Читать книгу Interventions 2020 - Мишель Уэльбек - Страница 17

J-YJ and CD: In what way do the several works of which you are the author, from the essay on Lovecraft to your latest novel Whatever, via Rester vivant [Staying alive] and the collection of poems La Poursuite du bonheur [The Pursuit of Happiness] constitute an oeuvre?¹ What is the unity or the main obsession that guides it?

MH: Above all, I think, the intuition that the universe is based on separation, suffering and evil; the decision to describe this state of affairs, and perhaps to move beyond it. The question of the means – literary or not – is second. The initial act is the radical rejection of the world as it is; it’s also a loyalty to the notions of good and evil, the desire to dig into these notions, to map out their realm, including within myself. Then, literature must follow. The style can be varied; it’s a question of internal rhythm, of my personal state. I’m not too worried about issues of consistency; it seems to me that consistency will come of its own accord.

J-YJ and CD: Whatever is your first novel. What motivated this choice, after a collection of poems?

MH: I wish there weren’t any difference between them. A book of poems should be readable straight from start to finish. Likewise, you should be able to open a novel at any page and read it regardless of context. Context doesn’t exist. It’s right to be wary of the novel; you mustn’t get caught up in the story; nor by the tone nor by the style. Likewise, in daily life, you should avoid being trapped by your own story – or, more insidiously, by the personality you imagine to be yours. You need to conquer a certain lyric freedom: an ideal novel ought to be able to include passages that are versified, or sung.

J-YJ and CD: It could also include scientific diagrams.

MH: Yes that would be perfect. You should be able to put everything in it. Novalis, and the German romantics in general, aimed to achieve total knowledge. It was a mistake to give up on this ambition. We wriggle about like swatted flies; and yet we have a vocation for total knowledge.

J-YJ and CD: Obviously, as it happens, all of your writing is filled with a terrible pessimism. Could you give two or three reasons that you think may help stave off suicide?

MH: Kant clearly condemned suicide in 1785 in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Let me quote him: ‘To annihilate the subject of morality in one’s own person is to drive out morality from the world, insofar as that world depends on oneself.’² The argument seems naive and almost pathetic in its innocence, as often with Kant; I believe, however, that it’s the only argument. It’s only a sense of duty that can really keep us alive. Concretely, if you wish to endow yourself with a practical duty, you must make sure that the happiness of another being depends on your existence; you can for example try to raise a young child, or failing that, buy a poodle.

J-YJ and CD: Can you tell us about the sociological theory according to which the fight for social success specific to capitalism comes with a more treacherous and brutal struggle, this time sexual in nature?

MH: It’s very simple. Animal and human societies set up different systems of hierarchical differentiation, which can be based on birth (the aristocratic system), wealth, beauty, physical strength, intelligence, talent, and so on. Actually, all these systems seem to me to be almost equally contemptible; I reject them; the only superiority I recognize is kindness. Currently, we move about in a two-dimensional system: erotic attractiveness and money. The rest, people’s happiness and unhappiness, flows from these. In my view, this is by no means a theory; we do live in a simple society, which these few sentences describe completely.

J-YJ and CD: One of the most violent scenes in the novel is set in a nightclub on the Vendée coast. There are abortive scenes of seduction, flabby bellies that cause resentment and bitterness, purely sexual encounters. However, this place appears in your texts as the equivalent of the supermarket. Are people consumers in both places in the same way?

MH: No. A parallel could be drawn between special offers on chicken on the one hand, and miniskirts on the other; but the analogy ends there – with the enhancement of the supply. The supermarket is a true modern paradise; struggle ends at its threshold. The poor, for example, don’t go inside. People have made their money elsewhere; now they’re going to spend it, in the presence of an innovative and varied supply, often reliable in terms of taste and well documented from a nutritional point of view. Nightclubs present a very different picture. Many frustrated people continue – against all hope – to frequent them. They thus have the opportunity to verify, minute after minute, their own humiliation; here, we are much closer to hell. That being said, there are sex supermarkets, which produce a fairly comprehensive catalogue of porn on offer; but they lack the essential. For most people, the goal of the sexual quest is not pleasure, but narcissistic gratification, the homage paid by desirable partners to one’s own erotic excellence. That’s why AIDS hasn’t brought about much of a change; condoms diminish the pleasure, but the desired goal is not, unlike in the case of food products, pleasure: it’s the narcissistic intoxication of conquest. Not only do consumers of porn not experience this intoxication, they often feel the opposite. Finally, we can add, for the sake of completeness, that some people who embody deviant values continue to see a connection between sexuality and love.

J-YJ and CD: Can you tell us about that computer engineer, the one you call ‘the network man’? What does this type of character refer to in our contemporary reality?

MH: We must realize that the manufactured objects of the world – reinforced concrete, electric lights, metro trains, handkerchiefs – are currently designed and manufactured by a small class of engineers and technicians, capable of imagining, then deploying the appropriate equipment; they alone are really productive. They represent maybe five per cent of the workforce – and that percentage is steadily declining. Other company staff – salespeople, advertisers, office workers, administrative executives, designers – have a much less obvious social utility; they could disappear without really affecting the production process. Their apparent role is to produce and manipulate different classes of information, that is to say different copies of a reality that escapes their understanding. It’s in this context that we can situate the current explosion of networks of information transmission. A handful of technicians – at most five thousand people in France – are in charge of defining the protocols and producing the equipment that will allow, in the coming decades, the instantaneous worldwide transport of any category of information – text, sound, image, possibly tactile and electrochemical stimuli. Among them, some are creating a positive discourse on their own practice, according to which the human being, conceived as a centre for producing and transforming information, will find his or her full dimension only through interconnection with a maximum of similar centres. Most, however, do not produce any discourse; they just do their job. They thus fully realize the ideal of the technician, which has guided the historical movement of Western societies since the end of the Middle Ages, and which can be summed up in one sentence: ‘If it’s technically doable, it will be technically done.’

J-YJ and CD: Your story can be given an initial psychological reading, but it’s its sociological character that creates the most lasting impression. Could this be a work of less literary than scientific ambition?

MH: Maybe, but that might be going too far. As a teenager, I was indeed fascinated by science – in particular by new concepts developed in quantum mechanics; but I haven’t really addressed these questions in my writing yet; the real conditions for surviving in the world have undoubtedly occupied me too much. I am still a little surprised when I am told that I create successful psychological portraits of individuals, of characters: this may be true, but on the other hand I often have the impression that the individuals are almost identical, that what they call their self doesn’t really exist, and that it would in a sense be easier to define a historical movement. Perhaps we here have the beginnings of a complementarity à la Niels Bohr: wave and particle, position and velocity, individual and history. On a more literary level, I strongly feel the need for two complementary approaches: the affective and the clinical. On the one hand, dissection, cold analysis, humour; on the other, emotional and lyrical participation, where the lyricism is immediate.

J-YJ and CD: Despite the choice of the novel as a genre, you seem to think naturally in terms of poetry.

MH: Poetry is the most natural way to translate the pure intuition of an instant. There really is a core of pure intuition, which can be directly translated into pictures, or words. As long as we remain in poetry, we also remain in truth. Then the problems begin: when it comes to organizing these fragments, establishing a continuity that is both meaningful and musical. There, the experience of montage probably helped me a lot.

J-YJ and CD: Yes – before you started writing, you made some short films. What were your influences? And what’s the connection between these images and your literature?

MH: I really liked Murnau and Dreyer; I also liked what has been called German expressionism – although the major pictorial influence on these films is arguably romanticism, more than expressionism. There’s a study of fascinated stillness, which I tried to transcribe into pictures, then into words. There’s also something else, deep inside me, a kind of oceanic feeling. I failed to transcribe it into films; I didn’t even really get a chance to try. In words I may have succeeded sometimes, in a few poems. But one day or another, I’ll surely have to come back to pictures.

J-YJ and CD: For example, would it be possible to adapt your novel for the cinema?

MH: Yes, absolutely. The scenario is basically quite similar to Taxi Driver; but the whole visual side would need changing. Quite different from New York: the setting of the film would mainly consist of glass, steel, reflective surfaces. Landscaped offices, screens; the world of a new city, crossed by efficient and successful traffic. At the same time, the sexuality in this book is a succession of failures. Above all, any erotic magnification should be avoided – it’s the exhaustion, masturbation, and vomiting that should be filmed. But all as part of a transparent, colourful and cheerful world. Diagrams and graphical representations could be introduced, too – the rate of sex hormones in the blood, salary in thousands of francs … We mustn’t hesitate to be theoretical; we must attack on all fronts. The over-injection of theory produces a strange dynamism.

J-YJ and CD: You often describe your pessimism as just a passing stage. What might come next?

MH: I’d like to escape the obsessive presence of the modern world; move to a Mary Poppins-type world, where everything’s fine. I don’t know if I will. As for the general development of things, it’s also difficult to comment. Given the current socio-economic system, especially taking into account our philosophical presuppositions, humans are clearly rushing towards imminent disaster, under atrocious conditions; we’re there already. The logical consequences of individualism are murder and unhappiness. The enthusiasm that’s driving us to this destruction is remarkable; really very curious. It’s, for example, astonishing to see the cheerful shrug with which people have jettisoned psychoanalysis – which admittedly deserved it – and replaced it with a reductionist reading of the human being, based on hormones and neurotransmitters. The gradual dissolution over the centuries of social and family structures, the growing tendency of individuals to perceive themselves as isolated particles, subject to the law of shocks, as provisional aggregates of smaller particles … all this, of course, makes any political solution inapplicable. So it’s legitimate to begin by clearing away the sources of hollow optimism. Returning to a more philosophical analysis of things, we realize that the situation is even stranger than we thought. We’re moving towards disaster, guided by a false image of the world; and no one realizes. Even neurochemists don’t seem to realize that their discipline is advancing across a minefield. Sooner or later they’ll tackle the molecular bases of consciousness; then they’ll collide head-on with the ways of thinking resulting from quantum physics. We’ll be forced to redefine the conditions of knowledge, of the very notion of reality; we should start to become aware of it on an emotional level, right now. In any case, as long as we’re stuck in a mechanistic and individualistic view of the world, we will die. I don’t think it’s wise to stay in a state of suffering and evil any longer. The idea of the self has been centre stage for five centuries; it’s time to take off in a new direction.