Olivier Simon :
What is Chaos brûlant [Burning Chaos]? A novel?
A fiction? An essay?
Stéphane Zagdanski: Chaos brûlant
is a novel, a genuine novel. All of it
is invented. I could even say that the
novel’s common thread, that is the DSK Affair, itself is invented, since it is
re-elaborated by the mind of the narrator, who is a psychotic with the peculiar
ability to see, or to believe that he sees, what people think, without their knowing
it.
This
character, named “Bag O’Bones,” tattooed head to toe with a skeleton, thereby
enters into the mind of the protagonists and sees again everything the
characters did that improbable summer of 2011.
He relives, inwardly, the entire DSK Affair, and, in particular, the
scene in suite 2806 [of the Hotel Sofitel in New York City]. He enters, by turns, into the mind of DSK, of
Nafissatou Diallo—and later of [Benjamin] Brafman, of [Nicolas] Sarkozy, of
Anne Sinclair, etc., knowing for example what the hotel maid is thinking at the
precise moment she is performing oral sex on DSK.
How does he do it? How does he get into someone’s head?
There
is a sentence by Proust which much inspired me and which says: “Novelists see through walls.” Thus, in a certain manner, I lent my
novelist’s intuition to my narrator. I
do not speak for myself as author, but my schizophrenic narrator has this
capacity to allow the world go through him and to read thoughts, in so much as
he is sensitive to the vibration of the human word.
Chaos brulant
is also a novel about the battle between the Word and Number. Number is all
that is on the side of DSK, of the IMF, of money, of finance, of the
devastation of the world. And the Word
is all that is on the side of the narrator, of literature, of speech, of
poetry, of madness—but in the poetic sense of the term and of language.
It is a novel that also talks a lot about sex,
and sometimes in a very harsh, crude manner.
Why?
Because
sex is omnipresent in the DSK Affair. We
know all about the sexuality of this man.
I have no reason to appear more prudish than what the media reported and
exposed for a year. At the start, it is
a banal affair of morals: a man violently sexually possesses a woman he does
not know. There is no reason to not mention it.
Sexuality
experienced in this way, that is, basically, in a way that is wholly
dissociated from love, is before all else one of the failings of our time, one
of the multiple aspects of the insanity of the period. Today an eight-year old child can watch on
the Internet porn films of the utmost brutality and savagery. This slightly crazy and panic-stricken
sexuality is, besides, incarnated by one of the book’s characters whom I like
very much, and who is very touching: Goneril, the narrator’s fiancée. Goneril experiences her libido in the form at
once of a delirium and a deceit. We see
her and we hear her make love with Bag O’Bones, and we realize that she is
delirious. And the narrator, who coldly
observes her at the same time as she makes love with him and he loses his
virginity—he is mad therefore he is cold—realizes in the end that sex is “only a huge and comical deceit.”
Is this not a slightly radical point of view?
It
is the vision I give of sexuality today, such as it has spread throughout the
world. And there is no reason for it to
be less lunatic than the other aspects of the world. The relations between bodies and persons have
no reasons to not be touched by the universal madness which characterizes
humanity today. It is the same madness,
for example, that we see in the streets, of people who are more and more
tattooed. What is happening? What does this mean that the contemporary
body has need to cover itself with ink?
When these same people are less and less inhabited by writing; that is,
by the ink which, in the West and in numerous civilizations throughout the
world, is used before all else to write on paper.
Your characters have surprising talents. What can you tell us about them?
The
insane of the Manhattan Psychiatric Hospital, in which much of the novel’s
action takes place, are the narrator’s friends.
These are people – all of them psychotics, schizophrenics – who think
they are someone other who possesses a pertinent opinion about the state of the
world. For example, there is one
character who thinks that he is Karl Marx.
It is he who, during the course of the novel, will give the key to the
collapse of finance and of the global economy.
There is another character who thinks he is Franz Kafka. He is rather more interested in the spiritual
aspect of things, the way in which human spiritualities are parasitically fed
upon by lie and illusion, and how people are possessed without their knowing
it.
There
is also Sigmund Freud who is interested in the case of Sarkozy. He analyzes the
denial, the way in which Sarkozy lies in delirious fashion: he says yes when he
thinks no, he says no when he thinks yes; and when he says he has thought a lot
about something, it is because he has never previously thought about it. It is due to an exacerbated denial but this
very denial also belongs to the time. It
is similar to Goneril’s mind which is crammed full of advertising, and which therefore
no longer knows the difference between true and false, between yes and no,
between good and evil, between wealth and poverty. All her mental boundaries have been
abolished, which is the same with globalization.
Why did you choose to give pseudonyms to
invented characters and not to the novel’s real protagonists: DSK, Sarkozy and
Nafissatou Diallo whom you explicitly refer to by name?
In
a certain sense, those who most exist in this novel are my invented
characters. And those who exist the
least, in the realm of the word, are those who are reflected on our television
and computer screens, the DSK’s, the Sarkozy’s…There is a kind of fundamental
inexistence to “celebrities”. These are
people who have visual, hypertrophied media existences, whereas their spiritual
and verbal existence is manifestly atrophied.
This
is effected, for example, in Sarkozy’s manner of speaking, from which I have
used many ordurous expressions. His
relationship to the French language and to language is well known. It is disastrous. Nicolas Sarkozy is without doubt the
politician who, in a century, is the worst at expressing himself. Now, in France, political rhetoric had, until
him, always counted.
These
“celebrities” are therefore those who have the least substance; they symbolize
this devourment and this devastation which are the subject of Chaos brûlant. So it is not an accident if my invented
schizophrenics choose some of the great names of thought and literature as
pseudonyms. All this constitutes the
combination of the world today and a world which, if it seems forgotten, sends
its cordial regards to the memory of our contemporaries.
Interview by Olivier Simon for myboox.fr
English translation by Robert G. Margolis
***
Julien Bisson: The DSK Affair is still on
everyone’s mind. At what moment, and
why, did it suggest itself to you as material with which to begin a novel?
Stéphane Zagdanski:
I had been on the lookout for some while for the opportunity to write an
I.M.F., an “Instantaneous Metaphysical Fiction,” a novel interpreting ‘live’
and in their minutiae some of the various villainies which are emblematic of
our time. I also planned to dedicate a
novel to money or, more precisely, the spiritual ravages produced by its
financial transmutation.
Very
quickly, towards the end of May, 2011, the explosion of the DSK Affair appeared
to me as the ideal pretext for such a novel.
All the symptoms of the collapse of Western civilization were fused
together in the tragi-comedy of a single man: an absurd mechanical sexuality
dissociated from all linguistic refinement (which is at the antipodes of the
world of de Sade); a pathological existential blindness, belong to the arrogant
oligarchy who are leading the planet to its ruin; the hypertrophic media
feeding on its own emptiness, its abyss of non-thought occupying the entire
space of description and commentary; the criminal political impotence dressed
up in the advertising rags of the most moronically impudent public relations…
To what kind of literary genre does DSK belong? Should he be likened to Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities? To Don Juan?
To another type?
DSK
is an impoverished and grotesque version of King Lear: a man who believes
himself to be at the summit of a sovereignty of which he dispossesses himself
by the excess buffoonery of his own character, and by the ignorance he
obstinately shows of himself and of others.
A man whom nearly everyone has abandoned, who falls into helpless
disarray and who no longer finds refuge anywhere; like DSK being released from
Rikers Island.
How did you work on this book, and, in
particular, with regard to the DSK Affair itself? What part did artistic license play in
presenting the facts and the psychology of the individuals in this affair, for
which a ruling in a civil suit is still awaited?
The
spectacular panic around this affair—media coverage of which surpassed that of
the September 11, 2001 attacks—and the role of the new media, like YouTube and
Twitter being an important them of my novel—I put myself into the skin of a
total voyeur, dissecting everything I could find about DSK on the Internet, but
applying to this electronic documentation the mordacious critique of the Word
nourished by literature and thought.
Thus
I present pure images which I make reverberant with the most secret intentions,
unveiling the psychology of my characters with an unfettered license, the
license of the novelist about which Proust wrote that he “sees through walls,”
in this case, the walls of suite 2806 of the Hotel Sofitel in New York City.
Beyond the character of DSK, you evoke the
madness of our world, brought front and center by the Manhattan Psychiatric
Hospital where Bag O’Bones, the novel’s narrator, resides. Bag O’Bones even says that “the apocalypse
has already begun.” In what way can
literature help in these circumstances?
Literature
has no utility in a world in which the Word is in decline, in disintegration,
because Number has planned its extermination.
As much as to want to convince a stockbroker of the beauty of Rimbaud’s
poem Solde [Balance] devoted to “what will never be sold.”
Literature,
on the other hand, when it knows what it means to think, is alone in the position
to describe, to decipher, and to laugh at, this universal cataclysm. From a certain point of view, it is nothing;
from another point of view, it is everything.
Interview by Julien Bisson for France-Amerique
English
translation by Robert G. Margolis
