216
LEO BERSANI
candid letter from Paris informs a friend of mine that the psycho–
analyst Jacques Lacan, whose nine-hundred page
Ecrits
was recently
published, "est vraiment Ie seul genie du moment." Who can keep
\
up with these rapid changes of fashion? They are an inevitable part
of cultural impressionism, which tends to
be
parasitic: the French
make up for the lateness of their discoveries (for example, of Freud
and of the Russian formalists) by the intensity and brevity of their
fervor. It seems that French publishers are now interested in translat-
ing twentieth-century American criticism, and it is not inconceivable
that in 1975 the literary revolutionaries of Paris will be carrying the
banner of Brooks and Warren.
While the intellectual hierarchy in Paris may vary from year
to year, there is, at anyone moment, almost complete unanimity of
opinion and interest from the base to the peak of the pyramid of
power. The sharp disagreement among American critics a couple of
years ago over
Herzog
and
An American Dream
would
be
inconceiv–
able among the best French critics. How thrilling and improbable
it would be to find in the pages of
Tel Quel, Preuves, Critique
or
La Nouvelle revue
fra~aise
what strike me as simple and self-evident
truths: for example, that Lucien Goldmann has an elephantine sensi–
bility and is theoretically uninteresting once he stops paraphrasing
Georg Lukacs and Rene Girard; that the introduction and the essays
on Corneille and Racine in Starobinski's
L'Oeil vivant
are extra–
ordinarily dull; and that Barthes, by submerging the brilliantly im–
pressionistic social criticism of
Mythologies
in the derivative theories
of
his
Elements de 8emiologie
(where Saussurian terminology adds
nothing
but
terminology to analyses of road signs and menus) has
himself "signified" nothing more than his own evolution toward
rococo banality.
The astonishing conformity of opinion about books and ideas
which you find in French magazines is of course partly explainable
in historical and geographical terms. The influence of New York in
American cultural life
is
almost negligible compared to the mono–
lithic power of Paris. There is simply no way to resist that power,
no other center of diffusion; in France, Belgium and Switzerland, the
attention of Paris is the
only
sign
of success. And Paris is, after all,
a rather small and provincial city; it takes a depressingly short time
for people to get together and decide what's good and what's bad,
to create, announce and impose various trends and fashions. As in all
