Public Enemies Read Free

profession out of “living and dying in a mirror” in order to be “continually sublime.” The fact that I got there too late, that I just missed the Grand Miroir and its mysteries, is one of my true literary regrets in life. I envy you for being there, because—if any of this appeals to you—the cobble-stonesof the rue Ducale remain, with girls still twisting their ankles on the footprints of the author of
Fusées
. * There’s Petit Sablon Square, where, in my day, a brothel he used to like still survived, and the Augustine convent where he was locked up after his aphasia. And then, of course, there’s Namur, Église Saint-Loup de Namur, where for the first time he was touched by “the breeze of imbecility flapping its wing.”
    But back to your question—whether I have, as you put it, had occasion to reflect on “the” question based on my own experience.
    Well, yes and no.
    Naturally, yes, insofar as, even when I’m not there, I have eyes to see and ears to hear the nasty rumblings in response to any mention of me in a public place.
    And yet, at the same time, no, because through a rather strange phenomenon, I—unlike you, apparently—have never managed to think of myself as or feel like the “victim” of real “persecution.”
    Few other writers are abused as much as I am.
    For each of my books I receive a volley of insults that plenty of other people would find demoralizing.
    As for eczema, well, if that were a criterion, I have to admit that I’m something of an expert on that as well.
    The fact is that I find it terribly difficult not so much to take note of these attacks but to relate to the image of me they contain, to make it my own, to associate this reflection, hardly flattering, sometimes appalling, with my deep self or even simply my social self.
    Let’s take for example the film I shot twelve years ago and which got me reading the journal of
La Belle et la bête
soclosely. I know what has been and what continues to be said about it. When it isn’t entirely annihilated by the wags, I know that it’s said to be “trash,” an officially “impoverished” work and, according to Serge Toubiana, at the time the editor of
Cahiers
[
du cinéma
], “the worst film in the history of cinema.” I know that when it’s scheduled to be shown on television there are people who arrange a “dinner for idiots,” where the idiots are the film and its author. But how can I explain this to you? I know it but without living it. I’m aware of it but don’t ingest it. I know all about the avalanche of mud that was hurled at it when it was released, but I can’t think of myself as the maker of the most impoverished and mud-covered film in the history of cinema and I am quite capable of ending up in a situation, a debate, a meeting with friends, a business meeting where, without noticing the sneers around me, oblivious to the ridicule I’m heaping on myself through the polite embarrassment I’m provoking, I talk about it as a normal film, in fact a rather good one, almost important, and which I am proud of.
    Another example, more meaningful and with greater implications, is my being Jewish. As a rule, being Jewish means having a special relationship with this subject of persecution. For most Jews, being Jewish is an automatic passport to a perception of oneself as vulnerable, at risk, never completely at home, at the mercy of anti-Semitism. I know very few Jews who don’t have in their memory some family or personal anecdote, sometimes a primal scene, that smacks of this innate familiarity with offense. But there again, that’s not the case for me. I certainly do struggle against anti-Semitism. As you know, I’m one of those people who will let nothing get through on that subject, absolutely nothing. But perhaps that’s a form of denial. Perhaps it’s a symptom of my fundamental neurosis. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I was born ina part of the world where Jews were relatively spared. The fact