Public Enemies (32 page)

I can also imagine a filmmaker, Antonioni for example, or Lubitsch or Renoir for their part, objecting that no, you’re wrong once again about the genre; it’s the cinema that swallows everything up, absorbing music, painting, theater, philosophy; it’s cinema that’s the total artwork, the major definitive art form, having the power to attract the other arts and melt them in its cauldron, to reduce them to the status of components of its language in gold and bronze. Look at Godard’s first films, see in
Pierrot le fou
and
Breathless
, which
incidentally Aragon reviewed, the use made of literary quotations and philosophical aphorisms, and then try to tell that wild metaphysician, leaping from theorem to matheme, that he’s practicing a minor art!

I could even demonstrate to you that if the major genre is the one that colonizes and cannibalizes the other genres, reducing them to provinces in its empire, there is yet another art form that could make that claim: the theater. Not only could I do this, I have done it strenuously, quite a long time ago, in my first year at the École Normale, in an essay for Jacques Derrida’s seminar, in which my task was to relate Artaud’s
Théâtre et son double
and Nietzsche’s
Birth of Tragedy
. If, I argued, the theater is this scene of cruelty, this “shattered mound” on which embryonic man, yet to be born, is moving about, if this operation of “transubstantiation” in which the psychology of actors, characters, and even the author yields to a “metaphysics of gesture and trance,” if it is the sacred ceremony that Artaud saw in it—Antonin Artaud, that martyr, that great, radiant figure, that man “suicided” by society (who for me at that time had a colossal shadow and was a totem, an evangelist, whose first name I would later give to my son)—then it was absolute, peerless, the art of arts.

At the very limit, others could argue for fashion—and I’m not just saying this because I’m coming from the funeral at L’Église Saint-Roch, said to be the artists’ church, of the great designer Yves Saint Laurent, a man who couldn’t design a dress without incorporating a page of Proust, a color lifted from Ingres, a design inspired by Matisse or Picasso, a gesture he’d seen made by Giacometti or Germaine Richier; a man who could justifiably have not only lived like an artist but described his work as an unrivaled art. He didn’t do so, being too modest and too charming. But ultimately, the law of the cauldron, the great melting pot of genres, does it not apply
equally in a case like that? On what basis can we deny him or anyone else admission to the rank of the artist who melts and boils, absorbs, ingests, crystallizes, and transforms?

As you can see, there’s a problem.

If you can claim both one thing and its opposite and cannot decide between them; if to the same question you can give replies that are so different, so contradictory and equally well founded; if you can still say (since I didn’t finish the list and the possibilities are almost endless), like Rousseau, that it’s the confession that is the genre of genres or, more precisely and following St. Augustine, that it’s the confession of conversion that is the great book blessed by God, this implies that the question itself has been badly formulated.

So, following from the remarks I made above and my experience of Aragon’s case, I’ve going to offer you my own personal response to the problem you posed, avoiding an aporia.

There is no major genre: that’s the principle of my reply.

Any genre will become major once an artist takes possession of it and decrees it to be such; that’s the practical law.

If you prefer, art is like the Messiah, of whom the Maharal of Prague
^*
said that he would never be such-and-such a special person coming at a special moment in time to perform a particular miracle in a particular place. The Maharal said, he’s you, he’s me, he’s any of us at any time in history and no matter where, as long as he’s faithful to the Torah and animated by the will to carry out the commandments. In the same way, art is this verse, a page of prose, Praxiteles wielding his chisel or Uccello his paintbrush, it’s a wonderful cinema
shot, the “and” at the head of the sentence in
Madame Bovary
, the added knowledge you get from a novel by Philip Roth, a photograph by Richard Avedon, an autobiographical page by Gombrowicz,
^*
a scene from Aeschylus or Racine. Yes, all that is major, locally and definitively, and may occur even in a single work by the same artist, who, according to his mood, the time, the dead end in which he finds himself, his regular or unsettled breathing, the woman he loves, digs for the materials he needs for his great work under the headings of the genres in turn.

Not to choose—that’s the rule.

To be more opportunistic, more of a pirate than the guardians of the temple of genres would allow—that’s the secret.

A poet one day.

A novelist the next.

And back to being a poet again on another day when you feel that the art of the novel has exhausted you or that you have temporarily exhausted its resources and its remit.

At least, that’s the way I work.

I take the “genres” the way I take a taxi:
Here, this is where I get out … thanks and good-bye … how much do I owe you?

I borrow them, the way in the old times you would leave an exhausted horse at a coaching inn and get on another one to take you for the next stage (Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze said something of the sort in a discussion published forty years ago in the journal
L’Arc
).
^†

Therefore, in reply to the famous question of the “mental point” from which life and death, the real and the imaginary,
the past and the present, etc., would no longer be perceived as contradictory, etc., I take it for granted that for a writer the reply is never rhetorical (verse or prose, poetry or novel …) but is a question of diet (what is good at this moment for this body who writes and the body of the writing, which is also a living, growing body?) or even metaphysical (since truth is a being in movement and not only has the right but the obligation to switch from one genre to another according to the needs of its trajectory).

There is no “mental point” other than the mind.

No other light for a work than that of which Proust said, in relation to Vinteuil and his sonata, that even if it were refracted through different surroundings, it would remain the same monotone light.

The literary odyssey has no center other than the ego that surrenders to it, gets drunk on it, and naturally often loses itself in it.

When I say the “ego,” clearly I don’t mean His Royal Highness with its narcissism, its mirror, its store of stratagems and secrets. I’m thinking of this highly unstable, improbable, fragile, sometimes tiny ego that is nothing more than the subject of the literary adventure, its real “cruel theater,” the agent of its construction and deconstruction. I’m thinking of an ego that has become a mere place, sometimes a point, which inflates, empties, swells in time with the work and disappears when the work is finished. Didn’t I tell you that I hardly retain anything about Baudelaire, Piero, Angola’s cities, Sartre since I wrote of them? And haven’t we both had the experience of books that changed us and whose only interest lies in that?

Dear Michel, that’s what I think.

That’s why I believe that you will write more poetry and I’ll write another novel.

That’s why you made a film, a very good film, very poetic and metaphysical (bless Arte for having managed in the end to screen it!), which is first and foremost—I must say it again—another zigzag on the road where you scatter and snare your pursuers.

I also wanted to reply to what you said about actresses: one, in any case, for whom I can do no better than to apply Baudelaire’s dictum: “my great, my single, my original passion.”

I wanted to reply too about Gary, that other writer/filmmaker and master, if ever there was one, in the art of snares and hooks: what an odd idea, that concept of the duties we supposedly have toward our readers getting in the way of Operation Ajar!
^*

Maybe next time.

For the moment, I’ll send you this.

Maybe I expressed myself badly, dear Bernard-Henri; I think maybe I should start off by dealing with the unnecessarily pompous phrase “major art.” But before dealing with this issue, which is almost dearer to my heart than anything else, I’d like to catch my breath and share something I remember, something I’ve always found funny, about the director of an arts festival in Göttingen, an aging jittery punk who explained to me that he
insisted
that, at his festival, the writers be treated
exactly
the same as the musicians—including the planetary rock stars—and who concluded his diatribe with this phrase, which I could not but agree with, “
Literature is one of the fucking major arts of the Western world!
”

Rather than talk about major art, I should have said
simple art
(in the sense in which we talk about the chemistry of simple bodies) or maybe
profound art
. That is to say, almost the antithesis of what Wagner (whose work I rather like) meant by
total art
. Something that might be thought of as a more generalized version of
cante jondo
.

Obviously, there is not simply poetry. There are the moments when a musician finds, almost in spite of himself, a melody creating itself. There is the gesture, perhaps the most primitive of all (though we can never actually know), where a
man dips his fingers into colored mud and traces lines on the wall of a cave.

For me, there are moments when words come, with no purpose, no coherence, no judgment, and then I need a piece of paper because I realize that something is happening. It lasts for a certain time—well, it lasts as long as it lasts—but it lasts long enough for me to write a poem, deep down, that’s all I ask for. One morning I will never forget, while I was waiting for and then taking a taxi, I managed to write eight poems, the last of them being “The Possibility of an Island.”

But this could never work when writing a novel. What’s my maximum? Between five and ten pages, I’d say. After that you have to get blind drunk, calm the machine, wait for tomorrow, when it all starts up again.

And the problems appear only gradually. I’ll take a basic example, that will be easier: in
The Possibility of an Island
(the novel), at the point when Daniel and Isabelle meet Fox on a piece of waste ground off a motorway in Spain, I initially wrote that Daniel stepped out of his Bentley. A few months later, my Dutch translator (a guy of incredible precision and rigor, and a nice guy too) pointed out to me that the Bentley had been sold fifty pages earlier; Daniel should have stepped out of his Mercedes. No one at my French publisher had noticed a thing. When I’d visualized him pulling up by the motorway, I’d visualized the Bentley; being a good boy I changed it to the Mercedes. Did I do the right thing?

And this kind of thing happens all the time, because poetry says one thing and coherence, structure, logic tend, with depressing regularity, to say the opposite. If you abide by the poetry, you’re not far from becoming unreadable. If you don’t, you’re all set for a
run-of-the-mill
career as a
storyteller
.