Public Enemies (4 page)

To tell the truth, even if Michka Assayas were appointed to run the culture section of
Le Nouvel Obs
, I’m pretty sure he would resign after a couple of months; he would barely manage to deliver his weekly roundup for
VSD
. It’s not about laziness (his
Dictionnaire du rock
, for example, was a mammoth undertaking), it’s something more pernicious, a mixture of indifference and independence, something that, whatever it is, keeps you firmly
on the margins
.

There are, of course, exceptions; for example, I have a lot of admiration for Sylvain Bourmeau,
^*
a hard worker if ever there was one. And I think that, thanks to my regular admonitions, Frédéric Beigbeder
^†
has decided to keep his next job for more than a year. Even so, there is in those I admire a tendency toward irresponsibility that I find only too easy to understand. I am, after all, the son of a man who has (and I’m not up-to-date on everything he’s done) launched three companies, only to get bored as soon as they became vaguely successful; who built five houses (actually built, poured the concrete, planed the wood, et cetera), only to give up on the idea of living in them almost as soon as they were built.

•    •    •

Here we go again. We can’t escape it. My role in your destiny may well be to have dragged you down to
confessional writing
—and that may not be altogether a bad thing. Schopenhauer notes with surprise that it is quite difficult to lie in one’s letters (current thinking has not progressed on the subject and, for my part, I cannot help but
note with surprise:
there is something in an exchange of letters that fosters truth, participation—what?).

I don’t have a particular affinity with confessional literature; my problem is that I like almost
all
forms of literature. I have happily wallowed in the writings of Montaigne and Rousseau, but I still feel a delicious visceral shock when reading Pascal’s verdict on Montaigne, the extraordinary insolence like a slash of a whip full in the face: “The stupid plan he has to depict himself.” I have also taken inordinate delight in the absolute antithesis of confessional literature that is fantasy and science fiction; my panegyrics on Lovecraft may at times be over the top, it doesn’t matter, I stand by them.

And above all I have loved, and finally made my own, the
middle way
, which is that of the classic novelists. Who borrow from their own lives, or the lives of others, it doesn’t matter, or who invent, it’s all the same, in order to create their characters. The novelists, those consummate omnivores.

All the same, a little confessional writing might not be so bad. What do I know, I’ve never really tried it, and I don’t think you know anything about it either. We are so often misinformed about our own vocation (it’s surprising, for example, to think that Sartre may have attached greater importance to his works on theoretical philosophy than he did to
Nausea
or
The Words
).

Feel up to it?

For almost a week, dear Michel, I haven’t managed to reply to you.

There was my day for writing my “Bloc-Notes” article.

Then there was the gathering we organized with Philippe Val, Laurent Joffrin, and Caroline Fourest around Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
^*
that radiant young woman who’s been condemned to death in the Netherlands for having dared to make some statements about Islam, of the kind that seven or eight years ago got you yourself dragged into court. (I don’t agree with those statements: I don’t believe for a minute that Islam is intrinsically hostile to democracy and human rights, but I’m struggling for her and for you to be entitled to express that opinion.)

There was the jury of the French Golden Globes equivalent, which I agreed to chair as a favor to a friend—that took up another day.

There have been the thousand concerns that I found or
invented and that, caught up as I was in the madness and bustle of the day, caused me to put off replying to you.

But more than anything, there was the word
confession
that you ended with. Despite the passing years, I see that it still has the same ability to paralyze me …

Dear Michel, you have to understand that I am one of the few writers of my generation to have written novels (twenty years ago, you’ll say, but in that respect I haven’t changed) in which I consciously sought to create characters who were nothing like me.

You have to understand that in
Comédie
, which you quote (and which I published in the—oh so dramatic—aftermath of my own film’s release; welcome to the club, by the way, and good luck!), everything was organized, literally everything, up to and including setting up the Great Confession, to give away as little as possible, to hide while appearing to open up and certainly not to yield to that illusion of transparency, of baring your heart, and so on, for which I feel an almost phobic aversion. False confessions, then … “screen confessions,” the way psychoanalysts talk about screen memories … cunning, clever confessions whose entire purpose was to stand in the way of the big, juicy confessions I promised, even though I knew that I would have to shirk them. More than ever, when writing that book, I felt how patently true it is that turning your back on ambiguity can only be to your detriment.

You speak of Philippe Sollers, about whom, by the way, I think you’re being unjust (the same goes for Garcin, who has the merit—rare nowadays—of keeping the proper distance in talking about both actresses and dead friends). I’d like you to know that the only serious disagreement Sollers and I have ever had over thirty years of real friendship is when he says
(although, in passing, I’m not sure whether he applies the rule to himself) that writers are there to “tell how they live.” The formula itself petrifies me. When he pronounces it, it plunges me into an abyss of perplexity, and I always feel like replying that I believe exactly the opposite—that writers have every right and can talk about whatever they like but not how they live, not their inalienable secret life!

As for television and the way you think you should behave there, I agree with your recommendations. I concur with your analysis of the need to perfect an “act” that allows us to hide and protect our “deep self.” I also agree about the risk that, in doing so, like the “man who lost his shadow,” you can lose the trace of the “deep self,” let it lie fallow, forget it. Where you’re wrong, or where I fear you rate me too highly, is when you attribute to me a capacity for indignation that shields me from that risk so that, fired up in a polemic, a political battle or a rage, I supposedly let the “real” me rise up to the surface. Sadly, indignation has no role in this. You can be indignant and yet take a strategic tack. You can be scandalized or enraged, but precisely because you’re at war you manage to keep control of the impression you make. In my case, that’s a fact. It’s even, if I dare say so, an obligation. Even in extreme situations, when I return from Darfur or Sarajevo, when I rail against the indifference of the well-off toward this or that forgotten war, which I’ve taken the trouble to go and see and from where I bring back my distressed accounts, my phobia for these confessional stories is such that even there—I almost wrote
especially there
—I do whatever I can to stay in control of my emotions, reflexes, language, and facial expressions. (The face, oh dear … its shameful turmoil, its minuscule rages, which give away so much … it’s the reason why I leave those [television interview] programs in a state of nervous exhaustion, which those
who take me at my word when, quoting Bataille,
^*
I trumpet that the principle to follow on television is to think “the way a girl takes her dress off” could hardly imagine.)

In my last letter I spoke to you about my indifference to the horrors they may write about me and which, I know, weaken me in my struggles.

There was a claim that my father made his fortune in a vile way, which I didn’t contradict.

I let it pass when it was written that I hardly knew Massoud
^†
and that giving him as a reference, laying claim to both his values and his friendship, was a fabrication.

I’ve allowed books to appear and be disseminated on the Internet that I obviously did look through, even if at the time I claimed I didn’t, and whose basic message was always to make me out to be a bastard.

The reason I’ve put up with all this wasn’t simply negligence, indifference, or contempt. It’s not because I have a shatterproof, armor-plated ego or that I’m beyond reach. It’s not even that I take that pleasure in being disliked, which we spoke of in our first exchange and which for me, as for you too perhaps, is another form of posing. No, what I now think is that if I have never refuted their claims and naturally never sued that evil lot, it’s because part of me gets something out of it. That part of me prefers even disinformation and the supreme, Gidian art of the counterfeiter, an expert on false clues and ruses, to the obscenity of giving in to the universal
exhortation, be yourself (i.e., love yourself), which is the commandment of our age.

Of course, the question is why.

What’s behind this refusal, this phobia, this tendency to tell as little as possible, not to confess?

Where does it come from and what does it conceal—this desire to hide your cards, to be the champion of false confessions, an artist of trompe-l’oeil and deception, at the risk, I must repeat, of having highly offensive claims made about you without reacting?

I could tell you, and it would be true that there is a literary conception behind it: when I was writing the
Les Derniers Jours de Charles Baudelaire
[
The Last Days of Charles Baudelaire
], I was obsessed with the opposition between the good “Flaubertian model” and the bad “Stendhalian model”: a cold, cold-blooded, possibly rigid, even stuffy literature versus the exquisite but to my mind antiliterary stylistic freedom of the literature of “release.” Even today, I haven’t changed that much. The experiments that fascinate me are still those where the “I” is withheld or even—and I hope we’ll come back to this—where, as in Gary or Pessoa,
^*
it is a minotaur lurking in the depths of a labyrinth of words, a clandestine orchestral director manipulating his clones like puppets on strings.

I could tell you, and it would be no less accurate, that this attitude derives from the idea I have—and which was also Michel Foucault’s in his very last texts—as to why anyone
embarks on the adventure of writing, which is that you write in order to find out not so much who you are as who you’re becoming. I believe that what is at stake in a book is not being yourself, finding yourself, coinciding with your truth, your shadows, the eternal child within, or any of that other idiotic stuff, but rather changing, becoming other than the person you were before beginning and whom the book’s own growth has rendered obsolete and uninteresting. Do we write to retreat into ourselves or to escape; to disappear or to make an appearance; to occupy a territory or to mine it and, having mined it, to change it and lose ourselves in the maze of an unreachable identity? For me, the answer is obvious and in itself explains why I couldn’t care less about the nonsense written about the “truth” of my relations with money, media, power, or the Commander Massoud.

I could tell you—and it would also be true—that this mode of action, this repugnance for confession and for staging the inner self, reflects my metaphysical makeup, for better or for worse. In general, this derives from phenomenology, which reached its pinnacle in Sartre, then in the antihumanism of Althusser, Lacan, and once again Foucault, and whose fundamental principle is to view the subject as an empty form, with no real content, almost abstract, consisting entirely of the contact it establishes with the world and the content bestowed on it by that contact, this content being each time new, never substantial.

But the question of questions (and I don’t need to explain this to Michel Houellebecq, the Nietzschean) is naturally what is behind the metaphysics, poetical arts, conceptions of the literary adventure. The real question is to ask ourselves what this type of argument—this reasoning too straightforward to be honest; this choice, for example, between the Flaubertian and Stendhalian models, which may exist only in
my imagination—may hide in my personal history, in terms of subjective denials and fears, badly healed wounds, and the
unconfessed
family saga.

You spoke to me of your father (and I would be happy to hear more about the whimsical, poetical character he seems to be).

I should tell you a little about my own (because “concrete block” or not, this is probably the key for me as well).

I come from a family that elevated to the status of an imperative its sense of propriety, a horror of bombast, and a revulsion for anything resembling emotional excess or indiscretion.

My father was melancholic and powerful, silent and warlike, a chess player, unfathomable, clearheaded and skeptical, solitary and independent. For him secrecy was not only an intellectual experience but also—I’m convinced of this today—a way of being and living.

He had another peculiarity, unusual for a man who, in conventional terms, would not be thought of as an intellectual, which was his strange, almost superstitious relationship with the words of everyday language. There were those he used and handled very delicately, with infinite caution, as you would move a chess piece. Then there were those addressed to him that had the power (we didn’t always know which ones, we never knew exactly why; they were ordinary words belonging to everyday life) to catapult him into sudden rages, cold but dreadful, as if they’d reached some obscure place in him and set fire to it.