2023-09-19 07:00:00
– Salman Rushdie
Published today at 09:00
What are artists for? The question is as old as art and still has no definitive answer. Should we consider a work for itself, or get confused regarding its surroundings? Because the times are like this. She now reconfigures – following having advocated the opposite since Sainte-Beuve – artists and their work, noted a reflection in “World”. Sardou is right-wing, so are his songs, even when they talk regarding an Irish lake. Woody Allen only makes horrible films, since some consider him a sexual vampire. Polanski is considered by the same people as a criminal doomed to Hell, therefore his films are considered criminally bad: the last one has just been massacred in Venice. Michel Houellebecq is an unsavory character, so his volumes would have a “nauseating” smell.
The other contemporary reflex is to forget art by making it say something else. Jean-Jacques Goldman is supposed to be center-left by his biographer, so he was “narrating an era” and we miss the astonishing mechanics of his songs. “Barbie” is told as a feminist phenomenon when it is a capitalist exploit: charging an entry fee to watch an advertisement for two hours. Etc, et cetera…
This is why “The City of Victory” (Ed. Actes Sud), new novel by Salman Rushdie, is reassuring. This is a wonderful way to return to art. Of course, even by telling a story in 14th century India, Rushdie sends a thousand messages that speak of today, cruelties, women and men, or religions that imprison. But his purpose is only fundamentally artistic: to seek freedom and leave a trace. This novel was written just before the writer suffered 27 seconds of assault and twelve stabbings given by a Muslim fundamentalist, thirty-four years following the fatwa launched by the Iranian government.
But Rushdie – he mentions it in an interview with the magazine “Le Point” – never wanted to be “sociologized” and reduced to these attacks: “I believe that someone who read my novels without knowing my life might not detect the inflection of 1989 with the fatwa. He refuses to be a symbol rather than an artist, and even though his life was turned upside down, it remained his because his genius as a novelist refused to submit and he never transformed himself into a “creature of the event”. “The city of victory” is perhaps in this lesson, which can infuse us and do the work of liberation. The heroine of the novel, Pampa Kampana, a 247-year-old magical poet, knows that her end is coming and says: “Only the city of words remains. Words are the only winners.” It is a miraculous definition of the art of writing, of living, and of dying.
Christophe Passer, born in Fribourg, has worked at Le Matin Dimanche since 2014, following having worked in particular at Le Nouveau Quotidien and L’Illustré. More informations
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