Public Enemies (30 page)

(I realize this is an old debate and one that doesn’t concern you personally; but, when all is said and done, this is what I spent my youth doing; it is the sort of conversation I used to have in Le Lucernaire with Benoît Duteurtre and Lakis Proguidis.)

I don’t know whether I had
a gift
for writing novels, I don’t know whether the question means anything, can one have a gift for something so complex?

I certainly had no gift for stories, I’ve always found telling stories a pain in the ass, and I have no talent as a
storyteller
(to use a word recently adopted in French).

As for
style
, I wish people would stop bugging me with this shit. Where do words play their most direct part, where do
they gain power from how they are arranged? In poetry, first and foremost in poetry. Compared to a poet, no novelist has or can ever have a style. You try, oh, you try to achieve certain harmonies; sometimes you find, you’re delighted to find, in a sentence something that would not seem out of place in a poem (it often happened to Conrad, sometimes to Flaubert); but in general you keep your mouth shut about such moments, you let others discover them, you rely entirely on your future readers.

I had a gift for something, for one thing related to writing novels, creating
characters
. They kept me from getting to sleep, woke me up in the middle of the night, Bruno, Valérie, Esther, Michel, Isabelle. And now they are alive, yes, they won.

This can be disturbing about the novelist; he has the power, a power that is normally the preserve of God, to give life.

Lord Jim is alive.

Kirilov is alive (perhaps the most surprising example in all of literature, because he comes to life so quickly in a few short pages).

General Hulot is alive.
^*

And this is why actors, when they come face-to-face with a novelist, look at him so strangely; because they too try to
give life
to characters; they try with their own means, using their bodies, their faces. And they know, or they sense, that the novelist for his part, using different means, succeeds.

(Thinking about it, it is actresses who really look at me strangely; it’s perfectly understandable. When they haven’t tried, people always assume that it is more difficult to give life
to a character of the opposite sex. In reality, I can tell you, that it doesn’t matter; the gender isn’t the issue.)

But in poetry it is not simply characters who come to life, it is words. They seem to be surrounded by a radioactive halo. They suddenly find their aura, their essential vibration.

Give a purer sense to the words of the tribe
.

“Purity” is truly one of Mallarmé’s obsessions, whiteness, snow; I would certainly not have written that, because I am a sentimental little cretin, because whiteness and snow frighten me, they evoke Schubert’s terrifying
Winterreise
. Nonetheless, it’s very beautiful and perfectly precise.

Few people have penetrated these mysteries by means of their intelligence. Personally, I know only one. His name is Jean Cohen; he was a theoretician, a linguist. He wrote two books, the first entitled
Structure du langage poétique
, and the second
Le Haut Langage
, both published by Flammarion. He does not concern himself with the notion of
literariness
(by which certain texts among the immense body of texts in the world can be called
literary
). He interests himself in the issue of greater magnitude of
poeticity
(why certain texts in the body of literature can be said to be
poetic
).

It would be difficult for me to overstate the shock I felt reading
Le Haut Langage
. Because I hadn’t read (and still haven’t read) the theoreticians who came before him, Genette, Todorov, Greimas … But I had the pretension to know for myself, in a very secret place inside myself, when I had produced something that could be called a
poem
; or when, on the contrary, it had missed the mark (often the case with texts written under the influence of alcohol). And here I had
stumbled on someone who also knew … I felt as though he could read the very depths of my soul.

I mention this because I think he would agree with you on the word
living
. Except that he, unlike us, was not in the media; the dangers he faced were of a different kind. He knows he is being watched; knows his linguistics colleagues are waiting round the corner for him; in short, he has to
produce theory
. And what is most extraordinary is that he succeeds. He succeeds in giving a convincing theoretical elaboration of what quite clearly came to him by pure intuition. In a word, in a hundred words, you have to read Jean Cohen.

Unlike you, Bernard-Henri, I have never sought to join the ranks of the “intellectuals,” something that, from what I know of the careers of Jean Cohen and a handful of others, and from what Rachid Amirou (a university professor who specializes in the sociology of tourism and whose work I greatly admire) told me recently, I do not regret for a moment. There too there is slander, polemic, base jealousy, plots … And maybe I am idealizing, maybe it is the famous “magic of memory” at work in me, but I don’t remember anything of that kind in the little world of poetry. When I published my second collection of poems (which, coming after a novel that had had some press coverage, consequently had the dubious honor of being exposed to the broad mass of literary critics), some journalists saw fit to appear surprised that I use the alexandrine, a form they considered antiquated. In fact, they were rather simplistic (although I sometimes use the alexandrine, I more often use the octosyllabic form, or free verse). Well, whether you believe it or not, in all my time in the little world of poetry, I
never
came across a criticism like that.
That sort of criticism was considered completely outmoded. Whether a poem was written in alexandrines, in free verse, in prose, in anything you liked, made not the slightest difference in the little world of poetry. The alexandrine, I agree, was considered to be one of the possible forms of French poetry—a form that corresponded to the general structure of the language, which had made possible some beautiful works and could still do so.

All this to say, Bernard-Henri, that I have no trouble believing you when you tell me that your fame was in no way
premeditated
. It is all the easier to believe since almost nothing in my life has been premeditated (or, to be more precise, everything I premeditated failed). The only things I have ever managed to plan, more or less, have been my novels (well, at least the beginnings; after the first hundred pages, it goes downhill). And moreover, it was because I never
wanted
fame. It is true that I wanted to earn money through my books; fiercely wanted it, for the reasons I’ve already given, as soon as I realized it was possible (which is to say sometime around September 10, 1998). Perhaps, had I been rich, I would have wanted fame
as well
; but that is not the way things went in my life. I became famous in September 1998; I became rich in May 1999 when the royalties arrived. Well, I say rich, it’s all relative. Let’s say, rich enough to be able to think about giving up a job that simply paid the rent—but that, in any case, always seemed to me the only meaningful benefit of being rich.

The fact remains that, now, we have fame. And that we cannot easily get away from it. Even less so on my part since, unlike you perhaps, I have never felt the least temptation to
try the
Romain Gary ruse
.
^*
I don’t know why, to be honest; I think I would feel I was disowning myself, disowning my previous writings. I know some artists have done so.; but in those cases I think it was a
genuine
disavowal. Stupid maybe, or at least that is how it sometimes appears from the outside after a few centuries have passed; but at the time, from their point of view, entirely genuine.

There is also the fact that I have, over the years, established with my readers a relationship of trust (and that those readers, whether or not I know them, are the only people in the world to whom I feel a certain duty). I would feel, I don’t know, as though I were betraying that trust. And, in betraying that trust, I would feel that I was giving in to the pack.

And I do not want to do that. No, I do not want that.

So, there you have it; I will have to put up with
being Houellebecq
to the end, with all that that entails. Of course, the whole thing might be over the day after tomorrow; but let’s leave that hypothesis to one side.

It is true that there are those who have succeeded. Yes, yes, I’ve finally found something positive to say, it’s taken a bit of time, but I’ve found something! Certain poets, some of the
greatest, have managed to survive a substantial dose of celebrity; and managed to produce, in the throes of that fame, some of their most beautiful poems.

Well, when I say “certain poets,” the only name that really springs to mind is Victor Hugo.

Maybe Aragon, too, but I wonder: Are Aragon’s later works really as good as his early work? I don’t know, I’d have to look into it; but in the case of Victor Hugo, it’s certain.

So, how to become Victor Hugo? How does one develop that inner strength? This will make you smile, but I have managed to derive a certain comfort from the fact that, like Victor Hugo, I was born on February 26 …

(The analogy, I admit, stops there. In the famous poem “This Century Was Two Years Old” in which he talks about himself, he describes himself a few lines later as “Abandoned by all, save by his mother.”)

(And I suspect I’m off to a bad start when it comes to the state funeral.)

You have every right to smile—here I am, prepared to drift into the consolations of astrology, to believe in auguries and omens, when ever since we began writing these letters I have been posing as a rationalist, a freethinker … But maybe that is precisely my mistake. After all, Victor Hugo, after his daughter’s death, went through a terrible period of depression; what if it was spiritualism that brought him through it?

Maybe it is time for me, too, to say my “
farewell to reason.
” Reason, which has been useless to me, which has never helped me write a single line; reason, which, all my life, has done nothing but torment me with the desolate nature of its conclusions.

And whether I say my “farewell to reason” in the manner
of Pascal or of Hölderlin makes little difference. As long as I do not do so in the manner of Nerval or Kleist.

It was Nietzsche, I think, before he said his own farewell, who suggested that in the future, man should have
two brains
, one for science, one for all the rest.

The rest to include art, and love as well.

It would also include, if I understand you correctly, philosophy as an exceptional case within literature.

It’s strange how hard I find it to give up the illusion that there might be a place, just a little space, for philosophy next to science.

Just as, deep down, I have trouble accepting Nietzsche’s phrase, even though I understand precisely what he means.

Just as I have trouble accepting that, somewhere, there is a unity, an identity of a superior nature.

Just as I have trouble, in short, in going without
metaphysics
.

In my defense, it must be said I’m not the only one. Even in Aragon I can find it, this belief in a unique, mysterious core from which all else stems. I can find it in his own answer to the question he and Breton posed in 1919; well, in what I have always taken to be his answer:

So there you have it, the answer to your question. I don’t know. I don’t know any more than you do. But I do know there is something that cannot be compared to any project and that seems to me to be above desire.

On this point, I do not agree with you, because I remember reading, reading with a passion, long before I ever suffered the confusion of love (and I know that I will go on doing so long afterward, though that’s less amusing). Does this mean that I was already writing, I don’t mean compositions, I mean writing
for me
? In all honesty, I think the answer is yes, but I couldn’t swear to it; in any case I have not kept anything. But I was already reading with such absorption, such intensity, I reacted so powerfully to the words I found in books that I think I was already caught up in the system—that my fate was already sealed. We write because we have read, that seems obvious to me; it is, in a sense, a sort of conversation across the centuries. Except of course that Pascal or Dostoyevsky or Baudelaire is not going to rise from the grave to answer me. I know it, but do not know it; because I behave exactly as if they were about to do so. It goes without saying that we are never as rational as we think we are.

That it is a good life, a beautiful life, I confess, I have my doubts. What kind of life is it where you can’t walk three steps without taking a notebook? Where a couple of hours working on a text can leave you in a state of nervous exhaustion that requires several bottles of alcohol to get out of? I remember an interview with Patricia Highsmith where the interviewer asked what would happen to her writing if she fell in love again, fell hopelessly in love. She said nothing for a moment, then smiled, and said softly, “But there’s nothing to be done about that. Absolutely nothing.”