ARGENT AND VALUE

Argent (‘Money’, 2018) by the poet Christophe Hanna is a book somewhere between a sociological report and a work of ‘poetry’. The book's formal strategy is based on an econometric which divides the French population into ‘tranches’ of net monthly income (as French income is normally quantified). Each chapter corresponds to one of twenty €200 income brackets. The book recounts Hanna's discussions on the subject of money with one hundred (real) individuals, each individual corresponding to a percentile of income distribution and identified only by their forename followed immediately by the figure corresponding to their net monthly income. Thus, for example, Charlotte433 is an intern or stagiaire in a publishing house, Julien1042 is the performance poet Julien Blaine, Nathalie2400 is the writer Nathalie Quintane and Anne-James2500 is the poet Anne-James Chaton. Hanna's process is to ask people he meets – most often writers and poets – about their financial situation, sources of income and their experience of money. This allows him to insist on the real-world conditions of literature: that is, not simply with the cost of material reproduction of poets, but with the economic conditions of the possibility of literary works. The book gives real insight into the economic conditions of the publishers he is involved with (Al Dante, Éditions Amsterdam, P.O.L, Questions Théoriques). Hanna also foregrounds the conditions of the writing of his book, recounting how he obtained the interviews, describing his use of a dictaphone and how he takes the pictures that appear in the margins of his text. Hanna inquires not simply about literary works, but all that escapes a quantitative measure of value: how much, for example, does a love affair cost? ‘On ne sait pas vraiment ce qu’on doit comptabiliser’ (‘We don't really know what to count’). Some of those with whom he speaks believe that there is a more or less direct connection between the value of their work and their income, whereas for others the relationship is aleatory or even inverse. Some interviewed feel there is little meaning or dignity to their work. Many of those interviewed by Hanna are those fellow travellers identified by Nathalie Wourm as constituting a loose network of contemporary French writers sometimes inspired by the notions of deconstruction and deterritorialisation.