Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [12]
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,