Public Enemies (29 page)

That is the underlying logic.

Words or things? I can’t even understand how the question can be formulated.

Literature or life? Life because of literature; for me life
does not “live,” it is not profoundly and carnally life unless I know that I can snatch words from it.

At the risk of imprisoning it? At the risk of locking it up in those little paper coffins of which Sartre said at the end of his life in his interview with Madeleine Chapsal that they were the real subject of his
Critique de la raison dialectique
? It’s certainly not that. It’s exactly the opposite. I can think of nothing more antifunereal than words well used. By contrast with Sartre, who confused putting into words with placing in a coffin, I can imagine no happier place to stay in life than in a page of literature.

Moreover, I must tell you that in my humble opinion this is precisely why Baudelaire will always be more admirable than Rimbaud:
life is elsewhere
. What a mistake to think that real life is elsewhere! What unforgivable madness when, without leaving Charleville, he was this wonderful poet, to set off for Harrar to plumb language and give expression to its ever more dizzying depths. A season in hell? Why only one season? How I love, by comparison, Baudelaire’s exultation of literature, spewed out up to his last cry, of “For God’s sake, no!”

When I think about it, this was also the belief of the rabbis who stated that it was words that gave worlds their substance.

And I must say that when I’m down, when I feel like a real prick, when I’m ashamed of all the tricks and reminders I need to make sure I don’t forget the Darfuris or the Afghans, I can tell myself that at least I’m faithful to the great and lofty lesson of those sages.

There is no life outside of words; that’s the basis of their doctrine.

In order for there to be life, you have to get the right sparks from the white-hot stone of words—that’s the heart of the Talmud.

The true logic of living, its real constitutive element, is not the cell, DNA, and so on, it’s the pale tissue of the signifier, the fine intrigue of words that is the root of my literary neurosis as well.

I believe.

Of course, if we take this route we must take it all the way to the end.

And if we say that words are living, that they are more alive than living beings, that they are life par excellence, that we are really alive only in proportion to the quantity of words we’ve ingested, we can’t stop halfway. What is inherent to living beings is that they die. We must accept the idea that words, like all living beings, and indeed even more so than ordinary living beings, are earmarked for death, one of their intrinsic properties being that, sooner or later, they are destined to perish.

How soon? How late?

And for these living beings that are words, what is the specific system of their mortality?

And there you have it—the difference between good and bad books. For someone who is interested, as both of us are, in the machinery of literature, its abysses, its chaos, and the complex of forces that allows it not to implode, the only question that needs to be asked about any writer is what is alive in their writing and what is dead. In a given text, which are the words that are already dead, those that have one foot in the grave, those that are alive still but for how long? Which are the phantom words, the ghosts?

The answer is clear.

It can be seen with the naked eye. Your ear will detect it. There’s no need to be a great critic. Or rather, to be more precise, that is the principle of all criticism worthy of the name.

In the great writers, the ones that practically discourage us
from writing in their wake, almost everything is alive. For a long time, a very long time after the words were written, the power of the drama that took shape through them lives on.

In the bad ones everything is dead. The ink is barely dry and already the words it formed are disappearing. These are books without a footprint, books that leave no traces. It is sometimes said, and you said it yourself about the false books that have been written about you, that they are so bad that they dirty your hands. But it’s not that, it’s not even that, since the sign of their poverty is that they leave no trace at all.

In the in-between, uncertain ones, the minor or second-tier writers, or in those books by great writers that half failed or half succeeded, death and life mingle; there are areas that stand up and others that fall flat. In the same chapter, the same page, sometimes even the same sentence, you can find a mix of living flesh and dead meat, burning coals and embers, a part that still shines and a part that has faded, the sparkle of literary matter versus the black hole of words that have self-destructed.

Carry out the test.

Carry out this test of “living” or “dead” on the books you love and those you hate.

Do it with your own books, when you’re in doubt.

I do it sometimes. It’s the only test that doesn’t let you down—you’ll see.

As it happens, dear Bernard-Henri, just before your letter arrived I received an invitation from Matthias Vincenot, who organizes a poetry festival every August in Corrèze; and I almost accepted. I felt a distressing yearning, a brief, pathetic illusion, as though I could go back to the years of my youth when I was known as a poet, and only a poet and only by those interested in poetry in this country. To know again these modest little events, organized by some local council, with the support of some departmental council or a local branch of the Crédit Agricole. To go back to the days when, actually, I was happy.

But of course you understand the difficulties. My notoriety would make the situation awkward not only for me, but also for the other participants and for the whole event. Joys like this are forbidden to me now. And there is another thing, something that is perhaps worse; it is difficult for me to imagine taking part in a public reading in France now. For a long time, I avoided paranoia, in particular, I think because I read Rousseau’s
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
when I was very young and was terrified by the growing madness one can feel worsening page by page; I swore to myself that I would never fall prey to it. Today, I have to face the fact that I have not
come through completely unscathed. I recognize the symptoms, the tachycardia, the mind racing, the mental block.

Of course, I’ve got my reasons; if anyone in France right now has the right to be paranoid, it’s me.

Rousseau had his reasons too.

When you say this kind of thing, at best, people give you a knowing, mocking look. I remember the interviews with Kurt Cobain where he said he was happiest when he and the band could tour in their camper van playing small venues without attracting the attention of a single journalist. People say, what, you’re rich and famous now, what the fuck are you complaining about? It usually isn’t long before they start accusing you of
biting the hand that feeds
. Usually you have to put a bullet in your head before they realize you were serious.

So you see, Bernard-Henri, the extent to which it resonates with me when you talk about “local, tiny fame”; because I had that kind of fame; for years, that was my life. The sort of fame where you are read and recognized by your peers and almost no one else.

Not only have I experienced that fame, it still exists. A few months ago I received an anthology of French poetry that Jean Orizet
^*
compiled for Larousse. In the biographical note he writes about me he mentions, almost in passing, that aside from poetry I have published a number of novels that sparked a lively controversy.

Please understand, Bernard-Henri, this is not some affectation, some pose. In Jean Orizet’s universe things other
than poetry do exist, but their existence is tangibly less important.

Another time, I ran into Lionel Ray.
^*
I’d just been buying personal hygiene products at Italie 2 shopping center. We talked a bit about health, he was worried about some things, had some tests he had to have. He also told me that he had just retired (he worked as a teacher at the Lycée Chaptal). Otherwise, he asked me what I was doing; I told him I was working on a film. He found this funny, entertaining; he already knew I had written a number of novels. But still, he remarked, it had been a while since I’d published a book of poems. The reproach was subtle but real; in his view, it was time I
got back to serious things
.

And William Cliff,
^†
whom I ran into on a train from Paris to Brussels, had much the same reaction. After a little small talk, he launched into a discussion of Villon and on my use—rather too free in his opinion—of the alexandrine.

It is extraordinary, and I find it terribly moving, that such people exist. I feel like saying—actually, I don’t feel like saying it at all, but I almost feel obliged to say—that such people
still
exist. People with a system of values so distant, so incommensurable with that of their contemporaries.

How long will they go on existing? Oh, I don’t doubt that Gallimard is conscious to some extent of its cultural responsibilities; I’m sure the company will make it a point of honor to publish its old poets until the day they die; but I doubt they will put much energy into looking for their successors.

Besides, it would be unfair to
cast the first stone
at publishers; when was the last time I saw a poetry section in a bookshop?

And what can the bookshops do, if there are no readers? Maybe we live in a world (this was Ghérasim Luca’s
^*
conclusion just before he committed suicide) where poetry simply has no place anymore.

And so something precious is disappearing, disappearing before our very eyes. I can attest to it, I have watched it fade away in my lifetime, even during my modest career as a writer, I have seen the poetry sections in the bookshops get smaller, seen the poetry collections gutter out.

I have also seen the annual, Soviet-style displays of enthusiasm by those in charge; congratulating each other on the incredible success of “
le
Printemps des Poètes,
”
^†
on the extraordinary and growing appetite of the public for poetry, oh, it makes me tired just talking about it.

In
l’Auteur
, Vincent Ravalec
^‡
is viciously funny about the years he spent on another parallel circuit that is culturally subsidized and almost as pathetic as that of poetry: the world of the
short story
.

Before coming to the
true business
of writing novels (in 1994, he with
Cantique de la racaille
, I with
Whatever
), both of us had published (he, short stories by Les Éditions Le
Dilettante; I, poetry with Les Éditions de la Différence). Like him, I experienced those improbable cultural encounters where the cultural attaché from the local council wonders aloud whether the
côte de veau
is included in the
prix-fixe
, where you’re never really sure where you’ll be staying (he was once put up in an old people’s home, I in a disused caravan).

There is, however, a difference—minor but crucial—which means that if I had to recount my years on the
parallel circuit
, my story would be less funny, and less scathing, than his. Publishers consider the short story writer to be immature and lazy; I mean, after all, these little stories have characters, they have plots. What’s stopping the writer from doing the same thing on a bigger scale in a novel (which, at least, might find a readership)? Whereas the poet is considered to be an utterly irresponsible misfit; or, more straightforwardly, is not considered at all.

This is why poets, who are
out of the squad completely
in any case, have warmer relationships with one another than short story writers, who are
sitting on the bench
.

And this colors the entirety of their relationships.

Now I am
in the game
, to say the least; I’m desperately looking for a way to get
out
(while continuing, to some small extent, to be in).

Because it requires something to remain in touch with poetry, a certain innocence. Technically speaking, that’s all it requires. There is a very beautiful word to designate a man who has discovered treasure; it is the word
inventeur
. Whether he stumbled on it by chance while lost in the forest or after fifteen years poring over old maps dating back to the
conquistadores
doesn’t matter. And this is exactly the same
thing you feel when you write a poem: it doesn’t matter whether you’ve spent two years or fifteen minutes writing it. It is as though—and I know this sounds irrational—it is as though the poem already existed, has existed for all eternity, and that all you have done is
discover it
. Once it has been discovered, you stand at a certain distance. You have loosed it from the earth where it lay buried, dusted it off, and it shines, for all to see, a gleam of unpolished gold.

A novel is something very different; it entails a lot of grease and sweat; it requires a ridiculous amount of work to hold everything more or less together, tightening the wheel-nuts, stopping it from running off the road; it is, when all’s said and done, a piece of
machinery
.

I don’t disown my novels, I’m very fond of my novels, but it’s not quite the same thing; and with my head on the block I would argue (against Kundera, against Lakis Proguidis and all my friends, against all those who supported me when times were hard) that the novel (even in the hands of Dostoyevsky, of Balzac, of Proust), in comparison to the poem, remains a
minor genre
.