WHAT IS WRITING?
theater, but we find it piquant that Rousseau detested the art of the
drama.
If
we are a bit versed in psychoanalysis, our pleasure
is
per–
fect. We shall explain the
Social Contract
by the Oedipus complex
and
The Spirit of the Laws
by the inferiority complex. That
is,
we
shall fully enjoy the well-known superiority of live dogs to dead
lions. Thus, when a book presents befuddled thoughts which appear to
be reasons only to melt under scrutiny and to be reduced to heart
beats, when the teaching that one can draw from
it
is radically
different from what its author intended, the book is called a message.
Rousseau, the father of the French Revolution, and Gobineau, the
father of racism, both sent us messages. And the critic considers them
with equal sympathy.
If
they were alive, he would have to choose
between the two, to love one and hate the other. But what brings
them together, a•bove all, is that they are both profoundly and deli–
ciously wrong, and in the same way: they are dead.
Thus, contemporary writers should be advised to deliver mes–
sages, that is, voluntarily to limit their writing to the involuntary ex–
pression of their souls. I say involuntary because the dead, from Mon–
taigne to Rimbaud, have painted themselves completely, but without
having meant to-it is something they have simply thrown into the
bargain. The surplus which they have given us without thinking
should be the primary and professed goal of living writers. They are
not to be forced to give us confessions without any dressing, nor are
they to abandon themselves to the too-naked lyricism of the romantics.
But since we find pleasure in foiling the ruses of Chateaubriand or
Rousseau, in surprising them in the secret places of their being at the
moment they are playing at being the public man, in distinguishing
the private motives from their most universal assertions, we shall ask
newcomers to procure us this pleasure deliberately. So let them rea–
son, assert, deny, refute, and prove; but the cause they are defending
must be only the apparent aim of their discourse; the_deeper goal is to
yield themselves without seeming to do so. They must first disarm
themselves of their arguments as time has done for those of the classic
writers; they must bring them to bear upon subjects which interest
no one or on truths so general that readers are convinced in advance.
As
for their ideas, they must give them an
air
of profundity, but with
an effect of emptiness, and they must shape them in such a way that
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