Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [111]
*Louis Aragon, J’abats mon jeu (1959): texts dealing with “socialist realism” and Aragon’s political involvement in the 1950s.
*Herostratus was an ancient Greek figure who set fire to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in his quest for fame. His aim was to immortalize his name in history. Not only was he executed, but it was forbidden to mention his name under pain of death, so that he was punished by being consigned to obscurity. Here, “Erostrates” seems to refer to a group in the 1920s and ’30s with some affinities with the Surrealists. The lack of information available about them suggests that they were successful in embracing obscurity. It does not appear to refer directly to Sartre’s story “Erostrate,” a satire on Surrealism; Sartre dismissed the Surrealists and probably saw them as an adolescent, flash-in-the-pan movement similar to the Erostrates.
*Name given to Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Talmudic scholar, mystic, and scholar, best known for creating the legend of the Golem of Prague.
*Witold Marian Gombrowicz, Polish novelist and dramatist.
†“Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” 1972.
*Émile Ajar was one of Romain Gary’s pseudonyms (see this page).
June 26, 2008
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,