Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [91]
With my mother’s book, it’s a very different matter. In this case, none of my readers think I should “rise above it”; they all realize that what has happened is serious.
I realize, and this is very strange, that I still cannot bring myself to hate my mother. Perhaps it is difficult to hate one’s mother regardless of the circumstances; perhaps one always feels that in doing so one is hating oneself, disowning oneself. Right now, I feel a sort of numbness, a stiffness; I feel terribly sad and demoralized, but, even now, no hatred. I feel as though I’ve been bitten by a poisonous spider and am waiting for the moment when I will be devoured. I hold my mother no more responsible than the spider, left to her own devices, in accordance with her nature; she cannot help but bite and inject her venom.
More than anything, there is something that I had never felt, and that is shame. Ashamed of my mother, ashamed to be her son, ashamed to be myself. Nietzsche had some powerful, beautiful words to say on the subject. (“Whom do you call bad? He who always wants to put people to shame,” etc.)* The thing is, Nietzsche was a good writer, a very good writer, but maybe not quite good enough, and what I most remember, what first comes to mind when I think of shame, is Kafka. I rarely mention Kafka when I talk about my first great literary emotions, although I read him when I was sixteen, the same age as I read Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, whom I mention all the time. But in those writers (and even in Pascal), there was what Lautréamont called a “positive electricity”; you wanted to talk about them, to talk to them. Kafka is different; very close to what I’m feeling right now—a numbness, a stiffness, a cold, physical sensation. I remember the first thing I read was The Metamorphosis and Other Texts (published by Livre de Poche) and straight afterward The Trial (published by Folio). The last sentence of The Trial, immediately after Joseph K. has been caught and stabbed by the two killers: “… it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.”
There has been something in my literature, from the first, that goes hand in glove with shame. To be honest, when I published my first books, I expected to bring a certain shame on myself (even though, as I said before, I’ve always hated putting myself forward). What actually happened, and it was a wonderful surprise, was that readers came up to me and said, “Not at all, what you describe are human things, some true of human beings in general, others specific to human beings in modern Western societies … In fact, we are grateful to you for having the courage to expose them, for having shouldered that part of shame …”
This, I think, is what some people couldn’t stand, why they constantly try to portray my books as being not the expression of a general human truth but the product of a personal trauma; and in a bitter war like that, the biography, the crude, stupid biography, is unquestionably the most effective weapon; the conflict having reached, in recent weeks, its highest point. The simplistic approach, effective by reason of its very brutality, of reducing all literature to evidence; all this was predicted, long before Nietzsche, by Tocqueville.
Because in our societies, it is important for people to feel ashamed of themselves; it may even be the case that shame has become the fundamental tool for taming people. You were complaining in an earlier letter, dear Bernard-Henri, of being thought of as having no sense of humor; this may be your rarest quality. What is humor, after all, but shame at having felt a genuine emotion? It is a sort of tour de force, a slave’s elegant pirouette when faced with a situation that under normal circumstances would evoke despair or rage. So, yes, it’s hardly surprising that these days humor is rated very highly.
But I’m preaching to the converted. I said earlier that I “don’t believe in Jews.” Well, in general terms, that’s true, but there are certain things … Because unquestionably, long before anyone else, Jews developed the sense of humor that,