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By Root 900 0

the two of them would have made a great subject for a novel—which would also have been a fine novel about Les Trentes Glorieuses,* that most astonishing period of recent French history. The Elementary Particles is not that novel. It’s just possible to find in it some similarities to my mother, but I entirely evaded the subject of my father. As a character, Michel’s father is flimsy; Bruno’s father is more successful, but is utterly unlike my own father. All this simply serves to confirm an idea that I find increasingly more striking: in literature, the amount of truth, perhaps of autobiographical truth, you invest in a character is of no importance. The corollary of this is that you can confess everything, can say anything and everything, true or false, and none of it will have the slightest bearing on its eventual success.

Basically, the only important thing you need to know is whether confessional literature is appropriate for you, Bernard-Henri Lévy, whether it will allow you to write something you can be proud of. In my opinion it is impossible to tell until you have tried it. In my case, I am not too sure. In 2005, taking a break from The Possibility of an Island, I began to recount some memories on the Internet. The fact is, I gave up quite quickly and, though I later agreed to publish these pieces in a magazine, I have been reluctant, and thus far have refused whenever anyone has suggested collecting them as a book. The great autobiographical undertaking—that of a Rousseau or a Tolstoy—is, I fear, not quite my style. And yet I think perhaps a few scattered memories, sprinkled through a manuscript whose goal is something different, can have a certain aesthetic interest (sorry, all this is a little Stendhalian). Actually, I don’t know, I’m experimenting. There remains the question you posed: Why? (Why not in your case and why so in mine?)

Well, the propensity to confess that I manifest from time to time comes, it seems to me, from two very different sources. The first, as I have already said, is my deep-rooted conviction that no confession can change anything about one’s personality, cannot make good or make worse whatever flaws we have; in short an antipsychoanalytical conviction—one of the few that I have always held to, that and the nonexistence of God. The second is my extraordinary overestimation of myself, something that I occasionally fall victim to, which leads me to believe that no confession can ever exhaust the indefinite richness of my personality, that one could draw endlessly on the ocean of my possibilities—and that if someone believes they know me, they are simply lacking information.

I sometimes feel like Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, feeling it appropriate to give an account of his dietary habits, like his taste for “thick oil-free cocoa,” convinced that nothing that concerns him could be entirely without interest (and what is worse, one does read these pages with a certain pleasure; pages that may well outlive Thus Spake Zarathustra). I do, however, realize that this Stendhalian, aristocratic, flippant approach can be irritating (less with Nietzsche, in fact, since he never quite gets there; he preaches flippancy rather more than he practices it).

A modern variation, one from the era of the mass media: face-to-face with certain journalists I had sometimes felt like Kurt Cobain telling a tactless interviewer, “I’m homosexual, I’m a pagan, I’m a drug abuser, and I like to fuck pot-bellied pigs! Is that enough?”

I now have the well-established reputation of hating journalists; this is, at best, approximate. I can truly say I have encountered the worst and the best in the profession. I don’t think I have been remotely unfair to Jérôme Garcin. Everything about the man rings false, his every sentence oozes speciousness and affectation. The restrained emotion, the walks across the moors “lashed by the bitter wind” … you feel like you’re in a BMW commercial. But I have a powerful memory of Harriet Wolff, the very strange German journalist I allude to in the first page of The Possibility of an Island. (Was