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Interventions 2020. Мишель УэльбекЧитать онлайн книгу.

Interventions 2020 - Мишель Уэльбек


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on these films is arguably romanticism, more than expressionism. There’s a study of fascinated stillness, which I tried to transcribe into pictures, then into words. There’s also something else, deep inside me, a kind of oceanic feeling. I failed to transcribe it into films; I didn’t even really get a chance to try. In words I may have succeeded sometimes, in a few poems. But one day or another, I’ll surely have to come back to pictures.

      J-YJ and CD: For example, would it be possible to adapt your novel for the cinema?

      J-YJ and CD: You often describe your pessimism as just a passing stage. What might come next?

      1 1. Whatever is the English translation by Paul Hammond (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998) of Extension du domaine de la lutte (Paris: Editions Paul Nadeau, 1994), which more literally means Extension of the Domain of Struggle. The other works mentioned are Houellebecq’s essay Rester vivant (Paris: La Différence, 1991) and La Poursuite du bonheur, a collection of poems first published as part of the same volume. His study of Lovecraft has been translated into English as H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, translated by Dorna Khazeni (London: Gollancz, 2008).

      2 2. In a standard English translation of this work, Kant refers to potential suicide in these terms: ‘a nature whose law it would be to destroy life itself by means of the same feeling whose destination is to impel toward the furtherance of life would contradict itself and would therefore not subsist as nature’ (Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 32)).

      Monday, the art school in Caen. I’ve been asked to explain why kindness seemed to me more important than intelligence, or talent. I did my best, I struggled; but I know it was true. Then I visited Rachel Poignant’s studio, which uses casts of different parts of her body. I came to a halt in front of long thongs covered with the cast of one of her tits (the right one? the left one? I can’t remember). In their rubbery consistency, and general appearance, they definitely looked like octopus tentacles. Still, I slept pretty well.

      Saturday, a literary gathering in the north of the Vendée. A few ‘right-wing regionalist’ writers (it’s easy to see they’re right-wingers: when they talk about their origins, they like to point out a Jewish ancestor four generations back, so that everyone can see how broadminded they are). Otherwise, as everywhere, a very diverse audience: the only thing they have in common is that they like reading. These people live in an area where the number of shades of green is endless; but, under a perfectly grey sky, all the shades of green fade away. So what we have here is a faded infinity. I thought of the orbits of the planets after the end of all life, in an increasingly colder universe, marked by the gradual fading of the stars; and the words ‘human warmth’ almost made me cry.

      On Sunday, I took the TGV back to Paris; my holidays were over.

      La Structure du langage poétique meets the academic criteria of seriousness – not that this is necessarily a criticism.1 Jean Cohen observes that, compared to prosaic, ordinary language, the sort that is used to transmit information, poetry allows itself considerable deviations. It constantly uses irrelevant epithets (‘white twilights’, in Mallarmé; ‘black perfumes’, in Rimbaud). It does not resist the pleasure of the obvious (‘Don’t tear it up with your two white hands’, in Verlaine; the prosaic mind sneers – could she have three hands?) It doesn’t shrink from a certain inconsistency (‘Ruth was musing and Booz dreaming; the grass was black’, in Hugo; two juxtaposed notations, underlines Cohen, whose logical unity is difficult to see). It delights in redundancy, proscribed in prose under the name of repetition; a borderline case would be García Lorca’s poem, Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, in which the words ‘cinco de la tarde’ [‘five o’clock in the afternoon’] occur thirty times in the first fifty-two lines.


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