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By Root 905 0

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