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By Root 903 0

Les Lettres françaises), the academies and the avant-garde, Thorez and Rimbaud, the homage to Barrès and the discovery of Sollers, the bulimia of that man, who wanted until the very end to be both the prince of youth and also the great literary pontiff, the coherence of all that, the unity of that work and that life, whether there is, as you say, a “major genre” from which the rest originates and that gives some order to this bric-a-brac … Or whether there is, as they themselves, the “Erostrates”* of the 1920s and ’30s used to say, in terms not that dissimilar from those used by the Surrealists, “a certain mental point in which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low are no longer perceived as contradictory …”

Aragon’s argument that night was that there is indeed a unity …

I saw that he would never give up on the theory of that certain point, giving coherence to his thousand lives …

But his argument was also that this coherence does not derive from the existence of one presiding genre cementing all the rest of the work.

And that’s the point I want to make.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

I understand the reasons, all the reasons, for which poetry may be said to be, as you stated, “the” major genre par excellence. There’s Heidegger’s argument when he sees it as a magic wand allowing direct access to the living sources of being, Aristotle’s argument cited by Heidegger, on poetic experience being “more true,” more “precise,” than the “methodical exploration of Being” or the thesis put forward by Mallarmé in his essay “La Musique et les lettres,” according to which poetry is a later form than believed, which consumed, digested, and fundamentally ousted even the musical form, being the only form of language—he claimed—that is our master as much as our instrument, the only lexical structure that Being inhabits and in which it reveals itself. Who can put it better?

I also see the reasons for objecting to this and claiming that the novel is the major genre, that it can only be the novel, that nothing apart from the novel can incorporate, absorb, reproduce, and even improve on the double thrill offered by music and poetry with the bonus of thought, philosophy, knowledge: Kundera, for example, Cervantes as well, Proust, the great Austro-Hungarians, Dostoyevsky. There’s this idea everyone has about the novel being this “great form” that gobbles up all the others, demoting them to cantons within its empire, the idea that Mallarmé was right in essence and simply got the genre wrong and that this power he recognized in poetry should be attributed to the novel, Joyce and his paper Babel, Borges and his dream of one great book that would contain all the other books in the world and the world itself, my friend Danilo Kiš, who by the way has been quite forgotten and yet his conception of the novel as an encyclopedia of the dead and library digest is highly convincing …

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