A tidbit from Barbara Ellen in The Observer:

French letters? Non merci

French novelist Patrick Poivre D’Arvor is being sued by his ex-lover, Agathe Borne, for allegedly publishing her love letters in his novel, Fragments of a Lost Woman. D’Arvor is arguing that it is “self-fiction”. Borne, a former model and would-be writer, is suing for breach of privacy and literary theft over the novel, alleged to be a disguised account of their two-year affair.

Borne argues that D’Arvor only published the billets doux out of revenge when she left him to go back to her husband and children. The letters include such sentiments as: “Your skin and your smell obsess me. I would like to feel your body, your sex, your mouth, your hands, to lose awareness of time. To kiss you, to abandon myself to the limit.” And: “My brain is a box of surprises. But my body exalts in love.” On the one hand, this beats: “Don’t forget the milk and can you record Downton Abbey for me?” On the other, très embarrassant, n’est ce pas?

It’s not the sexuality that’s so mortifying – it’s the lousy, try-hard writing. Perchance this is an occupational hazard of falling for an author – this tendency to go overboard in erotic correspondence, trying to impress your heart’s desire with your turn of phrase. The next thing you know, it’s (allegedly) “fictionalised” in a book and everyone is having a good titter at your bons mots.

The verdict will be announced in the autumn, but one can’t help but feel sorry for Borne – she’s gone from being caught up in a grand passion to being unofficially shortlisted for the Bad Sex award. Is it too late for her to change tack and refuse to admit she wrote any of it?

The French way of love has been under the spotlight recently with the DSK scandal and the discussion of what it means to be a ‘homme a femmes’. On reading the piece, I found myself in sympathy with Ellen’s distaste for Borne’s exuberant declarations. The seem willfully immature, but I suppose that it does occur to me that this coolness might have its origins in la froideur brittanique and a lack of exposure to Baudelaire in my adolescent years?

In Thomas Meaney’s review of Patrick Wilcken’s biography of Claude Levi-Strauss in The Nation, Levi-Strauss becomes a prism through a host of French intellectuals can be understood:

For French academics and intellectuals coming of age in the 1960s, it was difficult to avoid the impression that Lévi-Strauss, by painstakingly drawing lessons from indigenous peoples from across the world, was working on a much grander scale than Sartre. “Bus-stop queues, strikes, boxing matches—the examples out of which Sartre built his ‘philosophical anthropology’—seemed provincial in comparison to structuralism’s global reach,” writes Wilcken. While Sartre concentrated on working out the problem of individual emancipation within the narrow confines of the Western philosophical tradition, Lévi-Strauss, by peeling back the divergent expressions of a common human nature all over the world, was able to reveal how much of Western culture was an unhealthy aberration. This self-critical stance in the face of other cultures became a more compelling form of anticolonialism than Sartre’s calling for third world revolution from his table at the Café de Flore. Ours was the only civilization, argued Lévi-Strauss, whose attempts to release humanity from the bonds of nature led to gross delusions that have underwritten everything from the destruction of the environment to the Holocaust. To Sartre’s “Hell is other people,” Lévi-Strauss answered: “Hell is ourselves.”

The other reason for Lévi-Strauss’s unlikely triumph was that structuralism served as a convenient halfway house for disenchanted Marxists. Those who had lost faith in the iron laws of historical materialism during the war now placed their bets on structuralism as a more credible form of social criticism for resisting the advances of Anglo-American liberalism. Structuralism also exercised a hold on their minds because its core concept of social codes was a closed system invulnerable to empirical testing. Its “imperialism of significance,” as René Girard has called it, could explain almost anything, and turned Lévi-Strauss’s corpus into the intellectual buffet from which the next generation selected its defining ideas. For Lacan, structuralism revealed the system of symbolic forms that the mind unconsciously mapped onto reality. For Althusser, it helped explain how the capitalist mode of production drew on an intricate code of agreed-upon meanings that bore little relation to the actual reality of workers. For Foucault, who was deeply attracted to the antihumanist element in structuralism despite claiming not to be a structuralist, Lévi-Strauss showed how concepts like “madness” were arbitrary constructions whose salience depended on a complex web of shifting social values. Meanwhile, Barthes used its more formal techniques to unveil the realist conceits of the modern novel and champion the “novels-without-a-subject” of Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Levi-Strauss, in his turn, became a ‘school of one’:

Still, the fusillades Lévi-Strauss aimed at his critics didn’t deter him from settling into his own brand of conservatism toward the end of his life. As Wilcken points out, Lévi-Strauss père’s reverence for established forms reasserted itself with renewed force in his son, whose youthful taste for the avant-garde proved to be spent. In 1980 Lévi-Strauss voted against Marguerite Yourcenar’s nomination to a seat in the Académie française because it went against “centuries of tradition.” (Yourcenar was the first woman to be elected.) A backslide into traditionalism is not unusual among old men. But less expected was that Lévi-Strauss’s scientific work would later be co-opted for explicitly conservative political ends: in the ’80s, French deputies quoted from The Elementary Structures of Kinship in their arguments in favor of traditional marriage as the cornerstone of the Fifth Republic.

Wilcken concludes his biography on a dismissive note. “Lévi-Strauss ended up as a one-man school,” he writes, “peddling a type of analysis that had become so utterly idiosyncratic that it was impossible to build on.” But his frustration with Lévi-Strauss’s overall project is understandable. The scientific side of Lévi-Strauss expected his work to be superseded, but in practice he stubbornly resisted updating his thinking or responding to revisions proposed by thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Clifford Geertz. In Wilcken’s telling, Lévi-Strauss comes to resemble a medieval scholastic, rummaging through structures of his own imagining as he twirls three-dimensional “myth mobiles” that hang from the ceiling of his office. The best Wilcken can say, in the end, is that “in a world of ever more specialized areas of knowledge, there may never again be a body of work of such exhilarating reach and ambition.”

Further reading:

1. Janet Maslin review in The New York Times
2. David Lan in The Guardian
3. Colin MacCabe in The New Statesman
4. Peter Mandler in The Literary Review
5. Andrew Hussey in The Independent
6. Adam Kirsch in Tablet Magazine
7. Peter Wilcken celebrates CLS’s centenary in The TLS
8. Ramona Koval talks with Patrick Wilcken on ABC’s The Bookshow

This fellow had quite a life:

Lived on a houseboat on the Seine.

Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy express outrage at being ridiculed and victimised by their nation | Books | The Guardian

Houellebecq also talks for the first time in detail about his parents, answering his mother, who recently published her own book calling him a “stupid little bastard”. 

In a literary scandal that gripped France, she took to the airwaves to heap insults on her son, who she gave to his grandparents to raise when he was a baby.

Houellebecq says he has only ever seen his mother about 15 times, and she conjured up a more radical “wickedness” than the “worst mothers in modern literature”. He said his friends, on reading her attacks against him, asked why she had not simply had an abortion instead of giving birth to him. He calls her an “absolutely egocentric creature, of real although limited intelligence” and says he cannot even manage to hate her.

It might be that never having a mother “reinforces” one, he writes, but in a way that he would not wish on anyone: one can never take love for granted, and one has difficulty believing in it, remaining a kind of “enfant sauvage”, never serene, never tame, “always ready to bite”. He saw his mother’s book and press tour as being the media’s attempt to get at him.

French Writer Wins Nobel Prize – NYTimes.com

Asked at the news conference if he had any message to convey, Mr. Le Clézio said: “My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.”

John Lichfield: Our Man In Paris – John Lichfield, Commentators – The Independent

The urban motorway which hugs the boundary of Paris proper is a sort of 10-lane medieval city wall. Inside the Périphérique is the beautiful city beloved of tourists and the home, for the most part, of the white and the well-off. Outside the Périphérique are the banlieues, a few of them leafy, wealthy and white; some of them poor and abandoned and dangerous; most of them a dynamic, incoherent, multiracial jumble.

President Nicolas Sarkozy took a bold, and somewhat puzzling, initiative last week. He selected 10 teams to think up visions for a “Greater Paris”. They will report back next year.

The idea is sensible and long overdue. But President Sarkozy’s initiative has, nonetheless, puzzled and alarmed many people. The Elysée Palace has jumped straight to the building stage. The Socialist leadership of the Paris town hall and the greater Paris area have been kept at arm’s length.

Critics fear that M. Sarkozy has no real interest in breaking down the invisible wall between Paris and its banlieues. Instead, they say, his plan is a smokescreen behind which property developers will be encouraged to create vast, new satellite cities of offices. Already, plans are going ahead for three new tower blocks.

Interesting report from the Paris known to us from La Haine and Caché.

The North Circular as sociologically significant boundary??

Lucie Ceccaldi, mother of Michel Houellebecq

The reptilian left eye… I’m on your side, Michel!

From Liberation:

Dans son ouvrage, Lucie Ceccaldi reconnaît avoir délaissé son fils, qui a été élevé par sa grand-mère paternelle. «La grand-mère Houellebecq était du genre prolétaire haineux», indique la dame de 83 ans.

and

Jusqu’à présent, Michel Houellebecq n’a pas souhaité s’exprimer sur le livre de sa mère.

Hmmm, I think old Lucie has a pretty thick hide, she might well need it.

She certainly doesn’t mince her words:

Mon fils qu’il aille se faire foutre par qui il veut avec qui il veut, j’en ai rien à cirer. Mais si, par malheur, il remet mon nom sur un truc, il va se prendre un coup de canne dans la tronche, ça lui coupera toutes les dents, ça, c’est sûr!

For tronche, think bonce.

and this – an enterprising Guardian journo gets Houellebecq psychoanalysed:

The emotions laid bare in this public spat between Michel Houellebecq and his mother are surprisingly common, if somewhat unfashionably Freudian. “Much is made of the Oedipus complex, and the triadic relationship between mother, father and son,” says Dr Avi Shmueli, a psychoanalyst with the Anna Freud Centre in London. “But it is more accurate to say that each of us is born with an immature sexual identity and aggressive impulses, and these are played out with the primary care giver, usually the mother.”

A boy may explore his sexuality with his mother in his early years, discovering his own body and hers, as well as the differences between them. But eventually he has to come to terms with the fact that her body isn’t exclusively his, and that he’s in competition with others for her attention. “Usually this competition is with the father,” says psychotherapist Brett Kahr. In some cases the mother bonds with her son to the exclusion of his father, a situation that can create rivalry and sexual jealousy between father and son as well as an inability to form sexual relationships later in life, but in Houellebecq’s case, “to be a little boy, and to know that your mother has gone off to be a sexual libertarian, is to feel constantly replaced by each new sexual arrival, constantly pushed down the pecking order”.

This sense of displacement, combined with the abandonment of being left to be cared for by others, can have deep-seated psychological effects. “The adult son may feel rage, hatred and even sexual undesirability,” says Kahr. “He senses he is somehow not of sufficient interest to his mother, and rejects her lifestyle and her choices.”

For Ceccaldi, the emotional fallout will be equally complex. “Some of us find it incredibly hard to be parents, but live with a deep regret for having left our child,” says Kahr. This can turn to resentment and even anger towards the child.

“Hatred is a very instinctive emotion,” says Shmueli. “As every mother knows, a screaming baby can drive you mad, and at times you want to murder it. That doesn’t mean you’ll actually do it, or that there aren’t other aspects of you that love it, but in that moment there’s a need for self-preservation. A mother’s occasional hatred for her child preserves her sense of self and the choices she has made.”

Houellebecq’s anger may also be a form of self-preservation. “But it maintains a relationship as well,” says Shmueli. “It makes him feel closer to her. Hatred is easier to deal with than that more profound sense of loss that comes with bereavement, for example. Hating someone does not imply that you’ll never have a positive relationship with them. What it suggests is that this is a passionate relationship with extremes of emotion, both negative and positive, and there is work to be done.”

A repeat viewing of Robert Bresson’s Dostoievskian tale of inflated anomie coming acropper in post-war Paris. The object relations school would approve of the means of his salvation – a comination of hitting rock bottom and finding someone to love.
I like tales of ego-shrunk salvation: DISGRACE and FALCONER spring to mind.

Despite his reputation, there isn’t an especially Christian flavour to what happens to Michel, although there are allusions lurking in the background. There’s something very Madonna-like in the young girl whose openness of heart comes to mean so much to Michel; we, in turn, come to see him as a prodigal returned by the end of the film.

Peter Wollen notes,

Visual display is the other side of the spectacle, the side of production rather than consumption or reception.

Guy Debord, the theorist of spectacle, noted how, in modern times, an excess of display has the effect of concealing the truth of the society that produces it, providing the viewer with an unending stream of images that might be best understood, not simply as detached from the real world of things, as Debord implied, but as working to efface any trace of the symbolic, condemning the viewer to a world in which we can see everything but understand nothing – allowing us as viewer-victims, in Debord’s phrase, only ‘a random choice of ephemera’.

I was throwing out some semi-digested content and found the Wollen quotation above. It’s interesting in light of the ‘Person of the Year’ Time Magazine article. This view of spectacle is getting turned on its head. Technology is empowering the consumer – don’t you just love that word! – to produce the images and more widely the content which is sending shockwaves in the world of corporate mass media.