Public Enemies (27 page)

With my mother’s book, it’s a very different matter. In this case, none of my readers think I should “
rise above it
”; they all realize that what has happened is serious.

I realize, and this is very strange, that I still cannot bring myself to hate my mother. Perhaps it is difficult to hate one’s mother regardless of the circumstances; perhaps one always feels that in doing so one is hating oneself, disowning oneself. Right now, I feel a sort of numbness, a stiffness; I feel terribly sad and demoralized, but, even now, no hatred. I feel as though I’ve been bitten by a poisonous spider and am waiting for the moment when I will be devoured. I hold my mother no more responsible than the spider, left to her own devices, in accordance with her nature; she cannot help but bite and inject her venom.

More than anything, there is something that I had never felt, and that is
shame
. Ashamed of my mother, ashamed to be her son, ashamed to be myself. Nietzsche had some powerful, beautiful words to say on the subject. (“
Whom do you call bad?
He who always wants to put people to shame,” etc.)
^*
The thing is, Nietzsche was a good writer, a very good writer, but maybe not quite good enough, and what I most remember, what first comes to mind when I think of shame, is Kafka. I rarely mention Kafka when I talk about my first great literary emotions, although I read him when I was sixteen, the same age as I read Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, whom I mention all the time. But in those writers (and even in Pascal), there was what Lautréamont called a “positive electricity”; you wanted to talk about them, to talk to them. Kafka is different; very close to what I’m
feeling right now—a numbness, a stiffness, a cold, physical sensation. I remember the first thing I read was
The Metamorphosis and Other Texts
(published by Livre de Poche) and straight afterward
The Trial
(published by Folio). The last sentence of
The Trial
, immediately after Joseph K. has been caught and stabbed by the two killers: “…  it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.”

There has been something in my literature, from the first, that goes hand in glove with shame. To be honest, when I published my first books, I expected to bring a certain shame on myself (even though, as I said before, I’ve always
hated putting myself forward
). What actually happened, and it was a wonderful surprise, was that readers came up to me and said, “Not at all, what you describe are human things, some true of human beings in general, others specific to human beings in modern Western societies … In fact, we are grateful to you for having the courage to expose them, for having shouldered that part of shame …”

This, I think, is what some people couldn’t stand, why they constantly try to portray my books as being not the expression of a general human truth but the product of a personal trauma; and in a bitter war like that, the
biography
, the crude, stupid
biography
, is unquestionably the most effective weapon; the conflict having reached, in recent weeks, its highest point. The simplistic approach, effective by reason of its very brutality, of reducing all literature to
evidence
; all this was predicted, long before Nietzsche, by Tocqueville.

Because in our societies, it is important for people to feel ashamed of themselves; it may even be the case that shame
has become the fundamental tool for taming people. You were complaining in an earlier letter, dear Bernard-Henri, of being thought of as having
no sense of humor
; this may be your rarest quality. What is humor, after all, but shame at having felt a genuine emotion? It is a sort of tour de force, a slave’s elegant pirouette when faced with a situation that under normal circumstances would evoke despair or rage. So, yes, it’s hardly surprising that these days humor is rated very highly.

But I’m preaching to the converted. I said earlier that I “don’t believe in Jews.” Well, in general terms, that’s true, but there are certain things … Because unquestionably, long before anyone else, Jews developed the sense of humor that, sadly, makes it possible for them to endure almost anything. And it is a fundamental change, and a real joy, to see
Israel fighting
these days.

Am I in the process of contradicting everything I’ve told you since the start of our letters? Am I saying that, in the end, I would rather fight? No, not exactly. What I mean is that, up until now, in my life, the refusal to fight (or sometimes flight) was the result of a
choice
. I chose to go to trial rather than make the “public apologies” the Muslim organizations would have been happy with. On the other hand, I chose to ignore Demonpion. I chose not to retaliate but simply to break off all relations when any newspaper or magazine published the sort of details about my life that normally would be made public only if a man were on trial for a serious crime (and even then, many trials are heard in camera).

Now, for the first time in my life, with my mother’s book, I feel as though I no longer have a choice. No more choice than a man stumbling into quicksand who knows that any movement he makes, by stirring up the mud, can only hasten his entombment.

Dear Michel, how about if we stop with the mud, hatred, whipping boys, slander?

We’ve said it all.

Naturally, we haven’t said everything about this thing with your mother.

Or about this question of Islamic-leftism, this new great alliance between new Reds and new Browns, of the axis that runs from those cretins at
Le Monde diplo
[
matique
] to the death squads of the jihad variety. I also believe we’ve seen only the start of it (where we disagree is about Islam itself, which I always take care to distinguish from Islamism, not out of prudence naturally or any concern for what’s politically correct but because I believe sincerely that Islam as such is not at all alien to the spirit of enlightenment, democracy, and freedoms).

But as regards the rest, your enemies, mine, their shared interests, this secret of the times that will begin to unravel when we begin to understand their unspeakable alliance, the reasons that make writers more hated than anyone else, I really believe that we’ve said everything there is to be said about those pawns, those paid biographers who are quite stupid, writers of poison-pen letters, snitches, vultures attacking living flesh, total nonentities.

I’m only going to say one more thing about it. I don’t get too upset, I never reply to those people, and I would suggest that you do the same. The reason why—apart from the whole question of negative emotions, having to bother with strategies and replies, apart from Spinoza and Hobbes—is that they’re just not worth it.

On the other hand, there were two things in your letter that led me to what are also probably useless reflections, but no matter …

First, your narrative of your beginnings: your lack of desire, you say, to be the center of attention; this essential timidity that made the young Houellebecq the man least prepared for “playing a public role”; in a word, this misunderstanding that was the beginning of it all.

I was also struck by what, a little earlier, you called the “strengths” that hold or fail to hold your texts together, your problems of “steering” and “braking,” your conception of literature as a variant not of bullfighting but cycling, and what this reveals about your way of working and your passion for writing.

The first point interests me because, even though this may seem even more surprising in my case than in yours, I was not at all prepared to become what I am either.

I’m not saying that I found it hard to play my role of “author” once I’d stumbled into it.

Or that in my childhood and adolescence I had that shy, unassuming nature, perhaps solitary, certainly fleeing from the footlights, that I sense behind your description.

But what’s clear is that I was perfectly happy with my local fame, local and tiny, in my classes and in the small groups and cliques that I moved in.

I’m equally certain that when I imagined my future, when, like all young people, I dreamed about my future, I saw adventures, combat, perhaps great books, and through all this a sort of luster, but a rare, local luster that would never take the form of that celebrity that has become my lot and yours.

At the École Normale there were boys who dreamed of becoming ministers or, like a former pupil, Georges Pompidou, presidents of the Republic.

There were some who saw themselves as and wanted to be “great writers” in the style of other former alumni, who had hung around the École Normale for years and who were now enjoying the fullness of their glory, like Sartre or Raymond Aron.

There were some, like my namesake Benny Lévy, who were shooting ahead and were already living in the moment, like the reincarnation of Lenin haranguing the Soviet people.

I wasn’t of the same disposition as any of them.

I don’t remember ever being tempted in May ’68, for example, to take the floor at a general assembly.

Nor—indeed still less—do I remember ever going to dream about my destiny in front of the columns of the Pantheon, the way Jules Romain’s pupils of the École Normale did.

In fact, what I remember is quite the opposite. On the first day back to school in 1966, a classmate held forth to a gathering that had formed in the covered-in hall where the pupils of the two first-year and two second-year classes in the preparatory section for the École Normale’s arts course met between classes. He gave two juxtaposed portraits, favoring the former, of that alumnus Pompidou, who had been enrolled at the École for so many years, and his obscure fellow pupil, the Latinist Pierre Grimal. I see myself without the shadow of a doubt adding my voice to the protests against this boy who was foolish enough to think of comparing the failed life of a
future president, seen on television every night, with the great life, eminently desirable and wonderful, of a translator of Seneca the Younger, Plautus, or Terence and whom we met only in the reading room of the École Normale.

If I had a yearning, it was not for any of those great destinies under the stage lights that the École might prepare you for.

When I think of the people I admired and dreamed of one day resembling, I wanted to be like that specialist on Plautus and Terence, or to be a philosophy professor who, like Jean Hyppolite, had translated the
Phenomenology of Spirit
, or even—sticking with the great Hegelian plotters, the mysterious Alexandre Kojève, about whom a few of us, just a few, were aware that he was master of our masters. There was also Louis Althusser, hidden away like the Minotaur in his office on the École’s ground floor, who was the greatest saint of Marxist modernity. And in a quite different vein, there was a playboy, quite unknown really, named Paul Albou—I’d read once that he was Brigitte Bardot’s secret lover and had been mad with jealousy.

To use your word, I didn’t believe that it was possible to “subjugate” more than a few people at a time.

I believed that influence, like concepts, lost in comprehension what it gained in extension, that it lost in intensity, incandescence, and power what it appeared to win by being exercised over a large number of people.

I liked to seduce and indeed spent a crazy amount of time at it but I too believed that the natural place for seduction, its correct wavelength, its source, was not light but shadow.

And I’ll say it again—if I’d had to choose between the life that has become mine and that of some clandestine head of a proletarian left-wing movement uniting those who—whoever they were—would have been the undeniable “aristocracy”
of the time, I would have chosen the life of the clandestine head.

So those are the facts.

They can say what they like, but those are the facts.

When I wrote what for me was my
Lovecraft, Les Indes rouges
, I decided to give it to François Maspero, who was certainly the appointed editor of that far-left to which I was close ideologically, and whose anti-TV, antimedia, anti-show-off stance in particular seemed to correspond to the ideas I had about thought and its influence.

When, four years later, I handed in my
Barbarism with a Human Face
, whose success I’m sure you know all about, there are two other facts that say a lot about my state of mind. First, I wrote it out of love for a woman I’d taken away from a cinema producer and who, I feared, would be bored in this literary world I was plunging her into without any notice. That gangster Jean-Edern Hallier had the fortunate notion of employing her in his publishing house on the express condition that I should at the end of each month give him a new chapter of the philosophy book he would get a chance to gamble on before anyone else. Then, when I had written it, Hallier went bust and when I approached Grasset to get him to take on my poor book, abandoned by the wayside, I found it perfectly normal that he should begin by turning it down and then publish it unwillingly, just to keep me happy, with the ridiculously low circulation of 2,700 copies—this can be verified from the publisher’s archives.