The novel is a bourgeois art because it gives itself time to play, and in so doing loses itself in the  anguish of its own dreams.

 

            I. On the Pathetic Condition of the Novel in Our Time

            To begin these reflections, I want to quote a passage from one of the great novels of the past: Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste.

            Where?--Where?  Reader you are of a rather cumbersome curiosity! By the Devil what does it matter?   Even if I were to tell you that it was in Pontoise or in Saint-Germain or in Notre-Dame de Lorette or Saint-Jacques de Compostelle would you be better off? If you insist, I will tell you that they were going towards –yes, why not? – towards an immense castle, on the frontispiece of which was written: I belong to no one and I belong to everyone.  You were already here before entering, and you will still be here after departing. [my translation]

            In Jacques le Fataliste Diderot creates a space never before seen in the landscape of the novel: a timeless stage without scenery (not unlike that of the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett) where his characters function more as voices than as full-fledged personalities.  Listening to Jacques and his Master talk, one always has the feeling that they are talking from inside a book rather than from reality.  I know of no opening of a novel more engaging, more fascinating, and more self-reflexive than that of Jacques le Fataliste:

It is certainly the playful self-reflexiveness of Jacques le Fataliste that makes of this novel the great fun book that it is, and this because Diderot not only meddles with the text but also offers the reader the possibility of participating in the fiction:  "No, no.  Of all the different abodes possible, which I have just enumerated, choose the one most appropriate to the present situation."  Or even better, the author seduces the reader into the interplay of self-reflexiveness while pretending to be annoyed by the reader's impatience, in the passage I already quoted:

Where?--Where?  Reader, you are of a rather cumbersome curiosity!  By the Devil what does it matter?

            Clearly, Diderot, like Sterne and numerous other great novelists after him, understood that the novel is very much like the inscription on the frontispiece of the imaginary castle he invents on the spot:  the novel belongs to no one and it belongs to everyone.  We (as readers) were here before entering the book and we will still be here after closing it.  This suggests that the process of reading a novel can be measured by the reader's willingness to engage -- or let himself be engaged by -- the self-reflexiveness of the text.  Or as Flann O'Brien puts it in At-Swim-Two-Birds (another outrageously self-reflexive novel): " ...a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader can regulate at will the degree of his credulity."  In this respect, the reader can be fascinated either by the tale only (which sends him back to his own reality) or by the telling of the tale (which keeps him inside the fiction).

 

             Can it be said then that by denouncing the fraudulence of a novel which tends to totalize existence and misses its multi-dimensionality, the critical work frees us from the illusion of realism?  I rather believe that it encloses us in it.  Because the goal remains the same: it is always a question of expressing, of translating something which is already there – even if to be already there, in this new perspective, consists paradoxically in not being there.  In other words, the novel, in a sense, cannot escape the double-headed monster of realism.  This mortgage weighs upon it since it’s origin, since the period when for justifying itself of the suspicion of frivolity, it had to present itself as a means of knowledge--and not only since the 19^th century.  The history of  the novel is--one is forced to admit--nothing else but the succession of its efforts to represent--or rather appresent--a  reality which always evades, always substitutes finer mirrors for vulgar mirrors, more selective mirrors.  But, in another sense, the novel is nothing else but a denunciation of its own existence, of the illusion that animates it. 

 

            All great novels are critical novels, which, under the pretense of telling a story, of bringing characters to life, of interpreting situations, slide under our eyes the mirage of a tangible form.

 

             All fictitious work forms a block: Nothing can be taken away from it nor can a single word be changed.  That is what makes of the novel a lure.

 

            We think we are going to find in the novel the expression of our unity, whereas in fact it only manifests the desire of it.  We believe, as we are relating ourselves, that we are going to discover, to uncover that being that we are already.  But that being, that somebody exists in the work only.  It is the product of it and not the source.  And this is because the essence of a literary discourse--that is to say a discourse fixed once and for all [a discourse that delights in its own form like fire--as Blake put it] is to find its own point of reference, its own rules of organization in itself, and not in the real or imaginary experience on which it rests. 

 

            Through all the detours that one wishes, the subject who writes will never seize himself in the novel – he will only seize the novel which, by definition, excludes him!

 

             To write a novel is a perilous and absorbing adventure.  One never knows in advance where one is going, and if one will reach the good port.  As a proof of this, the difficulty one has to finish a novel, with the customary necessity of a long interruption [even a regression] along the way. 

            The need to write a novel arises from a triggering, sometime a musical mood [mood indigo], a reverie  whose inclination follows the course of a moment of historical instability, or of an arbitrary encounter with a landscape--or with a human being.

             This act of writing a novel is not without danger: false souvenirs, fake emotions and images that the story will have brought forth will become henceforth a sterile field of words.

             Wild lines of words will cross the sheets of paper obeying only their own furor.

            Words will gather together, rush together into certain regions of the paper, small fields of forces will localize themselves--eddies, knots, crests, contours of words, spontaneous designs of signs climbing up and down the pages in mad laughter.

            There will be no moment when everything is in place.  When the accumulation of words will have reached a point of saturation.  When all that remains to be done would be to set the final period.  To end it all.  To say the story is finished.  For in fact, there will always be more words.  Words!  That great pell-mell Babel of words that make a novel.  There is no law, no order that says to the writer:  Here and Now you must stop.  Not a word more!  The writer can always go on, but there is always the risk [but that risk was there from the beginning] that one more word may be too much, one more word may destroy it all, may cancel the whole story, may force the whole story down towards an end!

            The writing of a novel has its particular economy.  It answers to a lack--a dissatisfaction that demands to be fulfilled.

             The subject of the book inhabits the writer, becomes part of his substance.  An object of desire rather than a clearly defined project.  And it is the tension of the fable in search of its incidents, of its form, of its rhythm, and what remains in suspense [unwritten] above the vacuum of creation that dictates the rest of the story.  The entire undertaking relies on intuition.   It requires probing, and listening to the verbal material.   

            This mental process is close to alchemical research for which no formula, no phenomenon of incubation exists.  Each new story re-invents its own process.  And so, the finished book may remotely resemble the original desire without, however, any possibility of ever reconstituting its genesis.  The scaffold that sustains the progress of writing is removed during the realization of the novel, including the author himself when he revisits his own work.

            There was a time when the novelist mobilized all his defects to produce a work which concealed him.  The notion of exposing his life to the public probably never occurred to him.  We do not imagine Homer or Dante or Shakespeare keeping track of the trifling incidents of their lives in order to bring them to other people’s attention.

            Perhaps they even preferred giving a false image of what they were.  They had that reticence of power which is no longer a property of the deficient nervous paranoid contemporary novelist.  Our confessions, our novels are all characterized by the same aberration: what interest can a mere life afford? 

            Even the story of a survivor of the Unforgivable Enormity known as the Holocaust, in the context of what is going on in the world today, is banal.  What interest is there in books inspired by other books or minds dependent on other minds?

            Only the illiterate can give that frisson of being which indicates the presence of truth.  Farmers among whom I worked once upon a time impressed me altogether differently than professors among whom I also worked, once upon a time.  The French intellectuals’ theories leaves me cold when I contemplate the anguish of the poor, the oppressed, the underprivileged.. 

            I saw beggars in Barcelona, in Pakistan, in India, in Egypt, and I would have liked to have been their chronicler.  They have no need to invent a life for themselves:  they exist.  Which does not happen often in our civilization.  Why, one wonders, didn’t our ancestors barricade themselves in their caves?

            When the average man lays claim to a destiny, then the average man can describe his own.  The believe that psychology reveals our essence necessarily endears our actions to us.  We imagine they possess an intrinsic or symbolic value.  Then comes the snobbery of complexes which teaches us to exaggerate our wits, to be dazzled by them, to gratify our ego with faculties and depths it is obviously un-endowed with.  The intimate perception of our nothingness, however, is only partially veiled by this process. 

            We suspect that the novelist who relies on his life is only pretending to believe in it, that he has no respect for the secrets he discovers there: he is not taken in, and we, his readers, are still less so.  His characters belong to a second-rate humanity, conscious and contaminated, suspect on account of their artifices, their intrigues.  We do not readily conceive of an astute King Lear ...

            The vulgar, the parvenu aspect of the novel determines its characteristics: fatality inhibited, lower case destiny, romantic agony, pseudo-tragedy déclassée.

            Compared with the tragic hero, so rich in the adversity that is his eternal patrimony, the contemporary novel’s main character seems like a naive candidate for ruin, horror’s cheap-jack, over-eager to destroy himself, terrified to fail.  He suffers from the very uncertainty of his disaster.  There is no necessity for his death.  We sense that the author could have saved him, which makes us uncomfortable, spoils our pleasure as readers.

            Whereas tragedy occurs on an absolute level, so to speak: the author has no influence over his heroes, he is only their servant, their instrument.  They are the ones in control, and they prompt him to institute proceedings against themselves.  They rule, even in the works for which they serve as a pretext.  And these works affect us as realities independent of both the writer and the marionette-strings of psychology. 

            We read contemporary novels in an altogether different way.  The novelist is always uppermost in our minds.  His presence haunts us.  We watch him struggle with his characters.  In the long run, he is the only one who holds our attention.  What is he going to do with his characters?  How will he get rid of them? We wonder.  Our curiosity tinged with apprehension.  If someone once said that Balzac rewrote Shakespeare using failures, what can we think of today’s novelists, obliged as they are to deal with a humanity that has deteriorated  still further?  Bereft of cosmic inspiration, the novel’s inhabitants cannot manage to counterbalance the dissolving effect of their knowledge, their will to lucidity, their lack of character.

            And so they are forced to ask, as the novelist himself is forced to ask himself:  Where now?  Who now?  When now?  Remembering how Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable put it at the beginning of his own failed fiction, as he faced the boredom of his fictitious existence to come.

            There is only one thing worse than boredom--the fear of boredom.  And it is this fear one experiences each time one opens a novel.  We have no use for the hero’s life, don’t attend to it, don’t even believe in it.  At least those of us who traffic in novels for more than just entertainment or escape. 

            The genre, having squandered its substance, no longer has an object.  The character is dying out, the plot too.  It is no accident that the only novels deserving of interest today are precisely those novels in which, once the universe is disbanded, nothing happens.  Or if something seems to happen it is the writing itself reflecting on itself.  The only valid novels these days are self-reflexive novels.  Even if the author is present in the text [often under his own name] but  seems missing from it.

            Deliciously unreadable [and of course, unmarketable], with no beginning nor end, these novels could just as well stop with the first sentence as continue for  thousand of pages.

            And yet . . . we continue to write novels.   And some of us continue to read  novels.

             Not long ago a young woman interviewing me for a magazine confronted me with an interesting question:  Why do you continue to write novels? she asked.  Why don't you do something else, like making films for instance, or writing for television.  Or simply play golf.

            As someone fatally committed to the novel I replied, and I am still pleased with my answer: 

            I write novels because it is the only place, the last place where one can still write well. And by well, I did not simply mean that one can write beautiful sentences in a novel for the sake of writing beautiful sentences.  By writing well, I meant also writing correctly in a moral and political sense, I meant writing truthfully, writing what is essential, what is urgent--even with humor or irony if necessary.  It is in this sense, I believe, that one should still write novels, should still try to write well, and in so doing make a last stand for the novel.   Or as Beckett put it--to try and fail better.

                                                                   

            II. The Fallen Prophet or Literature in Crisis

            I may not be wrong in thinking that this title suggests that in the face of the great social,  political, and technological changes that have occurred in the world in the past century, in the face of the great turmoil that the world is today, literature, rather than being in transition with the new century, is in danger--in serious danger--of becoming ineffectual and obsolete, in serious danger of extinction. Therefore, it is essential and urgent for those who still believe in literature, those who still practice literature, those who still produce books, to confront this crisis and this danger, and assess the possibilities still available to literature in order for it to survive.  In other words, it is urgent for literature to take a stand so that it can continue to be in the world and do what it has always done: capture the world, represent the world, explain the world, clarify the world, re-invent the world.  It is urgent for literature to take a stand, even if it is The Last Stand of Literature.

            It is a recognized fact that the United States is an anti-intellectual nation, a nation of  Pop-Culture, a nation that prefers easy spectacle to self-reflection, entertainment rather than art, and consequently it is difficult for writers not only to be taken seriously, but even to have access to the socio-political arena.  It is easier, in America, for a former football or basketball player, or even a wrestler, easier for a second-rate movie star to become involved in the political process and influence the course of history than it is for a writer or an intellectual.  The people of the United States distrust writers, especially when their work refuses to entertain -- refuses to tell and retell the same old story the same old way.  This raises crucial questions about the role of American writers in the face of the great changes that are taking place in the world today.  In this sense one could say that American writers, as far back as the early colonial days, have always been Fallen Prophets.  Whitman and Melville [certainly the two greatest writers of the 19^th century] were indeed Fallen Prophets.

            I must emphasize that I am speaking here strictly as a fiction writer and a poet, that I am not a political writer, nor a journalist, nor a pamphletist, nor a philosopher, and certainly not a prophet, but I do think of myself as a serious writer, and I consider my work to have some relevance to what is happening in our world.  I should also point out that my work (especially my fiction) has been labeled avant-garde and experimental, and as such has often been declared inaccessible (a key term in America these days in the market-place of books)--inaccessible and unreadable, and therefore useless, irrelevant, and of course unmarketable.  One could say that my fiction has been banned from the great supermarkets of books.

            But that is also being said of the fiction written by most serious writers.  In other words, in America, unless literature entertains--entertains in the same sense, let's say, that a Hollywood movie or a television soap-opera entertains--it is considered superfluous, and as having no raison d'être. That is why literature in America has always been a marginal activity, and has never been able to be politically committed. 

            But this does not mean, of course, that American literature is not concerned with the social and political problems of the world, it simply means that even though serious intelligent literature continues to be written, too often it is not made available to those who still believe in its efficacy.

            I learned from my own personal experiences, that to be a writer is to live in history, that the writer can never escape his time and history, and this because finally history is above all language.  It is the writer who fabricates history with language after the events have occurred.  That is why the writer bears such responsibility towards his work, and especially towards the language he uses.  If our readers cannot trust our writing (even if it is fiction) they will not trust the story and the history in which they live.

            It is in this sense that literature captures the world, represents it, explains it; re-invents it, in this sense that literature captures the past and the present with words, and even invents future history before it happens.

             However, today many writers are retreating from history, and consequently retreating from their responsibility towards language, or rather I should say, many writers finds themselves forced to retreat because their work is not taken seriously, because their work is declared useless and irrelevant, or else because their work is found too demanding intellectually, but especially because their work is found not entertaining enough, and therefore non-marketable, non-publishable.  As a result many important and innovative books are prevented from being disseminated by publishers, editors, literary agents, critics, librarians, and even professors who refuse to accept serious intelligent  books, refuse to read, publish, promote, distribute, sell, discuss, teach the current literature, the serious literature being written today.

            These are the reasons often given, particularly in America, for rejecting works of contemporary literature, or for relegating these to inaccessible places (such as remote sections of libraries or basements of bookstores) and thus preventing them from being available to those who are still interested in literature.

                                                                * * *

            I must now elaborate on what I have just said.  We are now in the new Century, and around us the winds of change are circulating in the world. These winds have swirled into a storm which is bringing fear, anxiety, insecurity and doubt to many nations -- as reflected especially in the unstable world wide economy, and the return in some parts of the world to extreme right-wing political positions.  And so, as we advance into this new millennium, there seems to be a longing for it to be different, a profound desire for this century to be better than the previous one.  As we look ahead, we hope that things will improve in the 21st century.

            But now one must ask, is it possible for literature, for the serious writers of literature to escape the generalized recuperation that is taking place in the market-place of books? Is it possible for literature to survive the kind of reduction, the kind of banalization that mass media imposes on contemporary culture?  Is it possible for literature to escape the way publicity and advertising ingests and digests culture?  Is it possible for literature to survive the hypnosis of marketing, the sweet boredom of consensus, the cellophane wrapping of thinking, the commercialization of desire?  In other words, can literature escape conformity and banality, and yet play a role, have a place in our society?  And finally, are there still people out there in the world willing to turn away from their television screens and find time to read works of literature?

            These are the fundamental questions before us today.  In the frantic and homogenized landscape of the telematic era in which we live, electronic communication is rendering literature obsolete.  As a result it is becoming a prejudice of the pas--a souvenir of another time when books really counted rather than being counted by numbers in the supermarkets of books. Literature is in danger of becoming a mere supplement of culture, because most works of fiction are written today specifically to be sold to television that their story can be adapted and serialized in that medium for a lot of money.  And even those books which are not written directly for television usually function with the same simplistic principle, the same simplified mentality, as television.

            However, since I am an incurable optimist, besides being an incurable foreigner, and an incurable word-addict, I will propose that rather than retreating before history, rather than retreating in the face of the threat that electronic communication presents, literature must take a stand, even if it is a last stand.  But how?

            In a recent book entitled Métamorphoses, the French thinker Kostas Axelos reflects profoundly on the neverending end of the world which we seem to have reached, and he writes (I am translating from his French):  "It is possible that this era in which we live demands clandestine thinkers to think the world, to traverse that world and transmit signs appropriate to the rhythm of the time.  The signs of the past are no longer valid."

            And it is true that what passes for literature today in many parts of the world seems unable to transmit signs appropriate to the rhythm of our time--the rhythm of change, of transition, of metamorphosis.  Most of the books published today no longer concern themselves with reality, but rather with the melo-dramatized image of reality projected by mass media. Most of these books mimic television, in technique as well as in substance.  It is in this sense, I believe, that what passes for literature is simply an insipid second-hand replica of what literature was, once upon a time.

            This is especially true in America, where the media have overtaken culture, but I have a feeling that this is also quickly happening, or will soon happen, in most places in the world where books and television co-exist.

            For most people, television has become the real world , but a world which has only one ideology:  commercialized entertainment.  Even the reporting of news, that is to say history in the making, must be presented as entertainment, otherwise it does not pass, which really means it does not sell, as we became acutely aware during the Gulf War which was, for us in America, a mere television spectacle, a war made for television by television, and presented artistically for consumption as our evening entertainment.

            Television has become the real world.  A world of spectacle--spectacle as the emblematic sign of a commodity form;  lifestyle advertising as its popular psychology;  banal seriality as the bond which unites the simulacrum of the show to the audience; electronic images as the only form of social cohesion; media politics as its ideological formula;  the buying and selling of abstracted attention as the locus of a market-place rationale; cynicism, violence and sexuality as its dominant cultural signs.  All these aspects of television culture have invaded what passes for literature today.  But if literature, I mean true, serious, intelligent literature, even if it is called elitist, is to survive, it must oppose and even denounce the way television captures the world, the way television presents the world, the way television explains the world.

            This does not mean that literature must negate television.  Personally, I do not object to it, as some people do, particularly pseudo-intellectuals.  On the contrary, I think television is an extremely important medium which has a crucial role to play in our society.

            I love television, I watch it often [especially football games, American football--after all the Buffalo Bills, my Buffalo Bills played in four Super Bowls, they lost four times, but that's not important].

            What is important, is that television cannot replace, must not replace literature, and especially must not dictate to writers how to write their books.

            In order to find its place again, and play a role in the world, literature must resituate itself in relation to the mass media.  But not by ignoring or negating television which is here to stay, but by doing what television cannot do, that is to say present the world and history without interference from economic and commercial forces.

            In order for this to happen, writers must regain confidence in literature, and assume again responsibility towards language, yes, especially towards language, even if this must be done, as Kostas Axelos suggests, in a clandestine manner, that is to say outside the mainstream, outside the literary establishment, on the margins of fame and wealth.

            In this triumphant era of mass communication, literature seems ashamed of what it is and what it is doing, and therefore too often readily submits to social and economic compromises.  In a world where books have become mere products of consumption and entertainment, it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the good books from the bad books, useful books from useless books, books which have a purpose from books that clutter the   shelves of bookstores and prevent the readers from reaching for literature.

            In the big supermarkets of books in America (chain stores usually located in shopping malls), such as Dalton and Walden Bookstores or Barnes & Noble which sell more T-shirts, calendars, or Stephen King's paraphernalia, than books, I recently observed an interesting phenomenon.

            In the center of the store are tables piled high with huge quantities of blockbusters--best-sellers by authors who every six months produce yet another book with the same story, the same plot, changing only the setting and the name of the characters.  These are novels which are quickly transformed into second-rate television shows or Hollywood movies.  I need not mention the name of these authors, they are well-known to us not for their talent but for being very rich.  Receiving millions of dollars in advance for their next predictable book.

            Then I observed that on one side of the store, the entire wall is covered with books designated as non-fiction.  What this means is that here one finds mostly how-to-do books:  books that tell the readers how to improve their sex life, how to lose weight, how to become rich fast, how to buy cheap, how to repair cars, how to keep in shape, how to play better golf or tennis, and so on. Or else one finds along that wall the fat unauthorized controversial obscene biographies of celebrities--that is to say the rich and the famous.

            Along the opposite wall are shelves full of books designated as fiction.  Most of these are pocketbook editions with sexy gold embossed covers--romances, mysteries, adventure novels, spy novels, naive science-fiction or horror stories, soap operas which are waiting there, already packaged, hoping to become television shows. 

            And then there is another wall at the end of the store, usually the shortest one because most of these bookstores are like narrow corridors with an open entrance at one end so that people can wander in and out and be seduced by the merchandise lined on the shelves and on the tables.

            On that wall, the far wall at the end of the store, one should almost say, at the bottom of the store, there is one shelf with a sign above it that says:  Literature [often written in Gothic letters].  Yes, in these bookstores there is still a small space reserved for literature, and in that space one finds hardcover editions of novels by Melville, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, and even a few contemporary writers such as Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Claude Simon, Samuel Beckett, usually those writers whose work has been authenticated by the Nobel Prize, and therefore recuperated into mainstream commercialization.

            [Oh yes!  It is also on those shelves that one finds books of poetry, but hardly anyone ever buys these, except perhaps the poets themselves].

            The problem, however, with this section of the bookstore, is that it is located so far from the entrance, and there are so many obstacles, books and enticing objects obstructing the shelf where literature awaits to be noticed, that the potential reader rarely manages to reach that wall, except for a few fanatics of literature who still remember where The Section Of The Fallen Prophets is located.

            But let us leave those supermarkets of books and return to our topic: Literature in crisis, or rather literature in danger of extinction.

            It is quantity and not quality these days that marks the success of a book.  That Michael Korda, editor-in-chief at Simon and Schuster (one of the big commercial publishers in America) should be quoted recently in The New York Times Book Review as saying,  "We sell books, others sell shoes, what's the difference?",  is not surprising from someone who in fact works for Gulf Western Oil.  That is the real problem with literature today:  it can no longer mark a difference, it can no longer be differentiated from other objects of consumption. 

            Books are now packaged, presented, promoted, marketed like any other product advertised on television:  beer, soap, toilet paper, deodorant, cars, shoes, and so on, without any regard for literary excellence.  What's the difference, we are told.

            I am, or at least I try to be a writer, I try to perceive literature today in its failings, its gaps, its disadvantages, its obscure symptoms, as it faces the conflicts, the fears, the demands, the uneasiness of this new world of ours. 

            But one must look far and attentively to find books in this changing landscape that can still be called literature in the sense that novels by Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and closer to us the late Beckett or Calvino, were called literature and are still called literature.  Books that respect language, books that work with language in order to capture history, rather than merely use or abuse language as a functional tool to present simplistic and simplified second-hand images of reality.

            I live in a world where most of us, who write for something other than fame and wealth, or for something other than personal distraction, have stopped reflecting on the purpose of writing, I mean explicitly in the writing itself, and consequently fail to mark the difference that literature makes in the world.  Perhaps it is because literature, and especially the novel, has forgotten how to reflect on its raison d'être, that is to say on what it is and what it does, that it has been pronounced dead.

            Nonetheless, the question remains.  How can the writer be part of the world?  How can the writer function in this world while writing this world?  In a way that question can be stated more directly:  How, as a writer, can I be of my time, how can I be a contemporary writer who lives in history and writes in history?

            Soon literature will have to explain (even to itself) its place and its role if it wants to survive and be more than just a supplement of culture--a vague souvenir of other times and other places.  Literature will be able to explain itself, as I suggested earlier, only when it re-situates itself in relation to the mass media, and by doing what the mass media cannot do, because by necessity mass media must compromise itself  to social and economic forces.

            For most people, even those of us who travel in the world, what has happened to our planet in the last few decades of the past century appears almost incomprehensible--the fragmentation of the Soviet Union into a Commonwealth of Republics, the disappearance of The Wall and with it the reunification of the two Germanies, the rise of religious fanaticism in many parts of the world, the quick making and unmaking of political ideologies, the oscillation of democracies  from naive liberalism to stifling conservatism, and much more.  If all this, all this history in the making seems confusing and unreal, it is perhaps because it has come to us via television.  History has become a set of easily manipulated images--images that are selected, arranged, packaged, made accessible, simplified, even beautified--and then explained to us by people who claim to be experts.  

Meanwhile the writer has deserted his post as witness of history to seek other rewards.

In 1947, Jean-Paul Sartre opened his famous essay, Qu'est-ce que la littérature? [What is literature?] with this sentence:  "All writers of bourgeois origin have known the temptation of irresponsibility: For more than a century, this temptation has been the norm in literary careers."

            What Sartre said then is still true today, whether from the East or the West, all writers are of bourgeois origin, and all writers have known the temptation of irresponsibility, especially when facing the demise of literature.

            But since the 19th century, since the rise of the bourgeoisie, literature has been in a crisis, literature has been the site of a crisis, and this crisis reflects the constant transformations that take place in the world, or to put it differently this crisis of literature is the world--the anguish, the desires, the dreams of those who live in the world, and which the writer captures in his writing.  Therefore, when literature ceases to represent, to be, to accept this crisis, it becomes entertainment.

            In our rapidly changing world, one should be able to say:  here are the books I need, and here are the books that are in my way.  Having made that choice, I can also decide, as a writer, here is the book I must write because it is urgent that it be written, and here is the book I will not write because no one needs it.

 

 3.  The Real Begins Where the Spectacle Ends