By now everyone knows that the French killed literature. They did it the old fashioned way: they held it in their arms and kissed it. It was, of course, a liberal kiss, tasting of cigarettes and coffee. But it was a liberal kiss nonetheless which means it had method behind it. Shall we explain further? Perhaps. But first we must tell you that love, true love, a committed love is simply a lie. Darling you must add it to all the other lies: justice, fashion, memories, motherhood and religion. (I am not French so I’ve left a few out.)
Anyway,here’s how you smother literature the French way:
1. Read Freud as a cookbook. Repression is desire frustrated by bad translations–all desires must be cooked with ever complicated recipes. The more complicated and frustrated you are the better. This is not your grandfather’s sponge cake.
2. In the backwards colonial algebra of equilibration, imagine that bad domestic ideas are equal to bad foreign policy. The battle of Algiers is akin to the devaluation of the ideas of the Enlightenment. That is, people are greedy and cruel because they’ve lost faith in language. This is of course not a political idea though it looks like one. Killing literature depends on the appearance of an idea, but not the possession of a true principle. This is very important but never say it.
3. The above means that you pretend to economic justice as an idea, but you don’t analyze as Marx did, the means of production, rather you take up language and decry its potential for honesty–this is the Derridean paradox. If clarity is impossible, nay, suspect, than in effect, and cynically enough, everything is equal. As William Gass once put it: “Culture has completed its work when everything is a sign.” To this we can add: “A culture without wonder.”
4. Killing literature depends on killing astonishment. And the more hieratic you can be with this principle the more Quislings you will convert.
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I haven’t been blogging much lately. I’ve let myself become entrapped in administration–a matter that can make one feel like Boris Gudinov, both honest and cruel, just and duplicitous. But I’m trying to work my way back to the good table whereon rests the good tea pot.
My sister who is a doctor and who is studying acupuncture reports that according to Chinese medicine the liver doesn’t like windy days. And the spleen doesn’t like cold water. The latter fact if it is a fact is the reason they serve hot tea in Chinese restaurants. Tea makes the spleen happy.
Judging by this, Samuel Johnson was a happy man.
And he certainly believed that words had efficacy.
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If you are a commenter on this blog, please note that in order to defeat spamming I’ve had to turn on the “approve comments” feature. I’ve been bombarded with junk and this is the only way I can prevent it. I promise not to edit your comments at all. No post-structuralist I.
Hot tea for everyone.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 