The Republic of Dissent

The philosopher of small things

Sugary excerpt from BHL (Bernard-Henri Levy) talking with alarming seriousness/narcissism about his habit of leaving his white shirt undone:

No, I just like to be loose. (...)I do. It's a form of my will to freedom. I like to be free in every sense of the word. I have never worn a tie in my life. There was even a diplomatic incident when I met Pope John Paul II. But it's a physical impossibility. I cannot have a shirt buttoned to the neck, I suffocate. I have to be free.

Sex writing

My reaction to this sugary excerpt from Natalia Antonova is ah!:

Good fiction features a lot of bad sex writing for the same reason as porn actors (Sasha Grey immediately springs to mind) have a tough time crossing over into mainstream film – society's desperate need to compartmentalise sex.

Literature should be, well, literary, we reason – for stimulation of the brain, not other parts. The ghettoisation of eroticism is the reason why you'd be hard pressed to find a "serious" book review that praises an author's approach to sex scenes, no matter how difficult they may have been to write.(...)Good writers are hyper-aware, neurotic creatures, which is probably another reason why so many tend to fail miserably (or entertainingly) when writing about an activity that puts much of the brain on autopilot. (...)Good sex writers, like bad sex writers, explore the dark side of desire. But bad sex writing is often a tough guy act – an attempt to intimidate the reader with shocking detail – whereas good sex writers invite the reader to explore strange territory.

 

The role of the critic

Sugary excerpt for this welcomed first day of November from Nicole Krauss:

It seems to me that we have lost something that used to be considered fundamental in the world of literature, which is the role of the critic. There used to be extraordinary critics. I’m thinking Edmund Wilson, say, or Lionel Trilling. At that time, the role of the critic was to not only know about literature, and to tell us what books were about and why they were interesting or not. Their role—their true role—was to teach us how to read. Ultimately, those critics taught whole generations how to read. The professional literary critic, in that mode, no longer exists in our culture. To begin with, there are no longer places where serious, extensive reviews are published—very, very few are left. So critics can no longer make a living—so unimportant are they to our culture, that we can no longer bother even to pay them.

French as the language of the infinitesimal

The sentence of the morning is from the greatest writer of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett writing to Georges Duthiut:

Never understood so clearly as when reading you, not even when reading Proust to what extent French is the language of the infinitesimal.

That explains why French is the best language for poetry!

The attractiveness of unattractiveness [in literature]

Sugary excerpt from Lionel Shriver, whose writing I find as sobering as a good cup of Kenyan coffee:

[...]do we always want to read about characters who conform to current political conventions – who don’t smoke, never say anything bigoted, and always recycle their yoghurt pots? Or who conform to our private code of behaviour – in which case, fiction writers might write for niche markets, their novels labelled “suitable for vegetarians” (no characters eat meat) or “does not contain nuts” (what a pity, a novel without nuts). Surely if fiction recorded the doings only of good campers who anguish about climate change and buy fair trade coffee, novels would be insufferably dull.(...)Goodness is not only boring but downright annoying. In fiction and reality both, multilingual, loftily-educated ponces on missions to save the rainforest are probably pains in the bum. Thus, however readily I might construct exemplars who pick up litter and volunteer at soup kitchens, this cheap courting of your approval might well backfire. Despite my heavy-handed stacking of the moral deck, you wouldn’t like them. Nick Hornby made exactly this point in his delightful novel How to Be Good, in which the main character’s determination to be virtuous – he gives away the family assets and invites homeless people to live in the house – is delectably repellent.

The real real thing

Sugary excerpt of the weekend from Elizabeth Lowry's review of Wendy Steiner's The Real Real Thing: The model in the mirror of art:

Today’s aesthetic controversies seem to turn specifically on the issues of truth-telling and the ethical treatment of the real in art. Oprah Winfrey’s indignation over authorial fraud can and often does make headlines – consider the furore when James Frey’s  account of his drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces (2003), and Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence (2008), were revealed to have been less than scrupulously factual. “Readers demand their money back for memoirs that lie; publishers rush to withdraw unsold copies from bookstores; editors, denying collusion with their fraudulent authors, are nevertheless fired for their credulity.” The real thing is no longer enough – our touchstone now is the real real thing.

Race and American delusions

I have a problem with Bill Benzon's post on Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad at the Valve in which he compares them to Ike Turner and Sam Philips and finishes by suggesting that the solution is to get beyond the boundaries of language. Sugary excerpt:

The point of this exercise, no, this demonstration, is that language and its reasonings and arguments cannot, in principle, encompass everything. That life itself is greater than language goes without saying – or does it? What matters is how we conduct ourselves around and about, in the shadow of, language.

Because I believe as Eluard that les mots ne mentent pas, I have a problem with  what Benzon is demonstrating.  The attempt should never be to get beyond the boundaries of language, but to acknowledge them and to break them down. 

I know I promise to stop bashing constantly Obama (I believe that I'm doing it rationally and analytically), but I believe that his 2008 campaign showed that Benzon is wrong and that America's problem with race isn't about its people not being able to get along, but rather about their need to believe that race is all encompassing and that  it is about something grand, when it is about petty stuff and about that itch that Benzon seems to have to want Achebe and Conrad get along.  It is far too obvious that Achebe didn't want to get along with Conrad, but needed to punch him in the gut to affirm his own existence and to define in his own terms what it meant or rather didn't mean to be 'african' (my contention is that it doesn't mean anything for Achebe has much more in common with Joseph Conrad than he does with Ferdinand Oyono).

In short, my point to Benzon, to America, and to Americans  is get over it already! Race isn't about race and instead of obsessing about getting along or pretending that you want to or that you do get out your own way and stop being so self-involved!

Philosophy can be literature

The sugary except on which I'm going to munch on to have a meaningful and productive weekend is from David Winters's review of Gary Gutting's on French philosophy, Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960:

It is perfectly possible to read works of philosophy as if they were works of literature. To read them without concern for their ‘truth content,’ attending instead to what leads them not to describe the world, but to create worlds, or to propose worlds at odds with our own. In the end, philosophy never really does succeed in describing anything. It tries to articulate what life is like, but it fails, at all times, in all places. This is the very thing that reveals and redeems it as literature.

Women, men, and writing about sex

Something about this passage by Monique Ruffey bugs me:

(...)sex is still riddled with social stigma and taboo. Church and state still patrol what is deemed OK, moral, loving and safe. Anyone who chooses to write about sex will attract stinging criticism from the moral right and so, relatively speaking, sexual memoirs are still rare. And they are mostly written by women.

Men, by and large, leave this subject alone. Somewhere it's a given that men don't have anything too reflective to say about sex, or they feel silenced by feminists. Where is the male Suzanne Portnoy, the male Melissa P? What men will write honestly about their highs and lows, their triumphs, their sexual sorrows? What man is brave enough to express himself freely about his desires? Few. My guess is that male sexuality has been so heavily associated with violence that men suffer an even stronger taboo than woman. Best keep quiet.

Really? I must be living  in a different planet than Roffey for it seems to me that the problem about sex or rather about your sex life is that you have to be able to view it about than a pornographic and a solely pleasurable/carnivorous experience, which makes it a challenge difficult for both sexes, but particularly for men. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

To stop reading fiction

The best sentences I read all weekend are from Philip Roth:

I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did. (...)I wised up ... ”

I find it difficult to stop reading Roth no matter how much he bugs me.

Fury!

Sugary excerpt of the best article I read last weekend, Amy Kazmin's portrait in the Financial times of Arundhati Roy:

(...) her fiction writing has been on the backburner, while she has dedicated herself to political activism, travelling to remote corners of the country, attending political meetings and writing essays on topics from India’s dam-building to its judicial corruption and its abuses in the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir. “You get drawn into a world where people realise, here is somebody who is not frightened of saying something. All of the last 11 years has been unplanned. It’s been a process of deepening your understanding,” she says.
In her political writing, Roy has been scathing in her description of India’s two-decade old economic liberalisation programme – which is widely credited with bringing unprecedented opportunities to many – and seemingly contemptuous of the emerging middle class.
Her diatribes have made her something of a hate figure for many Indian nationalists. There is also a feeling among a number of liberals and left-leaning activists, who have a concern for social justice – and for many of the issues she raises – that her strident polemics are too extreme. “I know I alienate people, but there isn’t any possibility of writing about these things where everybody is going to agree with you,” she says. “I am not scared of alienating the middle class. I am saying what I think. I know the entire establishment obviously disagrees with it, and would like me to shut up, or soften it or be more tactical, but I am saying things in a space that no one says.”
“When I write something, I have to spend a few days filtering out the fury,” she adds. “I don’t do anything to be deliberately provocative.”
Certainly there is plenty in India to be angry – even outraged – about. I ask tentatively whether she really feels that economic reforms have brought no benefits at all. I am thinking of the remote villages, and impoverished slum dwellers, now connected to a wider world by mobile phones. After a moment’s reflection, she answers.
“It’s as though you had this churning,” she says, slowly. “You had a feudal and very unequal society. In this churning, this thin milk separates into a thick layer of cream, and a lot of water that can be just slop. The thick layer of middle class that has been created becomes a great market. Suddenly, there are so many people who need cars and A/Cs and TV, and that becomes a universe of itself. Of course it looks great. Then there is this unseen thing that’s just being drifted off.”

Running away like Rimbaud

Quote of the day from Morgan Meis:

Rimbaud wrote his poetry of absolute modernity and then ran away, gave up writing completely, abandoning the very ground he begged the rest of us to defend.

I have ever been able to love or to even like Rimbaud because I was profoundly touched by Verlaine, whom I'm still under the illusion, was a woman.

Congo, Mobutu, Stendhal and authenticité

Sugar excerpt from VS Naipaul, which needs no commentary, although I have to say that it bugs me:

One day in Kinshasa I had the inspiration to leave the hotel and take a taxi to the university. They were very all very nice, very welcoming, although they had no idea who I was or what I did. And I thought then, here are all these very bright people, whose minds are going to be turned to lead very soon - this was in Mobutu's country, and they had to be turned to lead if they were to earn a living. And I wondered how this could be done. And I had a feeling that it was done through this old belief. And Mobutu gave to it a nice name, authenticité. There are these brilliant young people who would talk to you about Stendhal, something so far from their experience, and talking quite intelligently about it. And yet when you met them in their next incarnation as government officers, all that had gone away.

The insignificance of the writer

Shameless, but needed self-promotion. If you read French, you can read my latest interview here. 

Thanks to Idriss Linge. 

My reaction: I don't like to look at my navel.

Reading and sympathy

Quote of the day from Stephen Abell from his must-read essay on J.M. Coetzee and what he calls the limits of sympathy:

Reading is a test of our sympathetic abilities, our capacity to connect with the thoughts and feelings of someone else, and so stands for our ability to exist in, and respond to, a wider community than ourselves.

Multum in parvo

If you read French, you can read another review of my book, L'Empreinte des Choses Brisées by Jules Romuald Nkonlak. Didi I mention that I don't read review, I skim them and then I remind myself that I don't know everything about my book, which has a life and its own identity.

The N word and cleanliness

I agree with Roger Ebert on this:

Anyone offended by the use of that word the way it is used in Huckleberry Finn cannot read and possibly cannot think.
The word is spoken by an illiterate 11-year-old runaway on the Mississippi River of the mid-19th Century. He has been schooled by his society to regard the runaway slave Jim as a Nigger and a thief. Jim's crime: Stealing himself from his owner. Huck reasons his way out of ignorant racism and into enlightenment and grace. He makes that journey far in advance of many of his "educated" contemporaries. Part of reading the novel is learning to be alert about how the N-Word is used in that process.

In an outbreak of mealy-minded Political Correctness, an edition of Huckleberry Finn has now been published which meticulously replaces the word nigger with the word slave. The argument is often put forward that a young reader might be traumatized by finding a word in a 19th century novel that he hears a hundred times a day. If I were that young reader, I would be more disturbed by the notion that I was incapable of learning how and why it was used.

One of my favorite Eluard's quotes is, 'les mots ne mentent pas' (words don't lie). Nowadays, people have this childish notion that words are the problem when it is quite obvious that they are not. I'm wondering how did the apparent consensus that cleaning up language was the way to cleansing a society started and why too many believe that cleanliness is the surest way to Godliness as if people had to stop being imperfect. Is accepting that people are bad and can have disgusting thoughts and beliefs about one another really that unacceptable nowadays ? The answer seems to be yes, and it is a further proof of intelligence or rather common sense as Thomas Paine would say has lost a lot of ground .

Radio France Internationale

I appeared on a show called le débat africain (in French) on RFI in which I asserted that there isn't such a thing as Africanity. It is a position on which I will elaborate on December 13 when at last, I'm having, at the Lucernaire in Paris (7 pm), a soirée to present my book, L'Empreinte des Choses Brisées and of course to sign copies. So if you are in Paris or just want to pick a fight with me or just to listen to something fresh on identity, sexuality and les choses brisées, come and bring a friend.

 

1. La diaspora africaine aux Etats-Unis

(19:31)

2. La diaspora africaine aux Etats-Unis

(19:31)

Žižek's world

After reading Christian Lorentzen's account of a Žižek's signing in my village (Manhattan), I'm still wondering whether  he has become what he despises the most: a less posh version of BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy). The conclusion may be that one should solely read his work and shut down whatever else he does and says because it is meaningless theater. Sugary excerpt:

A long line of fans formed around the stage at Cooper Union to have Slavoj Zizek sign books. They rattled off their names for the philosopher's dedication.

"Ian," said one.

"Like the writer," said Mr. Zizek, "McEwan."

"Kelvin," said another.

"Like the stupid temperature."

"Austin," said a third.

"Like Texas."

"Anna," said a fourth, "with two n's. I'm from Denmark."

"Denmark," said Mr. Zizek. "I like Denmark because secretly I am a fascist. Keep the trains running on time. It's the only way to stop Hitler!"

"Gideon," said a fifth.

"He was a warrior. Paul Robeson, the greatest American leftist singer, has a song about him."

"Elias," said a sixth.

"Did you see the terrible movie Denzel Washington made about the Bible?" Mr. Zizek asked. "The Book of Eli?"

"Chris," said a seventh.

"Are you Christ without the t?"

The celebrity radical had just barreled through 90 minutes of his trademark political paradoxes, pulling his beard, wiping his brow and waving his fist in the air. "Today it is capitalism that is revolutionary. ... The impossible and the possible are exploding into excess. I am told that here in New York a man can have his penis cut in two. ... So you can do it with two women. You can achieve immortality. You can go into space. But maintaining a little bit of health care is impossible."

Virginia Wolf as a wuss

The sentence of the day is from Hilary Mantel's long article in the London Review of Books:

When Virginia Woolf’s doctors forbade her to write, she obeyed them. Which makes me ask, what kind of wuss was Woolf?

America, the problem state

Via Democracy in America, this interesting and pretentiously vacuous quote from Jonathan Franzen, which I need to find a way to read without hemorrhaging:

(....) America has emerged, even in its own estimation, as a problem state. That is, there are many criticisms one could make, as early as, well, our treatment of the Indians. It goes way back. And our long relationship with slavery—there have been some problems with the country at many points. And then the Cold War, we were certainly culpable. But the degree to which we are almost a rogue state, and causing enormous trouble around the world in our attempt to preserve our freedom to drive SUVs (...) It does make one wonder, what is it in the national character that is making us such a problem state? And I think a kind of mixed-up, childish notion of freedom—and perhaps, really, truly, who left Europe to go over there? It was all the malcontents, it was all the people who were not comfortable getting along with others.

Clearly, not all writers, whether or not they are good and thus given the presumption of intellectuality are great thinkers.  Nevertheless, it is disappointing to see evidence of their intellectual laziness.

Oedipus, guilt and fate

Sugary excerpt from J.M. Coetzee's review of Philip Roth's latest, Nemesis:

At the core of the Oedipus fable, and of the archaic Greek worldview enshrined in it, lies a question foreign to the modern, post-tragic imagination. How does the logic of justice work when vast universal forces intersect the trajectories of individual human lives? In particular, what is to be learned from the fate of a man who unwittingly carried out the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, a man who did not see until he was blind?

To respond that for one man to unwittingly (“by accident”) kill his own father and then unwittingly (“by chance”) marry his own mother is so statistically rare a sequence of events—even rarer than bearing the plague while seeming healthy—that it can hold no general lesson, or, to put it another way, that the laws of the universe are probabilistic in nature, not to be disconfirmed by a single aberrant individual case—to respond in this way would to Sophocles seem like evading the question. Such a man lived: his name was Oedipus. He experienced such a fate. How should his fate be understood?

I've always wondered whether guilt infects one's life no matter whether s/he was conscious of the morality her/his actions. Camus answered my question by asserting that human beings are solely guilty of their ignorance. It is because guilt isn't the same as responsibility that fate is mostly about faith. C'est simple mais c'est vrai.

The illusory 'we'

Problematic words from Lindsay Johns to defend a worthy cause:

Parts of the black community, however, continue to rail against the whiteness of the canon and try to promote second or third tier black writers such as novelist
E Lynn Harris or poet James Weldon Johnson. They are abetted by trendy educationalists in the establishment who feel acute post-colonial guilt and wish to show their anti-racist credentials by stressing the “diversity” of works taught in schools.

As black people, we cannot change history, and should not try to reject knowledge because of its provenance. It would be far better to focus our attention on understanding the atrocities that have been committed in the name of the canon, or why the humanities have, on the evidence of history, so comprehensively failed to humanise.

We should accept the truth of history, which is that white men have dominated intellectual life in the west. Let’s not resist this; let’s run with it. It is western history that has indelibly shaped our consciousness. We live in Britain, not Timbuktu. We might hail from Africa or the Caribbean, but our lives, for better or for worse, are lived in the modern western world, and shaped by the traditions that have moulded it. If we acquaint ourselves with the grammars of the west, it will indubitably help us to understand it and then duly succeed here.

Hum, there isn't such a thing as a black people for experience. history, and the present show that race is only an artificial and  unifying force in societies where the message, because of the past or inculture, is that people's identities are shaped by the color of their skin and not by the reactions that people have to it thus conditioning or rather 'blackening' their experience. Blackness as whiteness is a blank slate where people put everything that they want not to have to justify their choices and to avoid the eternal burden that all human beings must bear the responsibility for their essence. It might be harsh to say it so bluntly but a writer who put  'race' before her/his art isn't a write for literature when it is about solely about color is denatured and is as artistic and sublime as junk food..

Arousing literature

Mary Elisabeth Williams poses the question of the day:

Is it entirely possible that someone out there reading a fictional account of a rape could become aroused?

Is it just me, but doesn't that sound like a limited question, one that makes two gross assumptions, the first being that sexual pleasure is always pornographic and  the second that the only trouble with rape is the lack of jouissance or just enjoyment?

I have to say that I'm not convinced that a novel can be pornographic and artistic or that if it makes rape pornographic, it is ought to be placed in the cemetery of forbidden books.

Mean writers

The sentence of the day:

The irony is that writers are generally meaner to other writers than critics are.

I would say that Tahar Ben Jelloun's criticism of Michel Houellebecq's recent 'novel' La Carte et le Territoire proves the veracity of this sentence. I will add also that it is possible to be ferociously mean and to be on point and pertinent.

Cultural imperialism within America

I agree with Pankaj Mishra on this:

Edmund Wilson once warned against "the sometimes all too conscious American literary self-glorification which is a part of our American imperialism". But there is more reason to be wary of the cultural imperialism within America that, ignoring the country's lively diversity of artists and genres, erects singular monuments to American "greatness".

I only wonder the dictatorship of taste in America and elsewhere isn't due to the fact that the term culture has lost its meaning. My point isn't yet another one deploring elitism, but rather that elitism precisely is as intolerant of different and of peculiarities as what it despises the most, that is the commercial and the popular.

The difficulty of androgyny and gender-neturality in literature

Fascinating:

(...) today the “dominant masculine” no longer applies in grammar, and still no gender-neutral pronoun thrives. It turns out that it’s not just the conservatism of the pronoun system that’s blocking the gender-neutral pronoun. It’s also the fact that the speakers of English seem content to muddle along without this particular innovation. Even before the generic masculine started its decline, singular they was always an option, both in speech and, despite the tongue-clicking of purists, in serious writing as well. More recently, writers seeking to avoid the generic masculine have been plugging in the coordinate he or she, him or her, his or her(s), sometimes choosing slashed forms instead, he/she, him/her, his/her(s), despite long-standing objections that such constructions are cumbersome, especially when they’re repeated several times.

In fact, despite the almost universal condemnation of the coordinate he or she by supporters of gender-neutral pronouns, the rule books now opt for he or she and not an invented word to replace the generic he. Students who once were taught that the masculine pronoun must always be used in cases of mixed or doubtful gender are now taught instead to use coordinate forms, not for gender balance or grammatical precision, but simply because that’s the new rule. Those writers who question the rule, who realize that multiple he-or-she’s just don’t make for readable prose, won’t seek out a new gender-neutral pronoun. Instead they’ll recast some sentences as plural, and for the rest they’ll just take their chances with singular they. After all, if you, which is also gender neutral, can serve both for singular and plural, why can’t they do the same? In any case, after more than 100 attempts to coin a gender-neutral pronoun over the course of more than 150 years, thon and its competitors will remain what they always have been, the words that failed.

The issue of gender irks me less in English than in French for I have made the recent realization that it is easier to be gender-neutral in the former than in the latter. I had always assumed with foolish pride that French was a less sexist and gender-oriented language than English. My opinion changed when I decided that two of the main characters, Andrea and Leah, of my novel, L’Empreinte des Choses Brisées, weren't going to have a gender..I had read and loved Jeanette Winterson's Written on the body and thought unconscionably that it would interesting to try to write a story in French with gender-neutral characters without the issue of gender-neutrality being the main aspect of the story. I didn't realize how difficult that decision would make the story very challenging to write. In French, masculine pronouns are gender-neutral for characters are presumed to be male if the writer doesn't use the female pronoun elle or doesn't assert their gender. My point isn't very compelling, but it is that French is such a specific and a precise language that gender-neutrality is almost impossible to achieve because masculinity is assumed not only to be the norm, but to be all encompassing.  To be frank, I'm not sure that I succeeded in making my characters gender-neutral for most people so far who have read the book assumed with a disturbing certainty that my characters can only be women in spite of the fact that I keep asserting that I don't know their gender, for they never told me what it was. In short, French makes androgyny and gender-neutrality difficult,.

As Eluard, I believe that words don't lie and that it has forced me to realize that in fact, language says a lot more than it should about gender and its place within a society. The argument isn't that language frames one's mind or conditions one's thinking, but rather that it mirrors most societal conditions and what has always been believed about gender.

Naipaul and writing about 'Africa'

Excerpt of Aminatta Forna's review of V.S. Naipaul's latest The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African belief in the Guardian:

It is a quest through the continent for the spirit of African belief, the belief systems that preceded the arrival of Christianity and Islam – which is very much in keeping with the legacy of Joseph Conrad, who is referenced several times in the book. Already this feels cliched and tiresome; one yearns for the day when an author from outside can approach Africa without invoking the "heart of darkness" mythology. In 1975, Chinua Achebe published an essay attacking Conrad's best-known work as racist and already the novelist Robert Harris has described The Masque of Africa as "toxic".

This review makes me feel uncomfortable for two reasons. The first reason is that again, it is assumed that there is a such a thing as an "Africa" populated by Africans, with a particular identity and beliefs, which make them atypical or rather which explain why their continent is conventionally believed to be unmodern or in the back of the train of civilization. The second reason is that it seems that too writer who wants to write about the African continent like to make it feel as if it is an unique undertaking that must be judge by different standards and that their work must be judge with compassion and while having a forgiving consideration that they are doing something too difficult by going to the barbarians. The trouble is that reviewers and critiques enable them more often than not and judge their work as if it is different, out of the margins of literature because the subject matter is particular and so dark and foreign.

Since having my book published, I have realized that in France, in particular, it assumed that Africa and Africans are so different and atypical that their writings have to be belittled or graded with a curve and that more importantly, they are only entitled to talk about darkness, africanity, colonialism, and post-colonialism. The trouble comes when you refuse to fit that mold...I have wondered whether Conrad's The Heart of Darkness would be such as classic if it had been written by one of the 'savages.' Culturalism is destroying literature.

Remembering before writing

Sugary excerpt of the day from Bill Benzon on the "art" of remembering before writing:

If our memories for life events are keyed to neurochemistry, then how can we possibly remember the events of our life at any time and place? The world of a person who is ravenously hungry is different from the world of that same person when he or she is consumed with sexual desire. Yet it is the same person in both cases. And the apple, which was so insignificant when sexually hungry—to the point where that apple wasn't part of the world at all—becomes a central object in the world once sexual desire has been satisfied and hunger asserts itself. Regardless of the person's biochemical state, it is still the same apple.

I have to say that although I trust my memories, I always know that what I remember more vividly is how what happened made me feel.

The only thing that I had to remember while writing my first novel, L'empreinte des choses brisées was not to use my memories to impose feelings, views, actions, or even a story of my characters, but rather to let what I remember bring me closer to my characters. It is for this reason that I like to say that my novel is a true story, not an autobiographical one.

A place that lets you breathe

Sugary excerpt is from  Harry Eyres on Artistic inspiration:

Artists, and others, are reluctant nowadays to talk about inspiration. It sounds highfalutin and vague, like some mysterious essence which floats above the earth. But inspiration in its deepest sense, far from being vague or abstract, is very intimate, physical and personal. There is nothing more intimate, physical and personal than breathing, or breathing in, which is the literal meaning of inspiration. An inspiring place is one that lets you breathe.

Paris lets me breathe, especially because it is the place where you can find the only person that marries perfection and chaos.

Eternal damnation

Sugary excerpt of the day from Carole Enahoro:

If you write political fiction then you must expect complete strangers to grill you on any subject that crosses the collective transom. And if you’re carrying any African DNA, you’re doomed to read newspapers on a daily basis.
I noted this with the sad life of Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s 1986 Nobel Prize-winning writer. His eyes are hooded with fatigue. For any incident on which every vital and important person in Nigeria has already commented, the media hurries off to Wole for a quick quote. He is the voice of progressive Africa, whether or not progressive Africans agree with him.

Projection and 'American racism'

Interesting bit from Bill Benzon's essay, the best thing I've read this weekend, on the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

European-Americans, some more than others, and some little if at all, have used African-America as a means of discovering and acting out aspects of their own desires and needs which they cannot deal with directly.  Such psychological maneuvering is quite common on an individual level.  American culture has made such projection a part of its collective culture.

The damage of Rambo

Telling Story from Jacques Roubaud (h/t: Lee Rourke) demonstrating that war movies and the media which glorify violence by making it seem as wars or violent acts were part of a video game can damage our understanding of history:

I met Primo Levi once. He was a friend of Italo Calvino, who was a member of the Oulipo. We were both at a meeting in Torino after Calvino’s early death; it was a few months before he himself died. He was a very nice man, very soft-spoken. At dinner he recounted a terrible experience he had just had. He had been invited to a high school in Rome to speak about his experience during the war, and he said that the students could not understand why he and his friends had not taken the Nazis’ guns and killed them. They knew only the Rambo movies. He could not make them understand that it had been impossible to resist. A few months later, I heard that he had committed suicide.

The world has changed...to believe it read my poem

Funny quote from Alice Walker who is so confident in the majesty of talent that she believes that her poem could make the people who had trouble believing in Obama's election believe:

With the election of a black man to the presidency of the United States, the world has changed. Such an event was unthinkable for many people until it actually occurred. For some, there is an unwillingness to believe this historic turn in North America’s affairs is real. They need a poem that reminds them that disbelieving in a new reality can mean missing it altogether; this would be a waste and a tragedy for those who could benefit from shifting their understanding of what America is or can become. I was asked by a newspaper, I don’t recall which or whether it was printed, to write a poem for the inauguration; my mind was very much on those who, from disbelief, could not rejoice.

I'm speechless !

The novel and absolute intimacy

Paul Auster on the novel:

a novel is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. No other art can do that. No other art can capture the essential inwardness of human life.

Foreignness and the marketability of fiction

Astute observation from Russell Smith on the difficulties of naming local places and to sell books in America:

When situating fiction in your hometown, you risk relying on street names as a kind of shorthand, a code for those in the know who will immediately situate the characters and action in terms of social class and ambience. But that relies on what’s called extratextual knowledge on the part of the reader. I know Queen and Broadview as rather seedy, for example. I have done this rather lazily in my own fiction: I have mentioned Yorkville, a shopping district in Toronto, as shorthand for rich, which is a message lost to anyone who doesn’t know Toronto. I have had editors suggest I take out street names to make the city a less specific one: If you replace College Street with “a street of cafés near the large university” you sum up the atmosphere of the place in a way that’s accessible for a foreigner.
But then you also lose a certain amount of pride. Let’s be honest: We all know the primary reason for such erasures. It’s to make the book more saleable to Americans. We all want our books and films and TV shows to be published in the United States, and we know a large proportion of their entertainment-consuming population is not interested in looking beyond their borders. The story might be set in Ottawa, and it might be recognizable to Canadians as Ottawa, but if the Americans think it’s a nameless northeastern U.S. city, they’re more likely to buy it, so let’s not scare them off by naming it. Toronto in particular is a good stand-in for urban U.S. life anywhere, as we’ve seen in a thousand movies; you just blur out the CN Tower and you’ve got instant everywhere.
It’s pretty common to run into Americans, even at literary conferences, who love Alice Munro and who have not yet realized her Midwestern settings are in a foreign country. She doesn’t always identify her settings as Canadian, but one does recognize them if one is from here. It’s an extra layer of meaning that’s available to you, but you can be moved by the story without it.

I wonder whether what Smith is talking about with regards to American taste hasn't everything to do with the fact that Canada isn't exotic enough to Americans to read its literature and to be engaged by the foreignness of its context. Moreover, my sense is that for too many Americans, Canada is lesser America, a country that wishes it were the United States, in other words the main difference between Canada and America in the 'American' mind is power, which makes the most powerful nation, the better country.
I suspect that Belgian, Luxembourger, and Swiss writers who write in France have the same concern when it comes to their French audience which in my opinion would be more open to reading about London, New York or even Bamako than about Chaleroi or Berne. 

Freedom et liberté

Quote of the end of the afternoon from Jean-Paul Sartre:

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you

The intolerance of the liberal literati

Pertinent observations from Terry Eagleton:

For a long time, they were quite divergent politically: Hitchens was still some kind of socialist and Amis was vehemently anti-communist in an uninteresting, cold war kind of way. But they've since converged. And now they're old cronies backing each other up - instant responses to attacks on the other.
I'm interested in the way a whole stratum of the liberal literati (Rushdie, to some extent Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, obviously Amis and Hitchens) - the very people you'd have expected to be guardians of the liberal flame of tolerance and understanding - have, at the very first assault, rushed into these caricatured postures driven by panic. I'm very struck by how those who are making ugly, illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west are precisely the sort of literary and liberal characters from whom you'd expect more imagination, openness and sensitivity.

My opinion on the matter is that it's too challenging for the members of what Eagleton calls the liberal liberati to remain liberal all the time and to remain radicals, bold and fresh writers. It helps when you write to be angry and to feel the need to aim it intolerantly at somebody.

Nonfiction as something other than the real thing

I disagree with Rob Nixon on this:

Nonfiction has long been treated as the lutefisk on the literary menu, unlikely to be the special of the day. The genre emits a whiff of the déclassé, served (especially in literature departments) with a garnish of condescension. The problem starts with the word: Like "childless" (why not "child-free"?), "nonfiction" packs a lot of social judgment. Nonfiction may be real, but in matters of creativity, it's not quite the real thing.

I disagree with Nixon because it is my conviction that, although nonfiction may not be considered as totally literary , it has become in recent years especially since we are settled within the Me age as the real thing, as something that shows that a writer isn't just a self-indulgent recluse finding ecstasy within her/his imagination, but a real hard worker who just like a journalist investigates things and make sure that s/he describes what happened and not what s/he would like to have happened. All we have to do is to remember what happened to James Frey and others to realize that people hold nonfiction as the best category of literature because they believe that it is or at least ought to be truthful absolutely.

Loss, transition, tradition, and modernity

Deep thought of the day from Chaim Potok:

I think that the people who were in possession of the tools to move into modernity are gone

Trouver Derrida

Sugary excerpt from David Kaufmann's review of the latest biography of Jacques Derrida, Who was Derrida: an Intellectual Biography by David Mikics.

Derrida constantly took contrarian, if not outright rebellious, stances. He did not like assuming the protective coloring of his surroundings. When he arrived in the early 1950s at the most elite of French universities, the École Normale Supérieure, he chafed against the Marxist orthodoxy of his professors and refused to join the cult of Jean-Paul Sartre—a philosopher whose influence he called “nefarious” and “catastrophic.” Derrida did not follow the path of political engagement favored by his colleagues. Rather, by close and often inventive readings of major texts from the philosophical and literary traditions, he sought to blow up philosophical certainty.
But there were limits to his subversion. Mikics locates one of the major fault lines in Derrida’s thought in the philosopher’s prophetic tones, his “fondness for apocalyptic drama,” which works against his reluctance to imagine the apocalypse itself. According to Mikics, Derrida might have aspired to the end of Western metaphysics and he might have adopted the language and some of the practices of the avant-garde, but he could not run full-out at the future. He wrote like a radical in favor of the moderate.
Derrida’s split persona—revolutionary and ultimately conservative at the same time—goes a long way toward explaining his influence in the American academy. His insistence on close reading made him congenial for literature departments, and his pronouncements made close readings appear consequential. What is more, Derrida’s timing was perfect. His reputation in the United States grew at that point when being a hippie was not a political statement but a “lifestyle choice” and when many of the energies of the late ’60s had become merchandised or bogged down in economic stagnation. At a time of retrenchment, Derrida promised a kind of liberation that did not depend on ethnic or gender identity, a freeing of thought that was intellectually disruptive and could, if need be, serve politically progressive ends.

I have to admit that I have never know what to make of Derrida and Deconstruction because they never got to me. Reading Derrida's felt to me like watching Ingmar Bergman's movies, LI know that I'm watching something that is artistic and philosophical, but I'm unsure about the reasons why it should matter and therefore the question of relevance becomes both an obsession and a distraction. That said, I have always like watching Derrida's speak especially when he isn't given a lecture, because then one gets the sense of somebody who is totally caught up in his work and that must have been a great teacher. 

Camus, Sartre and Moral fetishism

In his indispensable article in the Philosophers Magazine  on the fetishism of morality, Jonathan Rée has a section on the quarrel that ended Camus and Sartre's friendship:

Exactly a hundred years after Mill’s attack on Whewell, Jean-Paul Sartre launched a similar assault on his old friend Albert Camus. His target was Camus’s book L’homme révolté (The Rebel, published in 1951), which argued that the “prophetic dream of Marx” had led directly to the creation of a “terrorist state”. As editor of the magazine Les Temps modernes, Sartre assigned the book to his colleague Francis Jeanson, who denounced Camus as a self-hating liberal “humanist” who wanted to substitute a lachrymose “red-cross morality” for serious political analysis. Camus wrote a feeble response which appeared alongside Jeanson’s hatchetry in August 1952, and Sartre weighed in by accusing Camus of a monstrous form of racism – the “racism of moral beauty”. Sartre was prepared, up to a point, to acknowledge the horror of the Soviet concentration camps – they were, he said, “a challenge for us all” – but unlike Camus he was not prepared to make common cause with bourgeois Commentators who were seizing on them with glee in order to “give themselves a good conscience”. Sartre was horrified by “the ease with which you handle your indignation,” he told Camus. “Is it my fault if these procedures remind me of the criminal court?” he inquired. “Perhaps you should have been appointed as Chief Prosecutor of the Republic of Beautiful Souls.”
Sartre’s belligerence is appalling; but when he talks about the temptation of casting oneself as “Chief Prosecutor for the Republic of Beautiful Souls” he surely has a point. And Camus, though deeply hurt by the attack, tacitly acknowledged that there was some truth in it. His late book La Chute is a first-person story of a drifter in an Amsterdam bar, who tells us how he fled in disgust from his former existence as a fashionable Parisian lawyer who specialised in the defence of widows, orphans, refugees and anyone else who gave off the sweet odour of victimhood. He had been offered public honours, but turned them down, he recalls, “with a quiet dignity in which I found my true reward”. He began each working day by giving alms to a beggar or two; then he would earn the gratitude of another fragrant victim with a heart-stopping speech in court, and in the evenings he would relax with his elegant literary friends, complacently denouncing “the heartlessness of the ruling class and the hypocrisy of our politicians”.
Gradually he came to be revolted by his own precious sanctity. (“Just think how many crimes have been committed because the perpetrator could not bear to be in the wrong.”) He gave up the glamour of human rights activism in favour of a chastened practice of forgiveness, describing himself as a juge-pénitent, a penitent judge or perhaps a recovering morality-fetishist. “I favour every theory that denies human innocence, and every practice based on the presumption of guilt,” he says: “I am, dear boy, a disenchanted partisan of slavery.” And when he gets to the end he turns to us, his listeners, and enters a gentle plea: “I hope at least,” he says, “that you are a little less pleased with yourself than you were.”
It was of course leftism that provided the context of this famous quarrel; and it seems to me that leftism, together with politics, has been a casualty of the fetishism of morality.

 I have been more of a Camusian than a Sartrian because that I have always admired the fact that although Camus agreed mostly with Sartre that Marxism was "l'horizon indépassable de notre temps" (the inescapable philosophy of our time), he was unwilling to get blood on his pen to defend it. He was also reluctant to forgive the left's moral contradictions by using the pretext that the end justifies the means and that since the ends of the left were just, it was free to use unjust means to achieve them. I believe that the reason that pushed Sartre to pick a fight with Camus after the publication of L' Homme Révolté was simply because it was his most moral work. In that masterful essay, Camus affirms that existence doesn't absolutely precede essence for some human tendencies exist before the beginning of one's existence that make the obligation to make moral decisions even greater and more fundamentally that makes it necessary to human being to refuse to be a God, to fetishize morality, to transcend it in order to accept to be people. Sartre wanted to be a God because he needed to be right absolutely.

Ayn Rand's demons

Cathy Young in the Globe and Mail on what she calls the darker sides of Ayn Rand:

(...) Ms. Rand's work also has a darker, more disturbing aspect – one that, unfortunately, is all too good a fit for this moment in America's political life. That is her intellectual intolerance and her tendency to demonize her opponents. Speaking through her hero John Galt, Ms. Rand declared, “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.” She lambasted free-market theorists such as Friedrich A. Hayek for their lack of purity in allowing the government a legitimate role in alleviating poverty and its effects. In her novels, supporters of various forms of collectivism – moochers and looters – are shown as acting by stealth to take over and corrupt society and culture.
Ms. Rand's detractors have often branded her a fascist. The label is unfair, but her work does have shades of a totalitarian or dictatorial mentality. To refute this charge, Ms. Rand's defenders point to her explicit statements that force is acceptable only in self-defence. Yet her fiction sometimes seems to contradict this principle.
Particularly troubling is a passage in Atlas Shrugged in which bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance lead to a deadly train wreck. Ms. Rand sarcastically notes that many people would regard the dead passengers as innocent victims of a tragedy and then, in a series of brief character sketches, endeavours to show that they were far from innocent: All had benefited from evil government programs, promoted evil political or philosophical ideas, or both. Especially chilling is Ms. Rand's casual mention of the fact that one of these evildoers, a bureaucrat's wife, is travelling with her three young children.
Ayn Rand does not advocate these people's murder, yet she clearly suggests they had it coming. Both in Atlas Shrugged and in her nonfiction essays, political and ideological debates are treated as wars with no innocent bystanders.

Americans almost always have trouble accepting that the people they idealized can be complex figures instead of just being people whose purity would force the Vatican should offer them  up for sainthood. That said, I think that Young's point about war and innocence is both poignant and relevant because it may explain the reason why so many Rand's true believers are never troubled by the violent inequalities of liberal capitalism whitewashing them with the assertion that life is Hobbesian and there is nothing that even politics can do or should attempt to do. In any case, the point is that Ayn Rand's work is relevant, but also limited because she was such a defender for the market that she was unwilling to even acknowledge that its imperfections were great enough that it had to be addressed by society not just through charity, but politics and yes, Government. For after, having a Government who actually focuses on what it can fix instead of managing people's lives and making them happy cannot be proof of the beginning of the Apocalypse.

The origins of Romance

Sugary excerpt from Carolyne Larrington's piece in the Times Literary Supplement on Mediaval Romance and literature:

Romance developed first in French as a mirror in which a European warrior-caste saw itself reflected as a courtly and chivalric aristocracy whose pursuit of honour was tempered by attentiveness to women, ritualized fighting with members of the same class, and a determination to face every danger.

That is just so surprising !!!

The globalization of literature

I agree with Tim Parks on this  (hat tip : Amtava Kumar) even though the same realizations take me some place else:

As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go away from it than toward it. However, more and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.
In recent months authors in Germany, France and Italy—all countries with large and well-established national readerships—have expressed to me their disappointment at not having found an English language publisher for their works; interestingly, they complain that this failure reflects back on their prestige in their home country: if people don’t want you elsewhere you can’t be that good. Certainly, in Italy where I live, an author is only thought to have arrived when he is published in New York. To appreciate how much things have changed one only need reflect how little it would have dented the reputations of Zola or Verga had they not achieved immediate publication in London.

The key point here is that globalization has widened not only the literary market, but it has also  shrunk it in the sense that taste has been homogenized and diversity hollywoodized. "International" writers write thinking about what they hope would be the english translation of their work and their "foreign" audience. In the Time of Zola and of Verga, writers didn't have the pressure to sell and more importantly, they didn't have the example of some of their peers who became incredibly financially successfully and widely influential by giving the masses what they want: "fast literature."

Plagiarism as a disease

Mary Beard makes a thought-provoking point about plagiarism:

(...)Yes it is possible to plagiarise without realising that you have. And no, fear of plagiarism should not stop you talking to fellow students about your work, so long as you are sensible.
It all made plagiarism sound like a nasty disease you might pick up without knowing -- but one that shouldn't stop ordinary social contact (so long as you dont share a tooth brush or anything silly like that.
And after all, as one of my colleagues pointed out, "plagiarism" actually sounds like a disease; "cheating" doesn't.

What I'm wondering is how does one prove that plagiarism is unconscious or accidental, I have the strong suspicion that it depends on the status /social condition/likability of the "plagiarist."

Reading lousy books

Over at Language Hat, it's interesting to see that  there can be a point, for some,  to reading lousy books:

I'm reading a lousy Iraqi novel called Papa Sartre (a 2009 translation of the 2001 original); it's only 178 pages long but feels like War and Peace, and I'm skimming more and more as I zip through its repetitive and heavy-handed mockery of schemers, ne'er-do-wells, and fake philosophers. Why do I keep reading, you ask? Because I'm fascinated with Baghdad, as I am with all ancient cities, and it's rare to read fiction set there.

Reading to me is like eating, it is as difficult for me to get through a lousy book as it is to get through a lousy meal just to experience something else. I am reminded of American tourists who force themselves to eat frog logs or escargots just to say that they experience French cuisine, but who have to fill themselves with French wine to force their stomach to accept what they consider filth.

The age of Botulism

Scott McLemee whose writings are addictive has an interesting take on Bernard-Henri Lévy and the now famous Botul affair:

A friend who has read La vie sexuelle tells me that the author’s tongue is very conspicuously in his cheek. That BHL cited it as a serious work of scholarship would strongly suggest that he has an employee or two toiling in the erudition mines for him. If so, it is an interesting question whether the person who actually read Botul misunderstood the nature of the book -- or passed along the citation as an act of sabotage. Either way, it seems like a fireable offense. (Of course, nothing like that ever happens in the academic world.)
Finally,the incident poses an important question about intellectual history. Michel Foucault once said of Gilles Deleuze that his friend’s work was so important that one day the century might be known as Deleuzean. The convergence of judgments between Bernard-Henri Lévy and Jean-Baptiste Botul regarding Kant has important implication -- even in the United States, where BHL has, of late, been vigorously colonizing the media system. He is a regular guest on Charlie Rose, his articles appear at The Huffington Post, and Random House is publishing another of his books in a few months.
Doesn’t BHL’s prominence reveal something about the nature of the period? Are we not living, perhaps, in the age of Botulism?

The answer to Mclemee's last question is of course yes. BHL is going to be at ease and like a fish in water in the America media world because nobody will ever require him to show more than photogenic flair and frenched fluff. America doesn't really take intellectualism seriously for it always assumed that if it isn't accessible, it isn't worth much and that it is too elitist. The trouble with BHL is that his admirers are too in love with him to criticize his tendency to take up easy causes and to dumb down complex subjects and that his dandysm impedes his detractors from taking him seriously. That's said, BHL is being the emblem of our age of Botulism, he is nevertheless useful like a burger from McDonald's. What would America,  our world be without fast food?

The mediocrity of terror

Sugary excerpt from  Costica Bradatan's review of Herta Müller's The Appointment in the Globe and Mail:

Terror can be mediocre, even idiotic, yet omnipresent. Terror can be terribly banal, utterly un-Romantic, but never-ending. Terror is when the secret police persuade your best friend to inform on you; when objects start moving around your room in your absence; when the secret police interrogator tells you, right before you leave his office after a day-long interrogation, that “accidents do happen,” or when your friends start committing (poorly) staged suicides.
That's why Herta Müller's work is so important: It maps out, with surgical precision, this mediocre yet sinister face of European totalitarianism, which is something that has been largely unaccounted for. Her novels document the oppressive fears and anxieties of a world turned upside-down, a world where the secret police do not necessarily kill you, but mess up your life enough to make you lose your mind.

The intellectual appeal of Nazism

Quote of the morning from Max Dunbar's review of Emmanuel Faye's book Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy:

Writers and thinkers still alive after the fall of the regime were confronted with that ultimate question: what did you do in the war? Academic supporters of Nazism could see several ways to postwar respectability. They could plead indulgence. It must have be easy in the mid-thirties to get caught up in the propaganda whirl of it all: tomorrow belongs to me! Alternatively, one could plead cowardice or pragmatism. Many had to make compromises to spare themselves and to protect family and friends.
The mistake is to see fascism as strictly a yob phenomenon that addresses the short-term frustrations of the poor and ignorant. The mistake is to believe that it cannot possibly appeal to educated men and women. Yet even before Hitler’s takeover there were true believers inside the academy’s lustrous gates. No one now remembers Schmitt, Wolf and Rosenberg but Martin Heidegger continues to be read, studied and quoted.

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