“The desire to become one’s destroyer”
On Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men, and the not-so great tradition of literary failure.
One way to get at the value of literature, perhaps, or at least its prestige, is the tolerance we extend to those who ruin their lives for its sake. When someone neglects their partner to paint tabletop gaming models of demons in their basement, we might mock them at first, and then be horrified. An immaculately varnished Warhammer army and the marriage it ruined might acquire a certain value as a metaphor, but in a way that escapes its commander’s control. Balzac, on the other hand, munching his coffee grounds and writing yet another novel about foolish spending in the small hours of the morning, hardly living at all, made metaphors from wasted lives, but did not somehow become one himself, at least to his admirers.
Of course, Balzac made a living from his books, but those who didn’t, perhaps even those who didn’t make anything good, are granted a certain dignity even by the least literarily inclined that other hobbyists are denied. The figure of the poète maudit, the accursed poet, the person who sacrifices themselves for literature should by now be absurd. But still, for me at least, and I assume for others, it moves.
Why does a work of art seem like it could redeem the life that it consumes? Balzac’s wife fell in love with him because of his writing, and indeed seemed to seek him out to soften a cynicism about women that she detected creeping in to his work. She wanted to redeem the work, too, by saving the man. No woman has ever wanted to marry a man to better his chaos space marines.
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Elizabeth Bishop, writing a letter to Robert Lowell when he grafted his wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters, with edits, into his poem, tried to draw a hard ethical line between art and life. Art just isn’t worth that much, she said to him. You cannot do violence to real people to make art. But the fact that it’s possible to make that mistake at all is telling. We feel that it is worth that much. It has to be.
Life gets away from you regardless of whether you live it well or wisely, after all. Better perhaps to reconceive it as something you can hold onto, something with a shape, even a stupid shape, or a curse on its possessor. We are willing to pay the price of violence to life for literature, because that is why we make it in the first place, to do violence to life.
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At least this is where I have always located the urge. I think it’s not that idiosyncratic. People want to make life into something that we can command. Lowell wanted to perfect the life in the work, make it mean something. Weirdly, even though many of the great works of literature spend their time stating their inability to right the wrongs of life, the mere ability to articulate this impotence, to give it shape, seems to give rise to a delusion of the importance of the task. It's worth it, in the end.
That’s part of what Lowell meant when, in his elegy for John Berryman, who lived one of the saddest, most pathetic lives of any successful, financially-comfortable poet, he wrote:
Les Maudits—the compliment
each American generation
pays itself in passing)
How is it a compliment to be an accursed poet? Because to be accursed is to render one’s life comprehensible as a certain kind of sacrifice.
Lowell wryly acknowledges that faith here, after his friend has killed himself futilely; he notes the ridiculousness of this schema—the wishful thinking—even as he buys into it so much that he was willing to commit any number of violations against his own life and the other people in it.
Lowell’s cruelty and hypocrisy was picked up on by critics. Adrienne Rich called it “aggrandised masculinity”, and the poems “bullshit eloquence”. Donald Hall, a little bit more excited perhaps, wrote “one sees with horror the cannibal poet, who dines off portions of his body and those of his family.”
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The term poète maudit came into English from an anthology of French poetry, edited by Paul Verlaine, himself one of these accursed poets. It was his personal selection of underrated poets, but it made a case that later became important to a range of scholarly and not-so-scholarly arguments about what the “value” of literature was.
Because it made the poet’s failure into evidence of their success, it paved the way, you might say, for the errors and wrecks of modernism, and the distinct errors and wrecks of modern aesthetics. Depending on whether you are a believer in literature or a sociologist, Verlaine is either staking a claim for the oppositional autonomy of the ‘aesthetic’ from the world of publishing and consumption and business; or establishing literature as a “restricted field”, an “inverted” version of the market with its own topsy turvy rules.
Verlaine offered a picture of the poets he introduced to an uncaring public as “absolute” poets, dedicated in their hatred of the readers who wanted something from them that they didn’t want to give. They wanted to give their lives, and to give their lives a shape that made their futility luminous, bright violence.
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Wikipedia informs me that the phrase poètes maudits actually has its origins in a novel, Stello by Alfred, Comte de Vigny. In it he describes poets as une race toujours maudite par les puissants de la terre (a race always cursed by the powerful of the earth).
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One thing that is striking about the figure of the cursed poet is that this figure is often described in the language of race, of “savagery” of blackness and of Africa. The cannibal poet that Donald Hall criticises in Lowell is an echo of this old twinning of the poet and the ‘savage’. John Berryman jammed some of his best poems full of ersatz (and disastrous) blackface minstrel dialect.
The emblematic figure of the Poète maudit, of course, is Arthur Rimbaud, whose youthful infatuation with poetry (and Paul Verlaine) ended in him casting it aside to become an arms dealer in Ethiopia. In the end, after failing to sell symbolic violence, he made a living with the real thing.
But that story is itself a symbol, and not even fully true. Rimbaud actually made a loss on his arms deal. The king of Ethiopia/Abyssinia bought rifles from him at a ruinous discount. If he was an accursed poet, he was also an accursed arms dealer.
The myth of Rimbaud, conqueror of the “dark regions” of the mind, and of the earth, is at once the myth of Rimbaud the man who went native, the myth of a racialized failure.
You can see this put to its most powerful and unsettling (and of course racist) use by Rimbaud himself in Mauvais Sang, the start of A Season in Hell. There is a strange inversion and entangling of the language of conquest and the language of identification; the race of poets is in some way like Africans. And yet his actual dealings in Africa reveals not just the oppositional violence in his symbolic identification with the “primitive” and “the real kingdom of the sons of Ham”, but also the straightforwardly colonialist—it is parasitical on racial hierarchy, to invert is not to overthrow; you have to identify some people as primitive.
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This myth of Rimbaud in Africa gets picked up right the way down the tradition of cursed poets. You might think of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, the greatest novel dedicated to the idea that the purest artist is a loser. In it, Arturo Belaño, the more or less autobiographical Bolaño figure, goes to Africa, specifically Liberia, to witness the civil war there, and « to die » in what is both direct allusion to Rimbaud (Arturo, after all) and a kind of mockery of Rimbaud and himself. Belaño goes because it’s what Rimbaud would do. Whether that is a vain thing to do in either sense is left unclear.
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The idea of a race of poets, on the outside of the world system, that comes sometimes to be paralleled to Africanness, is one of the things that seems to me to make World Literature a French idea. Though it’s Goethe, a German, who comes up with the term, he was speaking in the optimistic language of the French Revolution, the universal brotherhood of man. The French who come after him qualify this: it is a brotherhood of poets against the world.
In a novel like Bolaño’s, the vast global sweep of literature is such to constitute an imagined community, a world within and against the world, but what binds it together is failure, a failure that is modelled on that which is outside the world market, born of the compulsion to be “savage”.
And yet, obviously, that idea, that identification, is a flawed one. The continued modelling of bohemia on an image of blackness down the years is one that has been picked apart in countless ways, not least through the discourse of cultural appropriation.
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For those who have the French, this essay offers a counterargument, a not totally convincing one, I think, to my point here. 19th century French talk about the race of poets and French talk about the inegalité des races humaines, is not, says Laurent Dubreuil, all that entangled. If we read the poetry, for the most part, we can easily keep the meanings of the race of poets and the races of man separate.
But show me a poet who can keep meanings from mixing and I will give you all of the money I have ever made from literature. The point that the poets need an image of outsiderness and accursedness that they steal from elsewhere has never been lost on the world’s black writers.
Rimbaud’s Mauvais Sang, and its identification with blackness, is something that gets picked up, for example, in Amiri Baraka’s Hymn to Laney Poo. You can see an argument with Rimbaud behind a lot of his thinking. As he came to see white bohemia as a kind of parody of blackness, a deracinated, diluted and reactionary fantasy of the actual oppositional politics of blackness—the dreams of dreams of Jeanne Duval and not the reality of Toussaint L’Ouverture—he continued, in a certain sense, to take Rimbaud literally. If there is a race really cursed by the powerful of the earth, he thought, it was not the powerful’s wayward sons and daughters. It was his own people.
For Baraka, this meant that a poet’s duty was not to poetry, not to the idea of winning by losing, but to the idea of the loser winning, and the poet doing everything he could to achieve that.
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But is that commitment to nationalism just another fantasy, of becoming even more bohemian than the bohemians? Baraka’s Autobiography begins with the immortal sentence By the time you read this I will be even blacker. You can kind of imagine Rimbaud saying the same thing.
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Compare Leopold Senghor, who unlike Baraka, actually did manage to establish a UN recognised nation, becoming the first president of Senegal, but who was also a poet and a key theorist of Negritude, the essence of blackness, here in What the Black Man Contributes:
Je sens l'Autre, je danse l'Autre, donc je suis.
(I feel the Other, I danse the Other, therefore I am).
Senghor articulates a black counterpoint to Descartes’ subjective rationalism—blackness is an other-directed embodiment, a dance. But it’s also a riff on Rimbaud. Je est un autre. And Rimbaud remained a favourite of Senghor’s because his sense of what it means to be a poet took him towards this possibility that Senghor called blackness.
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Somewhere at the heart of the dream of literature opposed to life’s violence with a violence of its own, it seems, is a version of the real-life problem of the world system that modern autonomous literature emerged from. But also, at the heart of serious, political attempts to reject that system, to imagine an other to it, is that same, problematic literature.
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Which is all to say something like the following very simplified version of a backstory for world literature.
At some point, by the 19th century, it became more or less clear in Europe that writing was no longer addressed to a nation, but to the market. To address the market seemed, to many European writers who nevertheless felt compelled to write, to be to play a game that they would lose, and which was not worth playing. And so instead they imagined themselves to be others, a universal nation bund by a common langauge of otherness. The various ways in which this otherness might or might not be a kind of blackface are now being debated by scholars who see through the French origins of modern world literature to its actual origins in what is sometimes (not uncontroversially) called racial capitalism.
You might say then, that the value of literature, imagined as outside of morality, or politics, interpersonal relations—any other communal values than literature itself—is in some way not just the values of the market inverted, but also dependent on the racial difference that was born wrapped in the umbilical cord of the modern market, though likewise inverted in its valuation; it is the dream of having a tribe purified of its entanglements in modern collective life, a nation of nothing but poetry.
But what do you do when you come to see this dream as a mere inversion of the world’s injustices? Is it best to abandon the dream, and work towards some other sense of what writing might be for?
Should you write instead for a people, or a social movement? And in writing for a people, or a social movement, how do you ensure you are not recapitulating a smaller market within an imagined community? I.e. if you want to give people something they might not already know they want, do you not need that Rimbaudian sense of opposition, do you not need to write for an imaginary tribe of outsiders who do not simply share x or y values, but in fact share only an opposition to a dominant value? Don’t you need not to be affirming something, but to be trying to turn things upside down? And doesn’t that require a writing that’s difficult, a writing that will probably fail to reach an “audience”?
2.
A couple of months ago, I read a big novel in French, as a sort of act of self-discipline. Normally, I try a Balzac, or a Flaubert, and give up after being defeated by their vocabulary for rich interiors. But this time I chose to read La Plus Secrete Memoire des Hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men), by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. It won the Prix Goncourt in 2021. I think it was the first winner by a “sub-Saharan African writer” (Sarr is from Senegal), and it is perhaps tellingly about, in part, the relationship of African writing to the French literary establishment.
What drew me in was a comparison to Bolaño, because as I mentioned in another post, I’m a sucker for the more general tenor of Bolanismo, the modern continuation of the tradition of accursed poets. The Most Secret Memory of Men is a book about literary failure, literary appetite and desire, the waste of life that is literature, the waste of life that is life—in a way that consciously echoes Bolaño’s work. Its title comes from The Savage Detectives, as does its epigraph, in fact the novel contains almost the entire world. It uses its Bolanisme to dramatize the position of the writer of “world literature” in the global system of racial capitalism. Hence the extremely long lead in here.
But such a description makes the novel sound dry, like some kind of thesis statement. It’s not that at all. LPSMdH’s narrator tells us that great works enrich us by subtraction; aptly, then, the novel tries to boil itself down, to show us how the small-seeming question of why some people write rather than live still contains everything, reduced into richness.
The novel is narrated by Diégane Latyr Faye, a Senegalese novelist living in Paris, whose first book sold 79 copies. Faye is cursed with the label of a “Francophone African writer full of promise,” and participates in an African diaspora literary scene he affectionately calls “the ghetto”. He is trying to write a masterpiece but doesn’t know why or who for—all he knows is that he resents the various demands made on him by readers in Africa and Europe alike. He wants to avoid the trap he thinks his elders have failed to escape: to be ‘“authentic”—meaning different—but nonetheless similar—meaning comprehensible”’
But, after Faye tries to proposition an older Senegalese writer Marème Siga D, she rejects him and reintroduces him to the story of an older Senegalese writer, TC Elimane, giving him a copy of his lost novel The Labyrinth of Inhumanity.
Faye gets lost in it and dedicates himself to tracking down Elimane, or at least his story. Through a series of nested narratives, we learn the history of Elimane, his movements across the world, from Senegal to Paris to Argentina and back in reverse. And we learn about the many other lives, including Faye’s that get entangled with his, from the book’s Jewish publishers to a Nazi soldier, to a Haitian poet and Witold Gombrowizc. We take in love triangles in 1900s Senegal and 1930s Paris. In the meantime, we see Diégane Latyr Faye try on a series of views about the relationship between art and life, which are perhaps summed up in the question of who he is trying to write for.
Elimane, we learn, whose book The Labyrinth of Inhumanity (all the quotes are from Laura Vergnaud’s precise though to my ear too restrained translation) appeared in 1938, disappeared after his novel was suppressed. While initially hailed as “the negro Rimbaud”, a furious debate about the value of his work culminates in two accusations. First, that he plagiarised various canonical European works, and second, that he was merely recapitulating a traditional Senegalese creation myth. The two charges levelled agaisnt of the postcolonial and especially the African writer, mimicry of Europe, and mere ethnographic documentation, are combined. We get a darkly amusing satire of the reception of African writing embodied in Elimane’s life story.
Some of this story is drawn from the real life case of the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, who really did abandon writing after a similar plagiarism scandal scotched the reception of his novel Le Devoir de Violence. Sarr’s novel is dedicated to Ouologuem, who died in 2017 without ever publishing another novel. But he has moved his version of this story back closer to the birth of published African writing in French, and of the Negritude movement, the time, of Senghor. This seems to be partly for dramatic (Nazism!) reasons, but partly to really hammer home the question of what it means to be an African writer. There are numerous literary intertexts and allusions, some that I spotted, and most of which are lost on me due to my ignorance.
But at a level of abstraction that even someone as ignorant as I could see, what it means to be an African writer becomes, for Sarr and maybe for us all, the paradigmatic instance of the question of what it means to write about, for, and against life. The two poles of attraction, life, art, in the French, and the wider literary tradition, have been framed metaphorically through the question of African civilisation (sometimes raw life against European art, sometimes art against bland European scientific facticity). To confront the question of how to be an African writer, this novel suggests, entangles one in the way that Europeans have generally tried to envision the value of their own writing’s relation to “life”, the violence they want to do against it.
Diégane’s obsession with the work of Elimane has a kind of mystery at its heart. Is he trying to get closer to this man’s work or to the life? Which of these means more to him?
He is provoked into these thoughts by the moment Siga D gives him Elimane’s manuscript she explains why writers make “mediocre lovers”—
“There’s your mistake. There’s the mistake every guy like you makes. You all believe that literature fixes life. Or completes it. Or replaces it. You’re wrong. Writers, and I’ve known many, have always been among the most mediocre lovers I’ve ever encountered. Do you know why? When they have sex, they’re already thinking about the scene the experience will turn into. Every caress is ruined by what their imagination is doing or will do with it, every thrust is weakened by a sentence. When I talk to them during sex, I can almost hear their ‘she murmured.’ They live in chapters. Quotation marks precede every word they say. Als het erop aan komt—that’s Dutch, it means ‘at the end of the day’—writers like you are stuck in their make-believe. You’re permanent narrators. It’s life that matters. The work only comes after. The two don’t mix. Ever.”
An interesting and debatable theory to which I was no longer listening. Siga D.’s towel was now almost undone…
I’ll stop here to note the irony of these lines and the way they militate against the Diégane’s own narratorial control and irony. To note down what Siga D says, her “theory” and contrast it to the scene of her opening her robe like this requires him not being lost in the moment, requires him doing the thing she says he is doing. The visual irony that he creates is undercut by a narratorial irony that shows the narrator’s detachment from life. That confusion, which is really taking priority, art or life, is present in the novel at this kind of granular level. In putting it there, each grain seems to me to contain a whole world. Because it’s not simply that Diégane is too distanced, too bloodless, too obsessed with formal order, it’s that this kind of formal order is sedimented history, many years of many disappointing lives.
If writers make bad lovers because they prioritise art over life, there is a further irony in how Diégane takes Siga D’s words to heart—they become advice not about how to live his life, but how to write::
I went [to a party] without really wanting to, thinking about the vanity of what I was writing, the lie of what I was writing, the chasm between what I was writing and life. Siga D. had been right: from the perch of my speeches about what literature was or should be, I took off soaring above the world like a falcon in majestic flight; but those flights were only for show, not combat; entertaining, circensian exhibitions in lieu of fights to the death. I was sheltering behind literature as if it were a windowpane or a shield; and on the other side stood life: its violence…
There’s a little homage to Bolano here (2066’s lines about the true fights of the great masters). But it’s also interesting that while you can read this as Diégane acknowledging the obligation to let life into literature, it can also be read as something else, the desire to use literature not as a shield but as a weapon.
Diégane’s struggle to find an authentic relationship to his own life and to the undecidable life/work of TC Elimane is a personal one, his detachment, and his obsession are personal failings, which he transforms, reduces perhaps, into aesthetic ones. But the novel helps to show that this reduction condenses, rather than removes life. Partly, this is because “Africa” and authentic life, its “violence” are so to speak inauthentically twinned in both the dominant imperial literary tradition and in the postcolonial one.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Diégane’s life, is made into an allegory of the African writer—he doesn’t represent African writers, he is one. The history of empire banished to the margins of aesthetics is simply part of personal life, part of every writer’s personal struggle to write authentically, it’s in the blood of the race of poets.
LPSMdH ends with a trip retracing Elimane’s steps into the interior of Senegal. The book’s concluding section also asserts the demands of social and political life on writers, ones that Diégane rejects initially but which chastens him (and perhaps any reader who becomes overinvested in the book’s meta-literariness). When Diégane’s friend, Musimbwa writes to him with the true story of the death of his family in the Congo civil war, and how it is hidden in his writing, we can see that the violence of life needs to be acknowledged. There is a power in this scene, a violence, that shatters a certain brittle literariness, a demand that a book be about nothing.
And yet ‘literariness’ --if we construe it partly as the rejection of the demands to represent, as I’ve been trying to say--has a history of violence, a life, of its own. Synthesising the two violences into one is one of the achievements of the book, and its one that makes the novel’s aim something like giving us a view of the totality of violent forces, as all great novels of the 19th century tried to do. Rather than try to represent a people, an authentic Africanness as such, what the novel represents is something like the world market, what binds Europe, Africa, and every other continent together, reflected in the negative, in the dream of literature.
Even the novel’s Bolanismo is partly a meta commentary on the market for writers from the global periphery, like Bolano himself. It’s not a coincidence that a novel like this sells better than Sarr’s previous works. It is a way of making himself accessible, but it’s this accessibility that he inverts. Revealing the underside of the tradition that he is inserting himself into, he shows the indelible African presence in this tradition, in all of French and by extension world literature. At the same time, it’s partly a sincere homage to the power of literature to be authentically against that market. it’s not a cynical marketing tactic, it’s a tactic for fighting back against the market, (and also a kind of global south solidarity between Latin America and Africa), which demands particular things (representativeness, or familiarity) for example, from African writers, and indeed from all writers in their different ways.
The gesture to a universal brotherhood of writers that is Bolanismo, we might say, fails for a number of reasons, connected to the strange genealogy of primitivism perfected by French romanticism. But failure can give things shape. That is why people write and fail to write as if the bad business of writing was more serious than life itself.
The novel ends when Diégane finds, reads, and condemns Elimane’s autobiographical second novel. Deciding that the best way to honour the man and his works is to destroy it, he commits a kind of symbolic violence. He drowns the book, tying it to a stone. We might see in that an allusion to Prospero, who drowns his book to embrace life—in which case how do we decide which way to take it, as Shakespearean allusion, or as an assertion of the value of life. Is the violence here against Elimane’s work or his life? How do we tell the difference? We might see it also as an attempt to perfect a kind of symmetty. That river claimed the life of Elimae’s grandfather., a fisherman And a song about a fisherman who may or may not return into the embrace of a fish goddess hums in the background of the book. All of these things are possible, and all are a kind of shaping violence, a counterpressure to the violence of life, or a channelling of it, into rich, strange ends.
I would say the book is probably the most ambitious, intellectually, and otherwise, novel by any writer of my generation that I’ve read. It’s not even about the things that I’ve discussed here. It’s about everything. But it manages to give these huge questions shape. It’s one of the only recent novels that I’ve read that effectively holds in tension the various social and political conditions that structure our understanding of what literature while doing justice to that enamoured dissatisfaction with life that is experienced in its most perfect form in literature. It is the tension between the institutional violence that makes life possible and the stuff of life itself that makes literature alive, and its why some people waste their lives in pursuit of it.
Sarr:
“Literature appeared to me in the guise of a woman of terrifying beauty. I told her, in a stammer, that I had been looking for her. She laughed cruelly and said that she didn’t belong to anyone. I got on my knees and begged her: Spend one night with me, a single wretched night. She disappeared without a word. I set off after her, full of determination and arrogance: I’m going to catch you, I’m going to sit you on my knee, I’m going to force you to look me in the eye, I’m going to be a writer! But then that terrible moment always comes, en route, in the middle of the night, when a voice rings out and strikes like lightning; and it reveals to you, or reminds you, that desire isn’t enough, that talent isn’t enough, that ambition isn’t enough, that being a good writer isn’t enough, that being well-read isn’t enough, that being famous isn’t enough, that being highly cultured isn’t enough, that being wise isn’t enough, that commitment isn’t enough, that patience isn’t enough, that getting drunk off pure life isn’t enough, that retreating from life isn’t enough, that believing in your dreams isn’t enough, that dissecting reality isn’t enough, that intelligence isn’t enough, that stirring hearts isn’t enough, that strategy isn’t enough, that communication isn’t enough, that even having something to say isn’t enough, nor is working tirelessly enough; and the voice also says that all of that might be and often is a condition, an advantage, an attribute, a strength, of course, but then the voice adds that in essence none of those qualities are ever enough when it’s a question of literature, because writing always demands something else, something else, something else. Then the voice stops and leaves you to your solitude, en route, with the echo of something else, something else that rolls along and then away, something else in front of you, writing always demands something else, in this night without the certainty of dawn.”