2023-09-10 06:29:19
The other day I remembered an interview that years ago was done with Edgardo Cozarinsky in which, recounting his arrival in Paris in the mid-70s, he noted: “It was still the last moments of May 68 (…) Foucault was read a lot, and it was the beginning of Deleuze and Guattari. Literature, the purely fictional, was, on the other hand, a desert. There was practically nothing that interested me in contemporary French imaginative literature.” This reminds me of a long conversation I also had many years ago with the French editor Christian Bourgois, who died shortly afterwards. Bourgois directed the publishing house that bears his name for almost forty years, where he edited much of the best world literature. At that lunch, for a moment the talk diverted towards contemporary Latin American literature (Bourgois published Aira, Bolaño, Pauls, among others. And much before, Copi, of course) and, amidst various comments, there was silence and he said: “How curious, now I almost only publish fiction, who would have thought that in the 70s?” In those years, Bourgois also participated in the edition of 10/18, a crucial pocket collection in the history of French publishing, which rarely published novels; On the other hand, he published much of the post-68 theoretical debate, including the crisis of Marxism, and texts in tune with the rise of interest in libidinal economy. Between us, Walsh’s condemnation of the novel genre as a petty bourgeois impediment to the revolutionary cause is not unrelated to this plot.
Returning to the topic (To what topic? To theory? To revolution? To literature?) it happens that, at the risk of sounding like a joke, the great novel of the 60s and 70s was theory. Little by little, the theory itself was discovering its fictional character, and several of the most extreme theorists made the mistake of jumping into the novel: from Kristeva to Sontag, many others made the leap towards the literature of the imagination, as Cozarinsky would say (for not to mention several whose novels, fortunately for them, went unnoticed: Palais Royal, by Richard Sennett, or the novels of George Steiner). Kristeva and Sontag did not have that star (going unnoticed is something that only a select few have access to) and their novels insisted on being the subject of formidable literary disaster marketing campaigns. Barthes, in the wake of Benjamin (whom, however, he almost never cites) knew how to stop in time: he took theory towards that edge where it borders on fiction, but without ever taking the step towards nonsense. Ultimately, Barthesian elegance rests on demonstrating that the figure of the écrivain is much more seductive than that of the romancer.
And after another silence, Bourgois smiled. It was the smile of someone who felt happy for having been defeated. The novel had triumphed again. And I, perhaps encouraged by the kindness of good French wine, dared to ask in the opposite direction, almost as a critical suspicion regarding the current state of narrative: “But is the contemporary novel in a position to think about the world?” Bourgois answered: “It is the opposite: the novel still has some possibility precisely if it does not allow itself to be thought by the world”, a phrase with new Benjaminian and even Fogwillian echoes (“I write so as not to be written”) in which I am still thinking, so many years later.
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