Postscript to #43: The French Connection

7 July 2023

One of the most impressive illustrations of the perennial struggles around self and self-importance, to me, is the 2008 exchange of e-mails, initially secret, between Bernard-Henry Lévy and Michel Houellebecq that has since been published in English under the title Public Enemies (Random House 2011).

Despite the confessional tone of this fascinating collection, it is hard to tell, with these two “poor clowns tired of their own comedies” (BHL, p. 180), where the literary personas ends and where the real human beings begin. (They are not such clowns, clearly, nor so poor, nor all that tired of their own acts, by the looks and sound of it.) To be sure there are some disarmingly sincere-sounding parts (MH, pp. 28, 41, 134–39, BHL, pp. 30–36, 72–77, 100–104), but at the same time, certain ellipses in key places (at the bottom of p. 235 for example) practically scream at the reader not to imagine that he is being told the whole story, and M. Lévy makes it abundantly clear that he—obsessed by his own admission to the point of pathology with masks and ruses and secrecy—is cultivating, under the guise of confession, “the art of hiding by revealing yourself” (pp. 30, 119, 172–75, 205, 261, 289–92).

Houellebecq says nothing, for once, to contradict him, being clearly just as fierce, and as selective, a protector of his privacy. One cannot really be too surprised, then, to be told that by MH’s own self-appraisal, he is only theoretically a pessimist, in practice and his day-to-day life, mostly a naïve and sentimental enthusiast (pp. 134, 249). Even his fifteen-year-old self was, or so we are to believe, not simply a social misfit, but rather “a pretty well-adjusted teenager,” sporty even and cute in the eyes of most girls—though when he found himself offered a corner of teenage paradise during a radiant summer among the “not very shy” damsels of southern Bavaria, he holed himself up in his room and read Pascal’s Pensées instead (pp. 134–35). One can see why regrets come so naturally to the guy.

The great unbeliever, it turns out, went to mass regularly for “ten years, maybe twenty,” as if such a decade were an afterthought so trivial that one can casually double its duration without remembering it (pp. 137–38). Grace eluded him, he confesses, and that is no matter for jests or jeers; even the theme of making one’s sacrifice of reason comes up (p. 253, 255). But the Bavarian lesson still applies: all the graces in the world, however freely offered, can only do a lost soul any good if they are as freely accepted.

Perhaps the story of his relations with “the talking cure” is likewise a little more complicated than he makes it appear when he scoffs at how unscientific and boring he finds psychoanalysis and everything to do with it (pp. 41, 136, 144). I have not the least desire to go digging after possible engagements with the couch. What his protestations do remind me of, however, is just how resistant (and not just in the technical Freudian sense) the more entrenched and intellectual kind of neurotic can be to the very idea of therapeutic redress, contriving all manner of philosophical objections even in the face of crying need. The more obviously, from the bystander’s perspective, a character would stand to benefit from a bit of therapeutic smoothing (and an editor), the more strident and hardened the stance against Freud and his successors (and editors) tends to be—Nassim Nicholas Taleb springing immediately to mind.

It amounts almost to a professional malady among writers and thinkers (see Post #32), who fear with Houellebecq that their great “expressions of general human truths” (p. 224) might be exposed as little more than the human, all-too human and at bottom very ordinary coping mechanisms of yet another emotionally damaged earthling. They are willing to suffer greatly for their exalted sense of self-importance, grant them that, since it means they get, if nothing else, to pronounce their summary verdict on life—and they do have a point. On the other hand, the whole business turns so very transparently on an extraordinary overestimation of themselves and their judgments that they recognize in themselves only too well—even while clinging to and clutching it with all their might (see MH, p. 41). And who would throw the first stone?

But consider this too: if books are not just mirrors of the world but the very “girders of the universe,” without which everything would be undone and lapse into nothingness, as BHL proclaims (p. 288), then what does that make of writers, at least in their own minds? Humble votaries before the shrine of the Muses, as they pretend and may believe of themselves quite sincerely? Notice how this particular place of worship is devoted to an art in which they just so happen to be the confirmed luminaries and high priests of the day, if only to their respective literary followings. See them in this self-aggrandizing light and their conceit can look so colossal that it almost makes the pen drop from one’s fingers. This is the logic of self-importance in its fullest expression, finding reasons why the very world would fall apart without that to which one can make a special claim, whatever it may be.

What is so remarkable about these serve-serving constructions we all put on the world is that our palpable self-interest in seeing things our way should remain so invisible to us. Even while we assign ourselves the part of sustainers and saviors of the world, it never occurs to us that we might be arranging things thus in our minds because such an arrangement is so advantageous to our self-regard. But no, it really appears to us as if seeing things that way were about the truth and nothing but the truth! All is vanity…

It may look like sheer madness when we catch others in the act, but it is so universally practiced, with such a definite though usually well-disguised method behind it, that one cannot just dismiss it as mere pathology. Compared to looking all the way down this bottomless pair of mirrors—one’s own self-centered mind—the mirror that you hold up to the world, dear Michel (pp. 276–77), is child’s play, or perhaps the work of that shell-shocked adolescence which we all find so hard fully to outgrow. (Not that I am deaf, let me be clear, to the siren’s song of the self, or any less moved by hearing it than our two gentlemen. But I can see enough, I think, to recognize that these lulling cadences are indeed luring us to the rocks, and that it would be wise to get our hands tied firmly to the mast before allowing ourselves to get too engrossed in them.)

I have tried to explain in my reflections on melancholy meditators (Post #32) why I too am wary of medicalizing unduly the fundamentals of the human condition. But there is a sensible balance to be struck in such things, from a middle-way perspective especially, and when bipolarity is presented as the very mainspring of one’s own genius (pp. 277, 279), then one will have to put up with some noises from those who have some valid reasons for taking a more clinical view, and who cannot all be brushed off as small-minded naysayers and psycho-babbling muckrakers.