70
PARTISAN I'lEVIEW
posed. I approve of Marc Fumaroli's way of speaking about intense medi–
tation on texts. There is no literature without this activity in the deepest
silence. But I also lean towards involving myself in the
polemos.
At certain
times, literature follows its path through a number of wars - wars that are
not always just and require multiple engagements, in every sense of the
word. Here we find the rhetoric important to Marc Fumaroli. I have the
feeling, in this respect, that I'm not bad at rhetoric, using very different
forms with ease. This draws the reproaches of an age that wants to name
and classifY, that wants to fix one in set images, in permanent groupings. It
is true that I've written in very diverse styles, that I have engaged in vari–
ous polemics, even excesses of political language whose irony was not
understood - too bad. My intention has always been to deflate the vulgar
Marxism whose reign I tried to break by overheating it....
MF:
Now you're searching through tradition for a mirror to reflect the
modern that you are. I'm not complaining. You're making yourself out to
be a rhetorician in retrospect - which, in fact, has always been a virtue for
a writer. Nonetheless, previously you wanted to be an ideologue of lan–
guage. What I recall most clearly from that time is your role as the
promoter of all that could destroy the very literature you now claim is
under siege and are defending. In
Tel quel,
I read articles in which you
claimed to be subverting an oppressive society by undermining its lan–
guage. That's a strange way of saving the Word. Today language has in fact
been undermined, as you had wished, but the Word hasn't fared much bet–
ter. You worked long and hard to invade it with a series of social sciences
that pretended, in effect, to take its place. It came to a point when the aca–
demic public, now extremely large and very susceptible to conceptual
games that do not require a great deal of discipline, provided ideologues
wi th a much more resonant sounding board than the tradi tional audience
of the "honest folk," themselves intimidated and disoriented, could offer
real writers. I couldn't help but observe then that this strategy's first and
most evident consequence was the weakening of a French literature that
is now, with you, trying to save itself from the steamroller of mass-mar–
ket books and entertainment.
ps:
You are ascribing considerable powers to me.
MF:
I'm not ascribing. You had them.
PS:
The power of a tri-quarterly journal' Let's be serious! Where do you
see a demolition project in this ideologization you deplore - in its inten–
tions? My view is that it was a matter of providing an impetus, as the resul t
has proven. You have to remember the world we were living in before
1968. Is it not true that after World War II, an attenuated Marxism
