names the longing that shaped the attempt, and the threshold Reinhardt believes he has crossed by completing it.