The following texts were written one a month for
about two years, from 1954 to 1956, in the light (or darkness) of current
events. My effort at the time was to reflect regularly on some myths of French
daily life. The material prompting such reflections could be quite various (a
newspaper article, a photograph in a magazine, a film, a theatrical
performance, a gallery exhibit) and their subject quite arbitrary, depending of
course on my own interests at the time.
The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience
with the ‘naturalness’ which common sense, the press, and the arts continually
invoke to dress up a reality which, though the one live in, is nonetheless
quite historical: in a word, I resented seeing Nature and History repeatedly
confused in the description of our reality, and I wanted to expose in the
decorative display of what-goes-without-saying the ideological abuse I believed
was hidden there.
Right off, the notion of myth seemed
to be to account for these phony instances of the obvious; at the time I was
using the word in its traditional sense. But I was already operating on one
conviction from which I would try to draw all the consequences: myth is a
language. Therefore, though concerned with phenomena apparently quite remote
from literature (a wrestling match, an elaborately cooked dish, an exhibition
of plastic), I had no intention of abandoning the general semiology of our
bourgeois world, whose literary aspects I had approached in my previous essays.
Yet it was only after having explored a certain number of current nonliterary
subjects that I attempted to define contemporary myth in any methodical; way:
that text of course I put at the end of this book, since it merely systematizes
previous materials.
Written month after month, these essays made no claim to constitute an organic
development: what links them together is a matter of insistence, of repetition.
Actually I don’t know whether I agree with the proverb that repeated things give pleasure, but I do
know that at least they signify. And what I have sought in everything here are
indeed significations. Are they my
significations? In other words, is there a mythology of the mythologist?
Doubtless there is, and the reader will soon find out where I strand. But to
tell the truth, I don’t think that’s the right way to frame the question.
‘Demystification’, to keep using a word that’s showing signs of wear, is not an
Olympian Operation. What I mean is, I don’t share the belief that there’s a
divorce in nature between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity
of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a ‘freedom’ and the latter
with a ‘vocation,’ both of them likely to spirit away or sublimate the true
limits of their situation: my claim is to live to the full the contradictions of
my time, which can make sarcasm the condition of truth.
…………………………..
What is enacted by wrestling, then, is an ideal intelligence of things, a euphoria of humanity, raised for a while out of the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and installed in a panoramic vision of univocal Nature, in which signs finally correspond to causes without obstacle, without evasion and without contradiction.
……………………………..
The whole Dominici trial was performed according to
a certain idea of psychology, which happens as if by accident to be that of the
properties of bourgeois literature. Material proofs being uncertain or
contradictory, recourse was had to mental proofs; and where to find these if
not in the very mentality of the accusers? Therefore the motives and sequence
of actions are reconstructed with a free hand but without the shadow of doubt;
a procedure like that of an archaeologists who gather old stones from all over
the excavation site, and with their quite modern cement erect a delicate wayside
alter to Sesostris, or even construct a religion dead for two thousand years by
consulting the remains of universal wisdom, which is in fact only their own
wisdom elaborated in the academies of the Third Republic.
Merely to base an archaeological reconstruction or a novel on a ‘Why not?’
harms no one. But Justice? Periodically, some trial, and not necessarily a
fictional one like the one in Camus L’Etranger,
comes to remind you that Justice is always ready to lend you a spare brain in order
to condemn you without a second thought, and that like Corneille it depicts as
you ought to be not as you are.
This appearance of Justice in the world of the accused is possible thanks to an
intermediary myth, always made good use of by Officialdom, whether the Court of
Assizes or literary tribunals: the myth of transparency and the universality of
language. The presiding Assize Judge,
who reads Le Figaro, obviously has no
scruples about exchanging words with an olds ‘illiterate’ goatherd. Don’t they
share the same language, and the clearest one there is, French? Wonderful assurance
of classical education, where shepherds
converse with judges without embarrassment! But here, too, behind the prestigious
(and grotesque) morality of Latin translations and French essays, a man’s head
is at stake.
……………………
And I begin to wonder if the lovely and touching
iconography of the Abbe Pierre is not the alibi by which a sizable part of the
nation authorizes itself, once again, to
substitute the signs of charity for the reality of justice.
……………………………….
The anarchy of customs and of superficial behavior is an excellent alibi for order:
individualism is a bourgeois myth which allows us to vaccinate the order and
tyranny of class with a harmless freedom: the Batory (800 French touring Russia in 1955) brought the flabbergasted Russians the spectacle
of a glamorous freedom, that of chattering during museum visits and ‘being funny’
in the metro, but there is no question but that ‘individualism’ is a luxury
product for export only. In France, and applied to an object of quite different
importance, it has, at least for Le
Figaro, another name.
When four hundred Air Force veterans, called up for North African service,
refed to serve one Sunday, Le Figaro no longer spoke of the sympathetic anarchy
and individualism of the French: no longer any question here of museum or
metro, but rather of colonial investments and big money; whereupon ‘disorder’
was no longer a phenomena of glorious Gallic virtue, but the artificial product
of a few ‘agents’; it was no longer glamorous but lamentable, and the monumental
lack of discipline of the French, formerly praised with so many waggish and
self-satisfied winks , has become, on the road to Algeria, a shameful treason. Le Figaro knows its bourgeois freedoms
out front, on display, but Order back home, a constitutive necessity.
……………………………….
(I confess a great predilection for balancing acts, for in them the body is
objectified gently; it is not a had
object catapulted through the air as in pure acrobatics, but rather a soft, dense
substance, responsive to very slight movements.)
…………………………….
The anti-intellectualist ideology
affects various political milieus, and it is not necessary to be a
Poujadist to nourish a hated of ideas. For what is inculpated here is any form
of explicative, committed culture, and what is saved is an ’innocent’ culture,
the culture whose naivete leaves the tyrant’s hands free. What is condemned is
the intellectual, i.e. consciousness, or better still: an Observation. That no one look at us is the principle of
Pujadist anti-intellectualism.
Only, from the ethnologist’s point of
view, the practices of integration and exclusion are obviously complementary,
and in a sense which is not the one he supposes, Poujade needs intellectuals,
for if he condemns them it is on account of a magical evil: in the Poujadist
society the intellectual has the accursed and necessary role of a lapsed witch
doctor.
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