Interventions 2020. Мишель Уэльбек

1 Jacques Prévert is a jerk

      Jacques Prévert is someone whose poems you learn at school. It turns out that he loved flowers, birds, the neighbourhoods of old Paris, etc. He felt that love blossomed in an atmosphere of freedom; more generally, he was pretty much on the side of freedom. He wore a cap and smoked Gauloises; he sometimes gets confused with Jean Gabin. Also, he was the one who wrote the screenplay for Quai des brumes, Portes de la nuit, etc. He also wrote the screenplay for Les Enfants du paradis, considered to be his masterpiece. All of these are so many good reasons for hating Jacques Prévert – especially if you read the scripts that Antonin Artaud was writing at the same time, which were never filmed. It’s dismaying to note that this repulsive poetic realism, of which Prévert was the main architect, continues to wreak havoc – we think we’re paying Leos Carax a compliment by identifying him with this style (just as people make out that Rohmer is undoubtedly a new Guitry, etc.). In fact, French cinema has never recovered from the advent of the talkies; one day these talkies will finally kill cinema. Too bad.¹

After the war, around the same time as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Prévert enjoyed enormous success; one can’t help being struck by the optimism of that generation. These days, the most influential thinker is more likely to be Cioran.² At that time, people listened to Vian, Brassens …³ Lovers smooched on public benches, there was a baby boom, and plenty of low-cost housing was built to accommodate all those people. Lots of optimism, faith in the future, and a certain amount of bullshit. Obviously, we’ve got a lot smarter since then.

With the intellectuals, Prévert was less fortunate. Yet his poems are full of those silly puns that are so entertaining in Boby Lapointe …⁴ Still, it’s true that the chanson is, as we say, a ‘minor’ genre, and even intellectuals need something to relax to. But when they focus on written texts, their real livelihood, they become harsh critics. And Prévert’s ‘textual work’ remains embryonic: he writes with clarity and a real naturalness, sometimes even with emotion; he’s not interested in writing as such, nor in the impossibility of writing; his main source of inspiration, it seems, is life. So on the whole he hasn’t provided fodder for postgraduate theses. Today, however, he has entered the Pléiade, which constitutes a second death.⁵ There his work lies, complete and frozen. This is an excellent opportunity to wonder why Jacques Prévert’s poetry is so mediocre – so much so that one sometimes feels a sort of shame when reading it. The classic explanation (his writing ‘lacks rigour’) is quite wrong; through his puns, his light and limpid rhythms, Prévert actually expresses his conception of the world perfectly well. The form suits the content, which is the most that can be demanded of a form. Moreover, when a poet immerses himself so much in life, in the real life of his time, it would be an insult to judge him by purely stylistic criteria. If Jacques Prévert writes, it’s because he has something to say; that’s all to his credit. Unfortunately, what he has to say is boundlessly stupid; sometimes it makes you feel nauseous. There are pretty girls with no clothes on, and middle-class men who bleed like pigs when their throats are cut. The children are charmingly immoral, the thugs are alluring hunks, the pretty girls with no clothes on give their bodies to the thugs; the middle-class men are old, obese, impotent, and decorated with the Legion of Honour; their wives are frigid; the priests are disgusting old caterpillars who invented sin to stop us from living. It’s all very familiar; one can be forgiven for thinking that Baudelaire does it better. Or even Karl Marx who, at least, doesn’t miss his target when he writes that ‘the bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand […] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation’.⁶ Intelligence is of no help at all in writing good poems; it does however stop you writing bad ones. If Jacques Prévert is a bad poet, this is mainly because his vision of the world is commonplace, superficial and false. It was already false in his own time; today its inanity is so glaring that the entire work seems to be the expansion of one gigantic cliché. On the philosophical and political level, Jacques Prévert is above all a libertarian; in other words, basically, an idiot.

      We’ve been splashing about in the ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’ since our earliest childhood. We can live with this situation, we can try to survive it; we can also just let ourselves sink. But what it’s impossible to imagine is that freeing the powers of desire alone is likely to melt the ice. The story goes that it was Robespierre who insisted on adding the word ‘fraternity’ to the motto of the French Republic; we’re now in a position to gauge the full irony of this anecdote. Prévert certainly saw himself as a supporter of fraternity; but Robespierre was not an opponent of virtue – far from it.

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