Honorary degree for the French writer at the Kore University of Enna: We have a physical and intimate need for others from other lives, and we find them in books. Here is his speech
The fact that we pay homage to writers has always amazed me. With an unfortunate constancy, the best authors unanimously describe a world without hope, ravaged by misery, populated by humans who are most often mediocre and sometimes openly evil. In this world, happiness, virtue and love have no place, they are not at home; they appear only as surprising little islands, almost miraculous, in the midst of an ocean of suffering, indifference and evil.
Worse still, the perpetrators themselves are very often sex addicts, sometimes pedophiles, almost always alcoholics, and sometimes users of other even more dangerous drugs; I, for example, have been heavily addicted to smoking for over forty years. If they need all this to be able to endure existence, because their worldview – which they try, as best they can, to share with us – is a vision of desolation and horror.
If this is the case, is it really legitimate to reward these people by pointing them to the admiration of the people?
S.
Literature contributes nothing to the increase of knowledge, n al moral progress of humanity; but it contributes significantly to human well-being, and it does so in a way that no other art can claim.
I will be forced to make some observations unrelated to each other, quite independent, to explain how I came to this belief.
Like most people, I discovered pleasure before I discovered pain. For children, the most common pleasure is that of gluttony; I was not a very greedy child. A little later I discovered sexuality; in that case, however, I immediately appreciated a lot. And then, roughly speaking, nothing more, no other essential discovery to report.
This has nothing to do with my topic, but still surprising: for thousands of years, human ingenuity works to create new objects, new products; and for several centuries it has made use of industry and capitalism, which has greatly accelerated the process. But it has never been able to produce anything that comes even remotely, that lives up to the sexuality bestowed upon you by the mere existence of your body.
Yet sexuality, and even more so the throat, affects only limited areas of the human body; the pain, on the other hand, which we generally discover later and which we get to know better and better as we age, can affect any part of the body, the variety of sufferings we endure enormous; there is no doubt, unfortunately: suffering is richer and more varied than pleasure.
I don’t believe in the fear of death. I remember the reasoning of Epicurus: when we are there there is no death, e when there is death we are no longer; we will never meet death, we have nothing in common with her. a simple, convincing and correct reasoning. The only fear we can have is that of the death of others, of those who are dear to us. And the only fear we have for ourselves is the fear of suffering.
The French Revolution was of a terrifying ferocity; at certain times, people were literally guillotined in series. My thesis that, in the line of those waiting for their turn, as Pascal says, no one was afraid of death, all the more so since almost all of them at the time were Catholics, convinced that they would immediately reach the Creator. Everyone, however, was afraid of that terrifying moment, that unprecedented moment in which the blade would cut the neck until it detaches the head from the body.
Well, in the line of those waiting their turn, there were several reading; and among those who read, as numerous testimonies attest, some, just before being seized by the hangman’s assistants and being dragged to the gallows, miserable the bookmark to the exact page where they left off – all books, at that time, had a bookmark.
What does it mean, in such circumstances, to bookmark? It can only mean one thing: while he was reading, the reader was so engrossed in the book that he completely forgot that in a few minutes he would have been beheaded.
What else, besides a good novel, could produce this effect?
Anything.
There is little chance of a new French Revolution in the near future, even less than the chances of Jean-Luc Mlenchon losing next Sunday’s legislative elections. But there is another situation, also quite distressing, which has greatly expanded in the last century, and which is destined to expand further: that of medical examinations. A century ago we only had radiography, X-rays; now we have the CT scan, the MRI and other more recent things. That’s fine, medicine is making progress. But people find themselves having to face, and more and more often as they age, situations in which they await the results of examinations on which their life will depend in the months, or even in the following years, and on which it could also depend. the time they have left to live.
You are there, in the waiting room, maybe for an hour, maybe two, normal, doctors need time to interpret the results.
What can be done in such a situation? Exactly the same thing that the aristocrats condemned to the guillotine did: read.
Music is not good, music involves the body too much, which one tries to forget. The plastic arts are totally out of place. And even cinema, even if it is an exciting thriller, is not enough.
It takes a book, therefore; but the most difficult thing: not all books are suitable. Neither philosophy nor poetry are for us. A play, yes, at the limit; but the best have a good novel on hand. In any case, it necessarily takes a narrative, preferably fictional, because the biography never reaches the power of the novel.
When I was young, I thought that poetry was a literary genre superior to all others; I still think so, to some extent. It is true that the association of sound and meaning, to which it is sometimes added the evocation of certain images, it gives immeasurable results for any other form of literary production.
So yes, I still think that poetry is the most beautiful thing there is; but I am convinced that the novel is the most necessary there is.
In my latest novel, Annihilate, the main character eventually finds himself in a situation of extreme distress. He falls ill with cancer and in order to have a chance of survival he has to undergo mutilating operations, so mutilating that surgeons are hesitant to offer them to him.
But in another circumstance linked to the treatment, not particularly distressing, only physically burdensome, which rediscovers the benefits of the novel. He has to make infusions that last four to six hours; and to forget the drip, to escape the constant desire to tear it off, best thing he gets to do is reading Conan Doyle.
Conan Doyle, I remind you in passing, an English author who wrote many beautiful things in my opinion, but his most famous work is undoubtedly the cycle of short stories with Sherlock Holmes.
And here, I would like to draw your attention to one point, because Conan Doyle’s choice may lend itself to misunderstanding. One might believe that the most important quality of a novel is to help us escape from a mentally painful situation – an interminable drip, waiting for the results of an exam – both to be what the Anglo-Saxons call a page turnerthat is, a book so captivating that it is very difficult to stop reading it.
This an important quality, true, very important; but I don’t think it is the most important.
I invite you to do a simple experiment. Go to the beach on a nice summer afternoon. Immerse yourself in a Sherlock Holmes tale. In less than a page, if Conan Doyle has decided so, you will find yourself catapulted into London, on a cold and rainy winter’s night, with the fog invading the streets, or into the Baker Street apartment, where the coal stove hums softly. Conan Doyle takes us where he wants, when he wants, and lets us enter the interior of the characters he has chosen. And he does it, really, in less than a page.
One might expect from one Master’s reading that shows you how he does it, what are the relevant details that can transport the reader into the world that the author has created. But no. Not all writers have the same method, for the simple reason that their perceptual universes are different.
One might expect, then, that a writer will illustrate it starting from a page of his own books, what is called a practical exercise. But no. You can’t, because conscious reflection plays no role; you write, you hear what is important in the moment, but you forget it as soon as you go to another page. Sometimes we find it again, when we reread it years later, and we say to ourselves: for, this or that detail is not bad; but exactly as if someone else had written the book.
useless therefore in general, when we ask ourselves so that certain pages are of good literature, ask the author for explanations, who know nothing about it. much better to leave it to the academic to identify the important details, the idiosyncrasies, the methods.
I’m an author, sure, but I am above all, in my life, a reader; I spent a lot more time reading than writing. And my life as a reader, unlike my life as an author, has led me to some definitive conclusions, which I will present to you in this short article.
The fundamental raison d’etre of fictional literature is that man in general has a brain that is too complicated, far too rich for the existence he called to lead. For him, fiction is not just a pleasure, a need. He needs other lives, different from his, simply because his is not enough for him. These other lives don’t have to be interesting; they can be perfectly monotonous. They may be full of major events, or foresee none. They don’t have to be exotic; they may take place five centuries ago, on a different continent, or in the building next door. The only important thing they are other.
It may be that this need for other lives is political in the broadest sense of the term; but so far no valid political solution seems to have been proposed. I think it is more likely that it is first and foremost intimate, physical, emotional; but even in this case no relevant solution seems to have emerged.
I don’t think it goes through the virtual at all, or the metaverso; this is just a lot of chatter.
The truth that literature remains, to this day, the only thing that works.
Of course, this need more lives it reaches its peak when our life circumstances become difficult and painful. That is why, despite everything I said at the beginning, it is perhaps justified to pay homage to the novelists.
Thank you for your attention.
(Translation of
Milena Zemira Ciccimarra)
June 15, 2022 (change June 15, 2022 | 20:02)
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