Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [77]
Behind every cliché there’s a theory, however rudimentary. But when a fact contradicts that theory, we don’t know what to do; we just set it down and wait around for a new theory (we’re always trying to come up with theories, and maybe that’s the problem; it would probably be better to admit that we are quite simply dealing with different human qualities).
However, there’s nothing to stop me from taking the facts into account. And I would, if I could find the energy, feel a certain satisfaction at the thought that with most of the media I no longer have anything to lose. Except that’s not true, the situation is unequal. They have nothing to lose because they know I will never speak to them again. I still have a lot to lose and they know it. Things could get worse; things will get worse.
I am not claiming that my physical existence is being directly threatened. Although people like Assouline, Jacob, Naulleau, or Busnel surely would feel a thrill of joy to find out I’d committed suicide (something which is possible, after all; I more or less fit the profile people associate with suicide; it wouldn’t really surprise anyone).
But, failing a real suicide, what they would like, at least, is for me to stop writing. Or, if I really have to go on writing, for no one to talk about my books. For people to talk about whatever they like, about my advances, my tax returns, my political opinions, my taste for alcohol, my family history; but never, under any circumstances, about my books.
Naturally, they are going to win.
What is curious is that I foresaw this a long time ago. I remember it was when I was awarded the Prix de Flore* in 1996 (at that point I was in my ascendant phase). In the middle of a conversation, for no apparent reason, I remember saying to Marc Weitzmann,* “You’ll see, you’ll all end up hating me.” He stopped what he was saying, and gave me a strange look and suddenly I realized that what I had just said without really thinking about it was an insight, a precise, dazzling perception of the future shooting through me. I don’t really believe in intuition, or rather I believe in it absolutely, but I can see nothing mysterious or alchemical about it: I think moments of intuition are simply unpredictable moments of great tension in the brain, a burst of ultrafast reasoning where nothing has time to skim the conscious mind (neither the proofs nor the premises). I was, in a moment of particular lucidity, simultaneously conscious of the fact of being a writer, of what I intended to write, and of the intellectual capacities of the time in which I lived; and I came to the conclusion that I was, that I would soon be, deemed unacceptable.
In 2005, when I did my interview with Sylvain Bourmeau for the Inrockuptibles DVD, I had already had time to think about this and was able to explain myself more analytically. And my conclusion, on that occasion, was clear: the group always wins.
In Western societies, an individual has the right to stay on the sidelines of the group for a few years and attempt to gallop freely. But sooner or later the pack wakes up, the hunt starts, and eventually they corner him. At that point they take revenge, and their revenge is terrible. Because the pack is scared, and that might seem surprising because they have strength in numbers: but it is made up of mediocre individuals who are conscious of and ashamed of that fact, and furious that, even for a second, their mediocrity is exposed for all to see.
That is where I am; the pack has caught up with me. It won’t let me go and this will go on until I am dead, and for a little while after that (my death will give rise, I think, to some lively controversy).
And then, obviously, everything will calm down; skeletons.
Okay, I think it’s not a bad thing to have talked about these things, that it’s interesting to note that in some sense nothing has changed, and it’s true, for example, that it’s amusing to see