L'eau rouge de Pascale Roze : Laurence Bertilleux et la honte du colon

During the Rencontres de Shangai in autumn 2008, Pascale Roze gave some explanation about the relations her writing keeps with History. First, she considered History as a tool to display the uniqueness of a character; in 2006, with the publication of L'eau rouge, the process was reversed. Henceforth, the author felt that she had to give precedence to the historical events, but in a very different position of historian's one: while this one stays away from his own analysis as trying however to give a coherence to sometimes scattered events, the novelist uses her creation as a way to investigate and to understand the world. L'eau rouge is the novel which illustrates excellently this way of proceeding: first, by holding a very meticulous inquiry, then by letting her memory work, because Pascale Roze says pertinently, "it's this memory which allows to write the novel, but not the consultation of the notes." By this way, the work of fiction is paradoxically an interpretation both faithful to the real and heavily influenced by the novelist's subjectivity, whose writing work consists in an absorption of "the outside" to transfigure it with her "inside" emotions. I intend to show how Laurence Bertilleux character is by herself a pointer to dominating relations that colonists kept with the natives in Indochina.