Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [87]
Among our most constant and most bitter enemies are the Web sites, the loathsome, terrifying proliferation of far-left sites that might model themselves on Le Monde diplomatique or Politis but which, in keeping with the maximalist logic of the Internet, go much further and, where people like us are concerned, almost go so far as to call for us to be killed. It’s here that you realize that the unholy collusion between the far-left and radical Islam is not a fantasy dreamed up by Gilles-William Goldnadel, but is something that is increasingly becoming a reality. I leave the accountability of those who find excuses for Islam because it’s the “religion of the poor,” or who look for points of agreement between Marxist thought and Sharia law, but I will say that every anti-Semitic attack or murder in the French banlieues owes something to them.
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When all this has calmed down, long after we are dead, some future historian will be able to draw some great lesson from the fact that we both, and at much the same time, have comfortably fulfilled the role of public enemies. I don’t feel able to expand on the idea, it’s just an intuition, one that still seems strange to me: but I believe that the person who manages to work out why the two of us, so different from each other, became the chief whipping boys of our era in France will, in doing so, understand many things about the history of France during this period.
The fact remains that, right now, while we are still more or less alive, the situation is difficult. I’m grateful that you haven’t tried to persuade me that “things will get better.” Because things won’t get better; so what is there that can help? Well, the most crucial are the encounters with anonymous readers (anonymous or famous, it doesn’t really matter, what matters is that they are readers), whether on the Internet or in the street. Such encounters are neither self-conscious nor awkward. The readers know there are many of them and they assume (rightly or wrongly, it depends) that I have a hectic schedule so they need to get straight to the point.
The first thing they say to me, and the most important, is to keep on writing. They usually put it as simply, as brutally as that. The phrase they most often use is “Keep on writing.”
But why, first of all, do they say this to me? I don’t think my writings bear the mark of any particular suffering. When asked if writing is painful or pleasurable for me, I’ve never known how to answer; the truth, I think, is that it is something else and can take either of those forms. An extreme nervous agitation, an exaltation that can be rapidly exhausting. In a long article that appeared in that curious publication La Revue des deux mondes* (a magazine, it is strange to think, that has existed at least since 1830, which saw and supported the rise of the Romantic movement in France!), a writer named Marin de Viry made an interesting analogy between writing and cycling. People tend to praise the mountainous stages, he said, where each new sentence, like each turn of the pedals, seems to display superhuman effort; but the stages of flat open country where nothing seems to be happening but where, at any moment, things can change dramatically have their own charm; the long stages along flat stretches, or stretches that only seem to be flat. The writer, I think, was comparing me to a flat stretch; it was kind of him, but not, I think, entirely true. What my novels make me think of above all are the downhill stages (people know little about them, in general; there are no spectators on the downhill stages, the exercise is too abstract, even the motorcycle cameras seem to hesitate, for fear of going off the road). I feel that I am writing a novel when I have put in place certain forces that should naturally lead the text to self-destruct; to an explosion