In The Forest Of Paradoxes

Why do we write? I imagine that each of us has his or her own response tothis simple question. One has predispositions, a milieu, circumstances.Shortcomings, too. If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That wefind ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we havechosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, atime for reflection.

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write–and this is notmere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy–I see clearly that thestarting point of it all for me was war. Not war in the sense of a specific timeof major upheaval, where historical events are experienced, such as the Frenchcampaign on the battlefield at Valmy, as recounted by Goethe on the German sideand my ancestor François on the side of the armée révolutionnaire. Thatmust have been a moment full of exaltation and pathos. No, for me war is whatcivilians experience, very young children first and foremost. Not once has warever seemed to me to be an historical moment. We were hungry, we werefrightened, we were cold, and that is all. I remember seeing the troops of FieldMarshal Rommel pass by under my window as they headed towards the Alps, seekinga passage to the north of Italy and Austria. I do not have a particularly vividmemory of that event. I do recall, however, that during the years which followedthe war we were deprived of everything, in particular books and writingmaterials. For want of paper and ink, I made my first drawings and wrote myfirst texts on the back of the ration books, using a carpenter's blue and redpencil. This left me with a certain preference for rough paper and ordinarypencils. For want of any children's books, I read my grandmother's dictionaries.They were like a marvellous gateway, through which I embarked on a discovery ofthe world, to wander and daydream as I looked at the illustrated plates, and themaps, and the lists of unfamiliar words. The first book I wrote, at the age ofsix or seven, was entitled, moreover, Le Globe à mariner. Immediatelyafterwards came a biography of an imaginary king named Daniel III—could hehave been Swedish?—and a tale told by a seagull. It was a time of reclusion.Children were scarcely allowed outdoors to play, because in the fields andgardens near my grandmother's there were land mines. I recall that one day as Iwas out walking by the sea I came across an enclosure surrounded by barbed wire:on the fence was a sign in French and in German that threatened intruders with aforbidding message, and a skull to make things perfectly clear.

It is easy, in such a context, to understand the urge to escape—hence, todream, and put those dreams in writing. My maternal grandmother, moreover, wasan extraordinary storyteller, and she set aside the long afternoons for thetelling of stories. They were always very imaginative, and were set in aforest—perhaps it was in Africa, or in Mauritius, the forest of Macchabée—wherethe main character was a monkey who had a great talent for mischief, and whoalways wriggled his way out of the most perilous situations. Later, I wouldtravel to Africa and spend time there, and discover the real forest, one wherethere were almost no animals. But a District Officer in the village of Obudu,near the border with Cameroon, showed me how to listen for the drumming of thegorillas on a nearby hill, pounding their chests. And from that journey, and thetime I spent there (in Nigeria, where my father was a bush doctor), it was notsubject matter for future novels that I brought back, but a sort of secondpersonality, a daydreamer who was fascinated with reality at the same time, andthis personality has stayed with me all my life—and has constituted acontradictory dimension, a strangeness in myself that at times has been a sourceof suffering. Given the slowness of life, it has taken me the better part of myexistence to understand the significance of this contradiction.

Books entered my life at a later period. When my father's inheritance wasdivided, at the time of his expulsion from the family home in Moka, inMauritius, he managed to put together several libraries consisting of the booksthat remained. It was then that I understood a truth not immediately apparent tochildren, that books are a treasure more precious than any real property or bankaccount. It was in those volumes—most of them ancient, bound tomes—that Idiscovered the great works of world literature: Don Quijote,illustrated by Tony Johannot; La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes;the Ingoldsby Legends; Gulliver's Travels; Victor Hugo's great,inspired novels Quatre-vingt-treize, Les Travailleurs de la Mer, andL'Homme qui rit. Balzac's Les Contes drôlatiques, aswell. But the books which had the greatest impact on me were the anthologies oftravellers' tales, most of them devoted to India, Africa, and the Mascareneislands, or the great histories of exploration by Dumont d'Urville or the AbbéRochon, as well as Bougainville, Cook, and of course The Travels of MarcoPolo. In the mediocre life of a little provincial town dozing in the sun,after those years of freedom in Africa, those books gave me a taste foradventure, gave me a sense of the vastness of the real world, a means to exploreit through instinct and the senses rather than through knowledge. In a way, too,those books gave me, from very early on, an awareness of the contradictorynature of a child's existence: a child will cling to a sanctuary, a place toforget violence and competitiveness, and also take pleasure in looking throughthe windowpane to watch the outside world go by.

Shortly before I received the—to me, astonishing—news that the SwedishAcademy was awarding me this distinction, I was re-reading a little book by StigDagerman that I am particularly fond of: a collection of political essaysentitled Essäer och texter. It was no mere chance that I wasre-reading this bitter, abrasive book. I was preparing a trip to Sweden toreceive the prize which the Association of the Friends of Stig Dagerman hadawarded to me the previous summer, to visit the places where the writer hadlived as a child. I have always been particularly receptive to Dagerman'swriting, to the way in which he combines a child-like tenderness with naïvetéand sarcasm. And to his idealism. To the clear-sightedness with which he judgeshis troubled, post-war era—that of his mature years, and of my childhood. Onesentence in particular caught my attention, and seemed to be addressed to me atthat very moment, for I had just published a novel entitled Ritournelle dela faim. That sentence, or that passage rather, is as follows:

"How is it possible on the one hand, for example, to behave as ifnothing on earth were more important than literature, and on the other fail tosee that wherever one looks, people are struggling against hunger and willnecessarily consider that the most important thing is what they earn at the endof the month? Because this is where he (the writer) is confronted with a newparadox: while all he wanted was to write for those who are hungry, he nowdiscovers that it is only those who have plenty to eat who have the leisure totake notice of his existence."

(The Writer and Consciousness)

This "forest of paradoxes", as Stig Dagerman calls it, is,precisely, the realm of writing, the place from which the artist must notattempt to escape: on the contrary, he or she must "camp out" there inorder to examine every detail, explore every path, name every tree. It is notalways a pleasant stay. He thought he had found shelter, she was confiding inher page as if it were a close, indulgent friend; but now these writers areconfronted with reality, not merely as observers, but as actors. They mustchoose sides, establish their distance. Cicero, Rabelais, Condorcet, Rousseau,Madame de Staël, or, far more recently, Solzhenitsynor Hwang Sok-yong, Abdelatif Laâbi, or Milan Kundera: all were obliged tofollow the path of exile. For someone like myself who has always—except duringthat brief war-time period—enjoyed freedom of movement, the idea that onemight be forbidden to live in the place one has chosen is as inadmissible asbeing deprived of one's freedom.

But the privilege of freedom of movement results in the paradox. Look, for amoment, at the tree with its prickly thorns that is at the very heart of theforest where the writer lives: this man, this woman, busily writing, inventingtheir dreams—do they not belong to a very fortunate and exclusive happyfew? Let us pause and imagine an extreme, terrifying situation—like theone in which the vast majority of people on our planet find themselves. Asituation which, long ago, at the time of Aristotle, or Tolstoy, was shared bythose who had no status—serfs, servants, villeins in Europe in the MiddleAges, or those peoples who during the Enlightenment were plundered from thecoast of Africa, sold in Gorée, or El Mina, or Zanzibar. And even today, as Iam speaking to you, there are all those who do not have freedom of speech, whoare on the other side of language. I am overcome by Dagerman's pessimisticthoughts, rather than by Gramsci's militancy, or Sartre's disillusioned wager.The idea that literature is the luxury of a dominant class, feeding on ideas andimages that remain foreign to the vast majority: that is the source of themalaise that each of us is feeling—as I address those who read, who write. Ofcourse one would like to spread the word to all those who have been excluded, toinvite them magnanimously to the banquet of culture. Why is this so difficult?Peoples without writing, as the anthropologists like to call them, havesucceeded in inventing a form of total communication, through song and myth. Whyhas this become impossible for our industrialized societies, in the present day?Must we reinvent culture? Must we return to an immediate, direct form ofcommunication? It is tempting to believe that the cinema fulfils just such arole in our time, or popular music with its rhythms and rhymes, its echoes ofthe dance. Or jazz and, in other climes, calypso, maloya, sega.

The paradox is not a recent one. François Rabelais, the greatest writer inthe French language, waged war long ago against the pedantry of the scholars atthe Sorbonne by taunting them to their face with words plucked from the commontongue. Was he speaking for those who were hungry? Excess, intoxication,feasting. He put into words the extraordinary appetite of those who dined offthe emaciation of peasants and workers, just long enough for a masquerade, aworld turned upside down. The paradox of revolution, like the epic cavalcade ofthe sad-faced knight, lives within the writer's consciousness. If there is onevirtue which the writer's pen must always have, it is that it must never be usedto praise the powerful, even with the faintest of scribblings. And yet justbecause an artist observes this virtuous behaviour does not mean that he mayfeel purged of all suspicion. His rebellion, denial, and imprecations definitelyremain to one side of the barrier, the side of the language of power. A fewwords, a few phrases may have escaped. But the rest? A long palimpsest, anelegant and distant time of procrastination. And there is humour, sometimes,which is not the politeness of despair, but the despairing of those who know toowell their imperfections; humour is the shore where the tumultuous current ofinjustice has abandoned them.

Why write, then? For some time now, writers have no longer been sopresumptuous as to believe that they can change the world, that they will,through their stories and novels, give birth to a better example for how lifeshould be. Simply, they would like to bear witness. See that other tree in theforest of paradoxes. The writer would like to bear witness, when in fact, mostof the time, he is nothing more than a simple voyeur.

And yet there are artists who do become witnesses: Dante in the La DivinaCommedia, Shakespeare in The Tempest—and Aimé Césaire in hismagnificent adaptation of that play, entitled Une Tempête, in whichCaliban, sitting astride a barrel of gunpowder, threatens to blow himself up andtake his despised masters with him. There are also those witnesses who areunimpeachable, such as Euclides da Cunha in Os Sertões, or Primo Levi.We see the absurdity of the world in Der Prozess (or in the films ofCharlie Chaplin); its imperfection in Colette's La Naissance du jour,its phantasmagoria in the Irish ballad Joyce created in Finnegans Wake.Its beauty shines, brilliantly, irresistibly, in Peter Matthiessen's TheSnow Leopard or in Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. Itswickedness in WilliamFaulkner's Sanctuary, or in Lao She's First Snow. Itschildhood fragility in Dagerman's Ormen (The Snake).

The best writer as witness is the one who is a witness in spite of himself,unwillingly. The paradox is that he does not bear witness to something he hasseen, or even to what he has invented. Bitterness, even despair may arisebecause he cannot be present at the indictment. Tolstoy may show us thesuffering that Napoleon's army inflicted upon Russia, and yet nothing is changedin the course of history. Claire de Duras wrote Ourika, and HarrietBeecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin, but it was the enslaved peoplesthemselves who changed their own destiny, who rebelled and fought againstinjustice by creating the Maroon resistance in Brazil, in French Guiana, and inthe West Indies, and the first black republic in Haiti.

To act: that is what the writer would like to be able to do, above all. Toact, rather than to bear witness. To write, imagine, and dream in such a waythat his words and inventions and dreams will have an impact upon reality, willchange people's minds and hearts, will prepare the way for a better world. Andyet, at that very moment, a voice is whispering to him that it will not bepossible, that words are words that are taken away on the winds of society, anddreams are mere illusions. What right has he to wish he were better? Is itreally up to the writer to try to find solutions? Is he not in the position ofthe gamekeeper in the play Knock ou Le Triomphe de la médecine, whowould like to prevent an earthquake? How can the writer act, when all he knowsis how to remember?

Solitude will be his lot in life. It always has been. As a child, he was afragile, anxious, excessively receptive boy, or the girl described by Colette,who cannot help but watch as her parents tear each other apart, her big blackeyes enlarged with a sort of painful attentiveness. Solitude is affectionate towriters, and it is in the company of solitude that they find the essence ofhappiness. It is a contradictory happiness, a mixture of pain and delight, anillusory triumph, a muted, omnipresent torment, not unlike a haunting littletune. The writer, better than anyone, knows how to cultivate the vital,poisonous plant, the one that grows only in the soil of his own powerlessness.The writer wanted to speak for everyone, and for every era: there he is, thereshe is, each alone in a room, facing the too-white mirror of the blank page,beneath the lampshade distilling its secret light. Or sitting at the too-brightscreen of the computer, listening to the sound of one's fingers clicking overthe keys. This, then, is the writer's forest. And each writer knows every pathin that forest all too well. If, now and again, something escapes, like a birdflushed by a dog at dawn, then the writer looks on, amazed—this happenedmerely by chance, in spite of oneself.

It is not my wish, however, to revel in negativity. Literature—and this iswhat I have been driving at—is not some archaic relic that ought, logically,to be replaced by the audiovisual arts, the cinema in particular. Literature isa complex, difficult path, but I hold it to be even more vital today than in thetime of Byron or Victor Hugo.

There are two reasons why literature is necessary:
First of all, because literature is made up of language. The primary sense ofthe word: letters, that which is written. In French, the word romanrefers to those texts in prose which for the first time after the Middle Agesused the new language spoken by the people, a Romance language. And the word forshort story, nouvelle, also derives from this notion of novelty. Atroughly the same time, in France, the word rimeur (from rime, orrhyme) fell out of use for designating poetry and poets—the new words comefrom the Greek verb poiein, to create. The writer, the poet, thenovelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language, itmeans that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why wecannot do without them. Language is the most extraordinary invention in thehistory of humanity, the one which came before everything, and which makes itpossible to share everything. Without language there would be no science, notechnology, no law, no art, no love. But without another person with whom tointeract, the invention becomes virtual. It may atrophy, diminish, disappear.Writers, to a certain degree, are the guardians of language. When they writetheir novels, their poetry, their plays, they keep language alive. They are notmerely using words—on the contrary, they are at the service of language. Theycelebrate it, hone it, transform it, because language lives through them andbecause of them, and it accompanies all the social and economic transformationsof their era.

When, in the last century, racist theories were expressed, there was talk offundamental differences between cultures. In a sort of absurd hierarchy, acorrelation was drawn between the economic success of the colonial powers andtheir purported cultural superiority. Such theories, like a feverish, unhealthyurge, tend to resurface here and there, now and again, to justifyneo-colonialism or imperialism. There are, we are told, certain nations that lagbehind, who have not acquired their rights and privileges where language isconcerned, because they are economically backward or technologically outdated.But have those who prone their cultural superiority realized that all peoples,the world over, whatever their degree of development, use language? And thateach of these languages has, identically, a set of logical, complex, structured,analytical features that enable it to express the world, that enable it to speakof science, or invent myths?