Transcript
Claire ParnetSo, "E" is "Enfance" [Childhood]. You have always said that you began your life living on the avenue de Wagram, you were born in the 17th arrondissement, then you lived with your mother on rue Daubigny in the 17th arrondissement, and now you live near the place de Clichy, that is, a poor neighborhood in the 17th arrondissement on the rue de Bizerte. One can say it because you will be dead when people see this, so we can give your address. What I want to know, first, is if your family was bourgeoise, what was known as a bourgeois family on the right, I believe.
I say it, I always say it when my friends ask me. It's true, it's something of a descent, I started at the high point of the 17th, a very beautiful part of the 17th, and then, during my childhood, I lived through the crisis before the war- I have some childhood memories of the crisis, I wasn't very old, but one of these memories was the number of empty apartments. . .. People really had no more money, and there were these apartments for rent everywhere, everywhere. So, my parents had to abandon the beautiful apartment at the high spot of the 17th, near the Arc de Triomphe, and then they went down a level, but it still wasn't bad, it wasn't far from the boulevard Malesherbes, in a little street, the rue Daubigny, and then when I returned to Paris, having grown up, it was at the far border of the 17th, a 17th full of small shops, a bit proletarian, rue Nollet, not far away from Verlaine's house, who was not rich. So it's a descent, and in a few years, I don't know where I will be, but the outlook isn't good.
Claire ParnetIn Saint-Ouen, I hope. [A near northern Parisian suburb]
In Saint-Ouen, yes. . . As for my family, yes, they were a bourgeois family, on the right, no. . . well, on the right, yes, they certainly weren't on the left. One has to return to the circumstances back then. I have few memories from my childhood because memory, it seems to me, is a faculty that should reject the past rather than recall it. . . Memory, one needs a lot of memory to reject it, precisely, because it's not an archive. I have this memory. . . There were these iron railings where there were signs saying "Apartment for rent," and I lived through a lot.
Claire ParnetIn what years was that?
Oh, I have no recollection of the years. . . It was between '30 and '35. . . I really don't know. . .
Claire ParnetYou were 10 years old.
People were without money. . . I was born in '25, yes, but I remember the money problems. . . That's what kept me from going to study with the Jesuit priests, my parents had no more money and I had been destined for the Jesuits, and then I went to the public high school when the crisis came. Then, another aspect. . . I don't recall. . . there was another aspect of the crisis I recalled. . . I forget, another aspect. . .. Well, it doesn't matter. . . And then there was the war, and my father. . . Yes, it was a family, indeed, a right-wing family, yes, because I recall this quite clearly-they never got over it, and it's why I understand employers better, bosses now, certain employers right now- the terror that they retained from the [Socialist] Popular Front is unbelievable, no doubt even employers who did not live through it, but there are still many who did live through it, for them, the Popular Front was the image of chaos worse than May '68. I remember nonetheless that all this bourgeoisie de droite were all anti-Semitic, and [Léon] Blum [leader of the Popular Front]. . . It was something ghastly, the hatred directed toward [Pierre] Mendès-France [Socialist minister under Blum]. But that was nothing, compared to the hatred that Blum had to undergo because Blum was really the first. . . The paid vacation, the reaction to it was frightening.
Claire ParnetThe first Jewish Leftist . . .
Ahhh, Blum was.. was. . . -I don't know how to say it- he was for them worse than the devil. One cannot understand how Pétain could seize power without understanding the level of anti-Semitism in France at that period. The French bourgeoisie's [anti-Semitism] at that period, and the hatred against the social measures taken by Blum's government, it was ghastly. So my father was a bit Croix-de-feu, yes. . . Oh, it was very common at that period. So it was a bourgeois family de droite. . . uncultivated. . . There was a cultivated bourgeoisie, but this was a completely uncultivated bourgeoisie. But my father was a lovely man, very benevolent, very good, very charming, and what really seemed astonishing to me was this violence against. . . He had gone through the 14-18 War which is a world that one can understand very well in general terms, but that one cannot know in fine detail. These veterans of the 14-18 War, at once the anti-Semitism, the regime of crisis, what this crisis was, that no one understood. . . So there you are. . .
Claire ParnetAnd what was his occupation?
He was an engineer, but a very special kind of engineer. I can recall two of his activities. He had invented-did he invent it? Or did he just commercialize it? -a product to make roofs watertight. . . the watertightness of roofs. . . But with the crisis, he ended up with only one worker, an Italian- a foreigner as well, so that didn't work out too well. And then, this business collapsed, so he resituated himself in a more serious industry that made balloons, the kind of. . . dirigibles, you see? But at a certain moment, these were completely useless to the point where, in '39, there were a few high above Paris to stop German planes. . . I don't know why, but they really seemed like homing pigeons. So when the Germans took over the factory where my father worked, they were more rational, and so they transformed everything for the production of rubber rafts. Rubber rafts were more useful, but they certainly did make balloons and zeppelins. And me, I saw this start of the war- I saw it, I have lots of memories, I wasn't very old, still I was fourteen- the way people knew quite well that they had gained a year with Munich, a year and a few months, until the war. So all that was connected, the crisis, the war, all of that. . . It was an atmosphere, I don't know, it was very tense, when people older than me lived through some really awful moments. When the Germans really arrived, coming down over Belgium and invading France, I was in Deauville because it was the place where my parents always spent summer vacations. They had already returned [to Paris], and they had left us, which was unimaginable since we had a mother who had never left us. . .. But we found ourselves in a pension, they had entrusted us to an elderly woman who ran a pension, so I had a year of schooling in Deauville, in a hotel that had been transformed into a lycée, and the Germans weren't far. . . Wait, I am confusing everything. . . That was during the "phony war" [1939-40], when I was in this lycée. So Deauville had always been. . . When I was talking earlier about paid vacations, I recall all the more clearly the arrival of the first paid vacationers to the beaches in Deauville. That would have been something for a filmmaker, that would be. . . a master work, because when you saw these people who saw the sea for the first time, it was astounding. I recall seeing someone who saw it for the first time, and even after, and it was splendid. It was a young girl from the Limousin province who was with us and who saw the sea for the first time. And it's true, if there is something that's unimaginable when you haven't ever seen it, it's the sea. One can tell oneself that it's something grandiose, something infinite, but the words don't mean anything. When one sees the sea. . . And that little girl stayed standing there, I don't know, for four or five hours before the sea, completely dumbstruck as if she had been born an idiot, she just did not tire from standing before such a sublime, such a grandiose spectacle. Now, this was the beach at Deauville that was a private beach, had been for a long time, for the bourgeois, it was their property. And here the paid vacationers arrive and people who no doubt had never seen the sea. That was grandiose! If class hatred means anything, it's in expressions like-alas, my mother, who was nonetheless the best of women, said, "The impossibility of frequenting beaches where there are people 'like that'." So these were. . . very hard statements. . . I believe that the bourgeois never forgot. . . May '68 was nothing next to this. . .
Claire ParnetTalk a little about the fear that they had, that you referred to earlier.
Their fear? Well, there couldn't be any stop to that [process]. If they gave paid vacation to the workers, then it was all the bourgeois privileges that were disappearing. . . And the sites. . . it was also a question of territory. If the maids can come to the beaches in Deauville, it was, I don't know, as if suddenly the return to the age of dinosaurs. . . or, I don't know, it was an aggression, it was worse than the Germans, worse than the German tanks arriving on the beaches. It was. . . indescribable.
Claire ParnetPeople from another world!
Also, and this is a detail, but what was happening in the factories, the employers, I mean. . . They never forgot that, and I think they even developed an hereditary fear. . . I don't want to say that May '68 was nothing at all, '68 was something else, but they did not lose their memory of '68 either. So there I was in Deauville, without my parents and with my brother, when the Germans broke through. And yes, it was there that I ceased being an idiot. I have to say that I was a young person who was completely mediocre in my studies, with no interest whatsoever in anything at all, and I think my stamp collection was my greatest activity. I was completely nil in class. And something happened, that occurred to a lot of people, I guess, people who are awoken, they are always awoken by someone in particular. And for me, in this hotel converted into a lycée, there was a guy, young, who seemed quite extraordinary to me because he spoke very well, and it was a total awakening for me, I had the fortune of coming upon a guy. . . Later he was rather well known, first because he had a somewhat famous father, then because he was very active in the leftist movement, but much later. His name was Halwachs, Pierre Halwachs, the son of the sociologist. At that time, he was young, and he had an odd appearance, he was very thin, very tall, or rather tall as I recall it, and he only had one eye, that is, one eye open and the other one closed, not naturally, but that's how he presented himself, kind of like a Cyclops, with very curly hair like a goat's. . . no, more like a sheep's. When it got cold, he turned green or purple, with very fragile health, so he had been deferred from military duty. He had a bachelor's degree, and so he had been placed there as a professor during the war to fill in. And for me, it was a kind of revelation. He was full of enthusiasm, and I can't even remember what year I was in, I don't know, in 8th or 9th grade, and he communicated to us, or communicated to me, something that, well, it was overwhelming for me. I was discovering all sorts of things. . . He spoke to us about Baudelaire, he read to us, he read extremely well. And we became close necessarily because he saw very well that he had impressed me enormously. And I remember, in winter on the beaches of Deauville, he took me for walks, I followed him. I realize that literally I was something like his disciple, I had found a master. So we sat down out there on the dunes, in the wind, next to the sea- it was great!-and he read to me, I remember, he read to me [André Gide's] The Fruits of the Earth. He screamed it out-there was no one on the beaches in winter- he screamed out The Fruits of the Earth. I was seated next to him, and I was a little worried that if someone else came out there, obviously, they'd say, "That's pretty strange!" So he read, and it was quite varied. He helped me discover Anatole France, Baudelaire, Gide, those were the principal ones, his great loves, and I was transformed, completely transformed. To such an extent that, rather quickly, people began talking about this guy and his strange appearance, his huge eye and all that, with this kid who followed him everywhere, going down to the beach together. The lady from the pension got worried, had me come talk to her, and said that she was responsible for me in the absence of my parents, she warned me against some type of relationships. . . I couldn't understand anything, anything at all. . .. If there ever had been a pure, indisputable, respectable relationship, it was that one. And I only understood afterwards that people assumed that Pierre Halwachs was a dangerous pederast. So I said to him, "I am upset, and my logeuse told me that"- I used the formal form in addressing him, and he used the familiar form with me- "she said we musn't see each other," that it wasn't normal, proper. So he told me, "Don't worry about it. No lady, no elderly lady can resist me," he said, "I am going to explain it to her, I will go see her, and she will be reassured." And still I was right, I was smart enough, he had made me smart enough so that I had doubts, I was not at all calmed down by that because I could foresee that it was not at all certain that the elderly logeuse would be. . . And indeed, it was catastrophic: He went to see the elderly logeuse who immediately wrote to my parents that it was urgent for them to have me return, that he was an extremely suspicious individual. . . So he completely blew the attempt. But there we were, the Germans arrive- all this was during the "phony war" -the Germans arrive, no longer any questions about Pierre- so my brother and I took off on our bicycles to meet our parents who had been taken to Rochefort- the factory was being moved to Rochefort, that is, to escape the Germans... So we did that on our bikes, and I still recall having heard the speech made by Pétain, the famous and hideous speech, in some village inn, and there we were on our bikes! And at an intersection, who do we see? There was a car, something worthy of a cartoon, there was the elder Halwachs, the young Halwachs, an aesthetician called Meyer. . . And they were going not far from La Rochelle, it was predestined. . . I tell you all that only in order to say. . . Years later, I met Halwachs, I knew him, I knew him very well, I did not have the same admiration for him, it's true, but that taught me something at least, which is that when I was 14, at the moment that I admired him, I knew that I was completely right.
Claire ParnetSo then you returned to Paris with a certain difficulty, to lycée Carnot, the "phony war" and the vacation were finished, and in lycée Carnot, you were in philosophy classes. I think at that time in lycée Carnot, Merleau-Ponty was a professor there, but strangely, you were in a philosophy class that wasn't Merleau-Ponty's, you were in the class of the other philosophy professor named Monsieur Vialle. I seem to recall that you said that name. . .
Yes, Monsieur Vialle, about whom I have a very, very fond memory. But it was completely by chance that I was assigned. . . So I could have tried to have myself reassigned to Merleau-Ponty's class, but I didn't, I don't recall why. Vialle was. . .. Indeed, Halwachs had helped me learn something about what literature was, yet from my very first classes in philosophy, I knew this was what I would do. . . I recall bits and pieces of things. . . For example, I remember quite well that I was in philosophy class when we learned about [the German massacre of the French villagers in] Ouradour. . . Ouradour had happened. I have to admit that I was in a class that was slightly politicized, rather sensitized to questions about the Nazis, etc. I was in the class of Guy Moquet [a French resistance hero], and there was a strange atmosphere in this class. . . In any case, the announcement about Ouradour, it was really very impressive for a class of boys at age seventeen or, I don't know how old one is when finishing the baccalauréat, seventeen-eighteen years. . .
Claire ParnetEighteen is the normal age. . .
Yes, I recall that well. So, Vialle, he was a professor who spoke very softly, he was old, he was. . . and I liked him enormously. Merleau-Ponty, I only recall his melancholy. At Carnot, it's a big lycée where there's a balustrade that goes all around the first floor, and there was the very melancholic gaze of Merleau-Ponty who looked at all the kids there, down below, playing, yelling, an enormous melancholy, it seemed like he was saying, "What in God's name am I doing here?" Whereas Vialle, whom I liked so much, he was finishing his career, and here as well, I got very close to him, very close. Since we didn't live very far from one another, we used to walk back and forth to school together, and we never got tired of talking, of . . . And there I knew, either I would do philosophy, or I would do nothing.
Claire ParnetStarting from your first courses?
Yes, yes. It was as if, if you like. . . When I learned of the existence, that there were such strange things called "concepts," that had the same effect on me as, for some other people, the encounter with characters from a magnificent novel. God, I was excited to learn about. . .
Claire ParnetThe Count of Monte Cristo, for example?
Oh, Charlus . . . or a great literary character from a novel, I don't know, Vautrin, anything, Eugenie Grandet. When I learned that, I don't know, even things like "What did Plato call an 'idea'?," that seemed to me to be as lively, as animated, as. . . I knew that this was it for me.
Claire ParnetAnd immediately, you did very well, you were the best?
Ah, yes. Henceforth, I no longer had any problems in school. From Halwachs onward, I did well, I did well in literature, even in Latin. Yes, I did well. I was a good student, and in philosophy, I became a very good student.
Claire ParnetI would like to go back a little. . . Weren't the classes somewhat politicized at that period? You said that something special was happening in that class because Guy Moquet was in it.
Politicized? Well, that wasn't possible during the war. We weren't politicized. There certainly were guys who, at seventeen or eighteen, were already participating in the Resistance, the conditions weren't right. People who were in the Resistance didn't talk about it unless they were cretins. So, we can't talk in terms of politicization or not. There were people who were indifferent, there were supporters of the Vichy regime. . .
Claire ParnetAction française? [A pre-World War ll ultra-right political group ]
Action française? Ah, no, this was much worse. They were Vichy supporters. . . One could say. . . No, that has no comparison with the politicization during peacetime, because the active elements were the Resistance, the young Resistance participants, or young people in relation with the Resistance participants. It has nothing to do with politicization, it was much more secretive. . .
Claire ParnetSo, in your class, for example, there were young people who were already sympathetic toward the Resistance and who talked about it?
Well yes, like I said, Guy Moquet, who would die. . . who was assassinated by the Nazis, a year later, I think. . .
Claire ParnetAnd you talked about it?
Well obviously. Just as I told you, the immediate news, the immediate communication about Ouradour was the theme, I think, a secret communiqué, the theme on the wireless (T.S.F.). . . The news was known on that very day. All the Parisian lycées knew about it. For me, that was one of the most emotional things, to learn about Ouradour almost immediately.
Claire ParnetSo to finish with "Childhood," if one is ever finished with it. . . Precisely it seems that, for you, your childhood really has little importance. That is, neither do you talk about, nor is it a reference point. You don't seem to see childhood as having much importance.
Yes. . . yes. . . yes. . . Well, necessarily so since it's almost part of all that we were talking about earlier. I consider, really, that the writing activity has nothing to do with one's individual situation. That does not mean that one doesn't put all of one's soul into it. Literature and writing is profoundly connected to life. But life is something more than personal. Everything that brings into literature something that has a relation with the life of the person, the personal life of the writer, is unfortunate by its very nature, lamentable by its nature, since that prevents one from seeing, that prevents one. . . It makes one fall back, really, on one's tiny private affair. That's never what my childhood was. It's not that it horrifies me. What would matter to me, strictly speaking, is this: just as there are becomings-animal that men envelop, [so] there are becomings-child. I believe that writing always means becoming-something, but it's for that reason that one doesn't write just to write either. I believe that one writes because there is something of life going through you, whatever it might be . . . There are things that. . . One writes for life, that's it, and one becomes something. Writing is becoming, becoming anything that one wants except [a] writer, and it's doing everything one wants except [creating an] archive. As much as I respect the archive- what we are doing is fine. We are creating the archive, but it's not. . . It has an interest only in relation to something else. . . If there is a reason to create an archive, it's because it has a relation with something else and that, through the archive, one will perhaps grasp a little bit of that something else. But the very idea, for example, of speaking about my childhood seems to me. . . It's not only useless, but also the opposite of all literature. If you permit me, I have read that a thousand times, everyone has said it, all the great writers have always said it. But I came upon this book that I didn't know-everyone has his gaps -a great Russian poet Mandelstam, that I was reading yesterday, as I told you. . .
Claire ParnetWith the very beautiful first name, can you read it?
Osip. . . yes, Osip. . . He says in this sentence. . . He says- there are these equivalencies, and this kind of sentence overwhelms me. And that's, the professor's role, that's what it is, to communicate a text, to have kids like a text. That's what Halwachs did for me- So he says: "There's something that I don't quite understand, I don't know exactly what it is." He says: "I never could understand people like Tolstoy," and even Tolstoy, eh? "in love with the family archives with their epic poems made of domestic memories." Here it starts to get serious: "I repeat: my memory is not of love, but of hostility, and it labors not at reproducing, but at distancing the past. For an intellectual of mediocre background," like him, "memory is useless, it would suffice for him to talk about the books he had read, and his biography would be complete," like me with Halwachs. "There, where for fortunate generations, the epic poem was spoken in hexameters and in chronicles, for me, there stands a gaping sign, and between me and the century there lies an abyss, a ditch filled with time that murmurs. What did my family wish to say? I do not know. It had been stuttering since birth, and yet it had something to say. This congenital stuttering weighs heavily on me and on many of my contemporaries. We were not taught to speak but to stammer- and only by listening to the swelling noise of the century and being bleached by the foam on the crest of its wave did we acquire a language." Now, I don't know, what that means for me, really. . . Yes, what that means that writing is to bear witness to life, bear witness for life, for in the sense we were saying earlier, for the animals who die. It's stammering in language. Doing literature by calling upon childhood, it's typically to make literature into one's tiny private affair, it's totally disgusting, really K-mart literature, bazaar literature, it's bestsellers, truly shit. If you don't push language up to this point where it stammers-it's not easy, it isn't enough to stammer, beh beh beh, like that. . . If you don't reach that point, well then. . . Perhaps in literature, just as, through pushing language to a limit, there is a becoming-animal of language itself and of the writer, there is also a becoming-child, but it's not his childhood. He becomes child, yes, but it's no longer his childhood, or anyone's childhood, it's the childhood of the world, the childhood of a world. So those writers who are interested in their childhood, they can fuck off, and then continue, well and good, they create the literature they deserve. If there was someone who was not interested in his childhood, it was Proust, for example. . . Fine, so, the task of the writer is not to go digging through the family archives, it's not interesting oneself in one's childhood, no one is interested. . . No one worthy of anything whatsoever is interested in hisIher childhood. Our task is to become child through writing, reach a childhood of the world, restore a childhood of the world. That's the task of literature.
Claire ParnetA Nietzschean child?
Nietzsche, among others, understood. . . Mandelstam as well. All writers know it. . . It's becoming, I could not find any other expression than that. Writing means becoming, but it means becoming neither writer, nor one's own memorialist. And it's not because I had a love story that I am going to go write a novel, it's vile to think things like that. It's not just mediocre, it's vile.
Claire ParnetWell, an exception to the rule is that Nathalie Sarraute, who is a great writer, just wrote a book entitled Childhood. Is this a little bit of a weakness?
Not at all, not at all. I agree with you, Nathalie Sarraute is an immensely important writer. Childhood is not at all a book about her childhood, it's a book that typically bears witness. . .
Claire ParnetI was playing the devil's advocate role . . .
I well understood that you are playing the devil's advocate role, but it's a very dangerous role, you understand? . . . She invents a child of the world. What interests Nathalie Sarraute finally in her childhood? It's a certain number of stereotyped formulae from which she derives marvelous effects. That could just as well be what she already did with the final words of. . . the final words of who there?
Claire ParnetOf Chekhov?
Chekhov. . . She is going to draw from. . . she is going to draw from . . . as a little girl, she heard someone say, "How are you?," what is this "how are you? how are. . . ?" etc., and from that, she is going to draw out a world of language, have language to proliferate on itself. So, come on, as if she were interested in her childhood. . .
Claire ParnetWell, all that is fine, but still. . .
Claude Sarraute would be interested in his childhood, but not Nathalie Sarraute!
Claire ParnetAllo Coco. . . That's all well and good, but still, at the same time. . . First, it was a very early training that pushed you toward literature. That is, you repressed your childhood, you rejected it like an enemy and as hostile, first, starting at what age, was this a training? And on the other hand, childhood returns nonetheless by bursts, even if they are disgusting bursts, childhood still returns. So is it necessary to have a nearly daily training or a daily form of discipline?
That happens all by itself, I imagine, because. . . Childhood, childhood, childhood. . . You know, it's like everything, one has to distinguish a bad childhood from a good childhood. I call. . . What is interesting there [in childhood]? Well, besides the relations with the father, the mother, and childhood memories such as, my father, my mother, that doesn't seem really interesting to me. It seems very interesting and quite rich for oneself, but not really interesting to write about. There are other aspects of childhood. . . I was talking about it earlier, a horse dies in the street before automobiles were around. . . It's a way to rediscover the child emotion. . . It's a child, in fact. . . One ought to say, 'The child I once was is nothing, but I am not merely the child I have been, I was a child among others, I was a child just like any other." And it's always under the heading of any child whatsoever that I have seen what was interesting, not under the heading, I was this particular child. . .. Ok, "I saw a horse die in the street before there were automobiles," not for me, but for those who saw this. Well, yes, very good, very good, perfect, perfect. . . It's a task of becoming writer, perhaps a factor that resulted in Dostoyevski seeing it-there is a wonderful page by Dostoyevski, I think, in Crime and Punishment, about the horse dying in the street- Nijinski the dancer saw it, Nietzsche saw it. . .. He was old already when Nietzsche saw it in Turin, I think. . . a horse dying like that. . . Well, that's fine. . .
Claire ParnetSo you saw the demonstrations of the Popular Front?
Yes, I saw demonstrations of the Popular Front, yes, I saw my father struggling between his honesty and his anti-Semitism. . . Yes, indeed. . . I have been a child. . . I have always pleaded, that is, in the sense that people don't understand the importance of the indefinite article. . .. A child is beaten, a horse is whipped, etc. . . . That doesn't mean, that doesn't mean, me, me. . . The indefinite article has an extreme richness.
Claire ParnetIt's the multiplicity, we will return to that.
It's the multiplicity, yes. . . yes.