As anciently anchored in me as may be my mistrust of literature—without, of course, excepting my own—it is literature which, indisputably, colors my life. My first trip to Africa represents in this regard a paradox that verges on buffoonery: having discovered ethnography and wanting to devote to it henceforth the largest part of my activity, I had gone off on this expedition wishing to turn my back on everything that seemed to me no more than a contemptible aestheticism; but it so happened that the travel diary I had strictly obliged myself to keep (making concessions to a far too inveterate habit of a man of the pen), this diary, published almost without any revisions shortly after my return, was, in fact, the start of my being published otherwise than in a quasi-confidential way, the one, in short, that situated me as a professional writer. The effort I had made to distance myself from the business of literature thus had an inverse result and merely endowed with a second calling—ethnography—the man of letters that I have remained. As for my recent trip to China, it can likewise furnish ample material for my irony: whereas in China I had said to myself that, as a Chinese in the people’s China, I could quite well adapt myself to a society whose members have as their ideal to take industrial and agricultural production as far as possible, in the same way that their recompense is eventually to be anointed “work heroes” (the strongest in weaving, manufacture of steel rods, or pork raising)—just as in other societies one can be consecrated a great writer or an artist of genius; and whereas on my return from China, properly literary preoccupations had become almost alien to me and I could not see what justification one could logically propose to men except the growth of their ascendancy over nature, I found when I arrived at my house a packet of press clippings proving to me that the book I had sent out a few days before going off—Scraps—had been received much more favorably than my preceding books had been. This relative success, occurring when I had just become convinced that my life could very validly have been constructed outside of literature, was a mockery that could only lead me to some bitter meditations on things that arrive too late: as a young writer I hoped (without admitting it to myself) that one fine day I would have a certain following; having grown older in harness, and believing less and less in the need for my message, I was in fact obliged to acknowledge that I did not derive more than a slender pleasure from this success and that my life, though it had become that of a respected writer, was in no way changed. I found myself, in short, in the situation of one who, where his love life is concerned, begins to enjoy good fortune though he is now too old to have the capacity—or even the desire—to profit from it.
Aside from two or three studies pertinent enough to help me take stock, which I read with interest, I had the feeling, as I studied the clippings gathered for me by my wife, as well as some articles that came after, that what I saw before me were obituary notices: having been bound and determined, as I was, to create a statue of myself, and having spoken only of myself, it was about me that they were speaking when they spoke about the book, and that statue which I had taken such care to sculpt—I saw it now, with horror, rise up like a tombstone in the external reality that it had assumed. Far from encouraging me, the welcome given to Scraps was thus for me a cause of depression and a constraint in the continuation of my work. The two feelings, of horror and mockery, of which I have just spoken were soon joined by a sort of stage fright, entirely new to me in this area, and it, too, was paradoxical: as if I now required this praise, although I declare that it caused me even more ill than good, and as if, having tasted this poison and consumed it with many a grimace, I was nevertheless afraid I would suffer for lack of it, I began asking myself if the same kindly reception would be reserved for the following volume, these “fibrils” on which, ever since China, I have been working with a difficulty perhaps connected (I have been thinking about this for some time) with the fact that China played no more than an infinitesimal role in the exoticism of my childhood, so that it lacks certain resonances, a difficulty based undoubtedly on my concern for truth, but carried to an extreme by this new worry. The dread of no longer doing as well, of being judged someone who perhaps had his hour but is today a finished man, the idea that I have now told the essential thing or, in any case, the thing that had enough attraction in itself to tolerate being narrated without too much art (so that I will need to deploy an art that is greater and greater as the attraction of what I have to say dwindles, and that I will have to resign myself sooner or later to silence, if I am incapable of inventing beautiful fictions when I reach the point of no longer finding anything in my life worth being recounted)—such thoughts plunged me into a state of uncertainty and almost physical disgust, aggravated by the opinion, more detestable than ever, that I formed of myself, as vulnerable as most men of letters to the judgment that may be passed on them by their readers. One myth at least was destroyed forever: that of the writer as rebel, so marginalized that he is no longer strictly speaking a writer. If writing still answered an almost visceral need in me, this was no longer because I hoped to find, at the end of my written discourse, a rule for a better way of living or because I had something on my heart of which I had to relieve myself or even because I needed at all costs to obey an inclination to tell about myself; it simply seemed to me that to say nothing would amount, in some sense, to dying, in the eyes of the men and women who had followed me thus far. No visible change had affected my person, and I had not decked myself out in any almeh’s baggy trousers; yet I had become Scheherazade, worried when she thinks she sees that the sultan has taken less pleasure in her tale of that night than in that of the preceding night, Scheherazade who cannot run short of stories under pain of being put to death by the sultan.
Through most of the published studies of Scraps or of my work as a whole ran one leitmotiv, my obsession with death, and as I read them it seemed to me that it was the same with my writings as in the Cards aria of Carmen: in vain had I mixed, cut, shuffled, hoping there would at last emerge a happy card; what showed up in the arrangement of figures and imageless values of my game was Death again, always Death. I saw a recognition that what I am is indissolubly linked to that from which, precisely, I want to disengage myself; and, whatever the praise was, anyway, I had to conclude from the great mass of these articles that my attempt to escape from the unbreathable atmosphere created by the constant presence of the idea of nothingness had failed. Certain critics spoke of my masochism, whereas I dream only of the fullness of life, and, though they clearly wanted to see my disturbance as an interesting case, they treated me as an ill man in love with his illness. I would seem blind, certainly, if I denied my inclination to lean, to the point of vertigo, over our inner abysses, and it would, furthermore, be ungracious not to pay their due to those whose commentary, in one way or another, helps me positively in my effort by allowing me a clearer view of the point to which I have come. But I may—without acrimony, though firmly—protest against the opinion advanced by some, that, under the effect of a morbid impulsion, I strain my ingenuity to diminish my enthusiasms and systematically seek to destroy all reasons for hope. Refusing to be deceived is not the same as proposing to reduce everything to mere deception. True, I want to accept nothing that I have not submitted to a severe examination; but if what results from this is the destruction of many illusions, that does not mean that, with a perverse joy, I set out to disqualify all things. It seems to me, in any case, only too natural to have to fight inch by inch against the idea of death, and that, without being a neurotic, one may well resist this invasion only with difficulty; if they were not in the majority, I would, in fact, consider abnormal those who apparently think so little about the thing by which I am said to be obsessed and, in my opinion, thus give proof either of a never-failing courage or of a deficiency of perspicacity that could not be justified by its happy consequences.
Those praising me (I must emphasize) were not at all unanimous in regarding my statue with the mixture of respect and commiseration one owes to the noble forms that may be assumed by o
ne who has been defeated. One of them, in his friendly kindness, went so far as to conclude an essay (which contained comparisons that were ingenious and for me revelatory between my various writings) by attributing to me this triumph: the discovery of the system that allows one to eliminate all distance between a personal life and mythology. But whatever egotistical joy I may have derived at the moment from the pages of my “supporter,” these pages soon ceased to be a balm and became, rather, a knife in the wound, for I knew too well this about myself, that, even admitting I had managed to transform my life into a myth, it has become such only in writing, in the past-tense tale I have made of it and not in itself, in the present in which I live it. I was therefore stricken, in the end, by this victory announcement (whose extremist nature could hardly escape me) scarcely less malignly than by the tributes of those who were saluting my defeat.
Never happy, said the title in gold (or black against a gold background) of one of my childhood books whose theme was the following: the naïveté of a young boy and his sister, who imagine that the early centuries were better than ours but encounter only disillusionment as they experience, in a dream, life in these epochs, none of which proves to be without a fault. “Never happy,” I could say with reference to myself, accusing myself of a lack of wisdom even worse than that of those two children, whose mistake is to underestimate what they have as their lot in life and to attribute marvelous characteristics to what they do not have, but who at least are led by their successive disappointments finally to appreciate what the present gives them. Uncomfortable if someone honored me while pitying me for my bad fortune, but also uncomfortable if someone sang my praises extravagantly; sensitive to judgments that I myself have provoked, and acquiescing to only a tiny part of them; disheartened by the series of clippings that I had to read when I arrived home, but annoyed when that dried up; depressed almost as soon as I saw that I was the recipient of a prize honoring me for my work in literature (the same prize that I would have been vexed not to receive once I had known I was in a position to obtain it); depressed, on the other hand, when I am incapable of continuing my task as writer and say to myself that if this goes on I will soon cease to exist for anyone, it is certain that in my chosen area, as in those from which arise, not only long trips, but other ways of searching for a Promised Land (like the little boy and girl who wanted to leave their own time for another), I behave like a sulky child, as though, despite my desire to come to an end of it, I intended to be the living illustration of that “never happy.”
I present myself as a morose sort of person, I depict myself first and foremost as eternally dissatisfied, and yet I protest if someone other than me should happen to accuse me of pessimism. Is this a desire to be contradicted, or a vulnerability associated with a concealed coyness, is it a complete inconsistency, or an illustration of that paradox from which it would be difficult to escape once one has become caught up in it: to be loved for what one is requires that one reveal oneself, and one proceeds to do so, risking all, but, the confession having been made and received, one is irritated once one sees oneself taken literally and unmasked? If there is something so unfair about my reaction to the simple belief accorded to what I said that it can make one laugh or merit an annoyed shrug of the shoulders, this is not even the height of my oddness. As it happens, in fact, just when I declared that I was not in despair, and rebelled against those who attributed too black a meaning to my writings, I indulged in what one may regard as a suicide attempt, and this, when I had just achieved what for a long time I was calling a piece of good fortune, the love affair of which, I had begun to think (many years ago, by now), the other adventures of one sort or another in which I might involve myself represented only, if I wanted to see things in their intrinsic nature, timid substitutes: the vain distractions from my boredom which were, in the end, my flights to other countries, my humanist research, my vague political inclinations, from which (if it were not for what is happening today in North Africa) I would probably have turned away, after the events in Hungary, which made me see the odious sort of religious quietism into which I had sunk when, after the Vienna Congress of 1952, I had become more or less what people of the right call a “cryptocommunist.”
About the crisis that motivated an action the result of which (according to conventional thinking) was nearly fatal to me, I will confine myself to giving a minimum of information. I remain too involved in it to be able to talk about it at greater length.
I should say first, therefore, that for several months I had been stockpiling, instead of using, the small tablets of phenobarbital which a doctor had prescribed for me in order to improve my emotional stability. A complicity had arisen between a woman I was corresponding with and myself on the subject of the “eight grams of soneryl,” the fatal dose of sleeping pills it is good to have on hand, since to have permanently available a sickly-sweet means of doing away with oneself can only help one to live. Not having this product, I had accumulated, without telling anyone, not even my correspondent, a quantity of barbiturate that had amounted to some six grams by the night I ingested it.
I should then say that the love so much desired, even though its advent, along with the exaltation that accompanied it, delivered me from a part of my torment, gave me a clear perception of the following harsh truth: except during short periods of true peace, I seem to oscillate between a boredom such that I believe it will drive me mad and the state of intolerable tension into which I am thrown by the conflicts of feeling that surge up as soon as I embark on a love affair in order to escape this boredom. What could be poetically described as the incarnation of a beautiful dream is labeled bourgeois adultery in the language of social relations, and I suffered from that dichotomy as I suffered from the game of duplicity to which I was led, in practice, endeavoring to maintain secrecy vis-à-vis the companion to whom, despite the difficult turbulence of which I have spoken, I am joined too deeply, and have been for too long, to want to leave her, and having no other choice than to betray her by saying nothing to her, or to betray the other by revealing my secret.
A lie does not merely attack a truth; by this lie, the whole truth will soon be called into question: to love within a lie led me to ask myself whether that love itself was not a lie, to what extent my partner was telling me the truth, to what extent also were we not feasting on a Henry Bataille sort of play whose lines we were feeding each other and if, when I hoped for an encounter that would banish the idea that before one dies, one can do no more than go quietly along one’s chosen path, I was really anything other than the victim either of the need to revive my slackening forces by giving them a new point of application, or of one of those violent lusts that seize men as they enter old age, most especially men like me, who, not having lived enough, and having always doubted themselves terribly, are determined to test themselves while there may still be time. What came to me then—from a woman who will remain, in this picture, a formless figure by virtue of a stupid way of proceeding that seriously falsifies perspective: the one that obliges me often to say nothing about a certain detail that matters, whereas I have all the accommodation in the world for other, secondary details—presented itself (I do not deny it) as a favor from destiny, but a favor that came to me too late, as came to me too late a certain literary consecration, and that, in addition, turned out to be impossible for me to seize without thereby seriously burning myself. I found, in short, that I was confronted with the following alternatives: either suffer this burning (knowing, furthermore, that my double life could scarcely last very long) or else remain in my rut. It was this exact point that I ran up against, believing I was in a situation with no way out and sinking more deeply than ever before into a nauseating state of mind of which I did not know what parts of it I ought to assign respectively to its physical and its mental causes.
Ancient cosmogonies describe the formation of the world as a degradation of the original unity, which split into fragments that split in their turn, so that the integrity of the whole deco
mposes finally into the dust of multiplicity. My own unity was first of all split between two women, and the harm, painful as it was, would perhaps not have become too extreme if the division thus begun had stopped there. But this division continued the same way as in the cosmogonies to which I have alluded. At the time of a visit from my correspondent (who had come to Paris from the Germanic country where she was feverishly trying her hand at writing while finishing her medical studies), a second and intolerable dichotomy occurred when I heard, from the mouth of this rather gruff visitor, who pleasantly accused herself of having betrayed me by seeking, for her attempts, other advice than mine, a phrase that I heard without restraining (with a greedy gesture) my emotion, but that overjoyed me only to torment me, for what I would have wanted was to hear it from another mouth: There is something heart-rending about you . . . This happened in the office that had gradually turned into a simple retreat, for me, in the basement of the Musée de l’Homme, which is today quite sleepy, after having been the most modern of the ethnology museums at the same time as a bastion of antiracism. Wretched as he felt, just as much so when he was at home as when he was in this lair, within the walls of which five days out of seven he enclosed himself for a few hours, the rake which I was not could not tolerate a farce in which Grace and Truth—the Cat and the Bear—took turns bringing him out of the torpor of which he was the victim. This was why he lost his grip, as they say.
The idea of suicide had been preoccupying me for a long time, it is superfluous for me to come back to this again, except to say that its ascendancy had grown starting from the moment when, no longer having my previous blind faith in the human value of what they call the “socialist construction,” I saw myself not only deprived of a sort of religion, but stricken even in the activity to which I devote myself with the most consistency, since, lacking henceforth a gleam of light, even if distant and intermittent, to guide me, I would become bogged down once and for all in the slough of my book. How—now that I had been shown in black and white how very many pitfalls lie along the path of Marxism and what numbing analyses one must perform if one wants to take part honestly—how was I to take this book to the conclusion that I had glimpsed, the rejection of which would only mean (if I still wanted to conclude) its replacement by an abrupt lowering of the curtain—that is, the recording of my defeat: this conclusion being the key I had found in achieving the fusion of the poetic and the social in the direction indicated to me by the experience I recounted at the very beginning of Scratches, an experience that was in some sense my cogito, when, learning that one says “heureusement” [“happily”] and not “. . . reusement,” as the little fellow I was then had just done, I had discovered the existence of language as an external reality extending beyond me, from which one must deduce that one does not speak all by oneself (others, even if absent, being implicated in the act of speaking, since it is their words that one employs) and that as soon as one speaks—or writes, which amounts to the same thing—one admits that outside of oneself there exists an other, so that, if one speaks or writes, it would be absurd to reject the knots that attach one to the indefinite circle of humanity that, beyond time and place, is represented by one’s faceless interlocutor? To this difficulty, not altogether new, was added, as though to make the cup overflow, the fact that something happened to me of such a nature that, knowing it would be henceforth out of the question to say everything, I saw myself committed to a form of cheating that consisted in continuing to talk about myself while keeping silent about this thing, which was, however, more important than many others about which I had gone on at length with perhaps too much complacency.
The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 Page 12