World Literature Today, 2025
in World Literature Today, USA, translated by Tobias Ryan
(initially published in revue Europe, 2023)
“Always curious about what has pushed others to do it, one day I came across these words from Camon when faced with an umpteenth “Why do you write?”: “Ever since, I’ve thought of writing as an “instrument of power”, and I’ve always dreamed of passing to the other side, of seizing writing, but to use it in favour of those who know nothing of it: to extract their vengeance. But they never really wanted revenge, and, as a result, they never felt represented by me. And those who were looking for revenge considered me—and justly so—an enemy. Consequently, I was isolated, I hadn’t managed to bond with anyone. Everywhere I went I was an unknown, an outcast, unacceptable: family, country, the literary world, that of the Church, the Communist Party, psychoanalysis.” There is something dizzying and perhaps prideful in this response. There is also something desperate in his perspective. One could believe that this text is the result of a man and a character, of an era maybe, but beneath the likely singularities of the author something that seems like fatality emerges, which is to say the results of psychological and sociological laws forming a knot that coils around their victim’s name.
Those words detonated a wave of violent anger in me as well as a keen sympathy for Camon. Pushing open the doors of the literary milieu had been difficult, but the illusion of freedom that had come with my first books was quickly stamped out. I understood that I too had been caught in a pincer, conscious and involuntarily. Since childhood, I have always struggled slotting into hierarchies and, though I may have always seemed docile, have always found ways to escape. I have held to the imperatives and inevitabilities that we are always banging on about. I have not wanted to climb the social ladder, though everything seems to encourage it. I have vertigo, and like all those who suffer from it, can’t bear endless heights. No, I don’t want to climb; I want to fly. Becoming a writer was the best way as far as I could tell. Very quickly, however, the literary world caught up to me, its logic and preoccupations turning me away from something in which I had profound faith, and which Deleuze put: “[t]o write is also to become something other than a writer.”And what can we become through the power of writing if not one the obstinate who endeavour to escape social injunctions in whatever way they can? A mystic, maybe. An outsider, surely. If that’s not why one seeks to become a man of letters then what’s the point?
Camon’s words bear witness to the tendency for the intransigent to exceed the garments in which they have been decked, whether that be a suit or a cassock. They come from someone who, despite gaining recognition, seems to have resisted institutionalization. An unyielding writer. Because of that, I have felt him at work within me. Sharply, sorrowfully. Neither as a pose nor a failure, but actually as a kind of immiscibility. Everywhere I have been, I was, or was put, to one side: medicine, psychoanalysis, university, letters. I have partaken in this fatality myself, without wanting to, and sometimes wanting the opposite, seeking out community. I don’t want to say, like him, that I have actively been suppressed. Of course it was more subtle. It is a process of eviction which pushes one into isolation despite oneself. And if the dominant caste have established a respectable category for its class exiles, rare are those that have chosen it—in order to serve, whomever it is they defend, more so than to change their own lives.
Camon has never really benefited from the advantages of this reassuring knighting. He cries out in his vindictive disarray, proclaiming that he has been, if not wayward, at least unassimilable. And his anger perhaps affirms the resistance of a lost memory—one of the motors of his writing: that force that ghosts breathe into life before they disappear, unquestionably making it impossible to assimilate.
What he has done is to invite me to accept the discomforting surge which has mistreated me: that reaction against the prevailing powers which has often hampered me. An opposition which has not only been metaphorical, such as I experienced when ill then convalescing, but against the social Moloch which insidiously transforms those who submit to its rules into powerless rags—guns ceaselessly trained on them.
And that anger can’t but maintain the fire of what had unconsciously pushed me and pushes me still: to write and in doing so shatter the moorings of all docility.”