Prix Goncourt
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
The latest winner of the Prix Goncourt, an American named Jonathan Littell who has lived in France since the seventies, somehow found the time to skip over to America to attend Yale--then had the audacity to further legitimate himself by skipping through Bosnia, Afghanistan and Chechnya to work for something called Action Against Hunger. I speak for the illegitimate when I say: what bullshit.
Why am I suddenly so angry? Let me indulge myself. This is not a mere burst of jealousy. Naturally I'm jealous. I, too, would like to be taken out of the world of mere contingencies, to have my life of service to others mean something other than whatever was necessary, to have my work transformed into a well-publicized and slightly condescending choice rather than a penance I perform for the right to pay my rent. I'd like to have my sodden biography replaced by one full of such humanitarian asses milk and literary diamonds. But my nature is, unfortunately, linked to that of people who suffer only the slow erosion of the cream of democratic values. That is to say, I once shopped; now I help others shop; I may yet shop again: all for the good of the economy. Once a year, and only after a great hassle, I can go camping up to Taconic State Park, as I did this weekend, and stare mindlessly for hours into the coals of a fire I made and hope it's enough to, as the analogy has it, reset my system.
Literature, like hands-on, spoon-the-gruel-into-their-mouths, adopt-a-baby humanitarianism, is a type of currency only those who have paid their way out of ordinary contingencies can spend. It depends on a democracy so corrupt, so bored with the compromises of peaceful co-existence, it requires a few blasted limbs and bloated stomachs to see the politics. And returning from the Sudan, or Darfur, or the distant, bloody past of wartime Berlin, or whatever, our hero finishes himself by writing a novel. The question is, was the novel always this worthless? Was it ever needed? Or is this just a since-the-nineteenth-century thing?
The latest Lair of the Minotaur CD is more like the fire I built this weekend: it is cathartic. Listening to it helps me get back into the daily fight, which is more than Jonathan Littell, bless him, ever did for anyone who has to hold down a job.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:06 AM,
