L.A. Alexis Philonenko describes your work as “a vast island in a closed sea, surrounded by small islets, with a port, whose main square is surrounded by cliffs. One of those cliffs is called Babel, the other Antigone.” Do you agree with him?
G.S. Not entirely. Babel, yes, considering that questions of language have been central to my research and thought throughout my life. Antigone, because it’s one of the finest pieces of literature in the world, and its variations have allowed me to indicate how a myth lives and relives, and takes on other forms. But it could have been Iphigenia, Oedipus, even Phaedra, which have inspired other scholars.
L.A. Language is certainly basic to your research, which is not surprising, given your own biography. You were born surrounded by many languages.
G.S. My father thought that, for a Jewish family, survival depended on knowing as many languages as possible. The argument that teaching several languages to a child could induce a sort of schizophrenic disorder makes me furious. Thinking like that serves only politically correct Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American imperialism. In fact, there is nothing worse than limiting children to a single language and telling them, as some do today, “Since Anglo-American is spoken everywhere, don’t waste your time learning another language.” It’s true that in Chinese schools they learn Anglo-American; in Russia, it’s everywhere; in Japan, it’s the second language. But it’s disastrous, because the death of a language is the death of a universe of possibilities.
L.A. It’s commonly said that we have one mother tongue, which dominates the way we think. But it seems that you had several mother tongues. How was that possible, and how did you experience it?
G.S. There’s a magnificent passage in Proust: the young Marcel is translating the great British critic John Ruskin, a philosopher of art. Seven years of translation. Proust knew very little English. So at night his mother would do a rough draft—her English was wonderful—and slip it under his door. And what does the young Marcel tell us? “English is my mother tongue.” This is a very important lesson. I don’t believe in mother tongues, native tongues. In western Sweden and Finland, children grow up learning two totally different and very difficult languages. In Malaysia there are three languages; you grow up speaking all three. In the Grisons region of Switzerland there are three languages: Romansh, Italian, and Austro-German. Many people are born into several languages. The so-called natural nature of monoglottism is greatly exaggerated.
My mother began a sentence in one language and ended it in two or three others. She was a Viennese lady (and that really meant something!) who had learned French. In the Viennese Jewish upper classes, French was spoken fluently. Nabokov mastered English before he did Russian. In any case, he says he first wrote verses in English. For Nabokov, Byron came almost before Pushkin; and his nanny—essential in this story—spoke to him in English. Not to mention Oscar Wilde (who wrote several brilliant works in French) or Joseph Conrad (who abandoned Polish for English). As for Beckett, no one knows what his early drafts were like. In my book After Babel I tried to show that they were probably an almost unconscious mixture of French and English, with a good dose of Italian. His first works, when he was James Joyce’s secretary, were in Italian. They were on Dante and the Italian language. And Beckett is perhaps the greatest writer in modern literature. He creates a sort of volcanic territory, a volcanic magma in which languages are intermixed. Furthermore, he could do something no one else—or almost no one—in the history of literature has managed to do: he could transfer jokes from one language to another. And that’s supremely difficult. He was a virtuoso of Babel.
Far from being cursed, people who speak a number of languages or dialects are incredibly lucky. Every language opens a window onto another world. There’s a counterargument, I know. For years, some people marginalized me at Cambridge and elsewhere in Britain, and still marginalize me, by labeling me “a continental scholar.” Amazing! A continental scholar. He is not one of us. Why? Because here, too, there is a Barrèsian cult of blood and the dead: only those who are enrooted (another Barrèsian term) in a native language have true sensibility, reflexes that a polyglot or an outsider can never have. That may be true. It’s quite possible that there are poets in the English/American language whose depth escapes me. That means I can admire them, but I can never rival those who feel completely at home in that language and no other.
We can’t have everything. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a monoglot; I can’t even imagine it. I’ve taught English literature for fifty years, I hope with some success. I went to Paris to visit the tomb of Paul Celan, who, like Hölderlin—by far the greatest poet of the German language—is untranslatable. What’s more, and this is very serious, you and I have to read the Bible in bad translations, sometimes glorious but basically bad. Not knowing Hebrew is a primary barrier to one of the sources of our humanity. Ancient Greek, in translation? Let’s not go there. And we are cut off from China, Japan. I don’t read Russian. At the end of his life, when Edmund Wilson, my immediate predecessor as the main critic for The New Yorker, knew he was dying, he hired someone to teach him Hungarian—a terribly difficult language. He explained, “I’ve been told there are some poets who are as great as Pushkin and Keats. I want to know them!” He was thinking of Endre Ady and Sándor Petőfi. It was magnificent. “I want to know, not to be told things second-hand.” And if I weren’t so lazy, I would also be trying to learn another language or two. I, too, would like to know.
L.A. What are your thoughts on the current domination of Anglo-American on a global scale? And what about the status of French?
G.S. A language is simply a means of saying things: the future tense of a verb—which is called hope in some languages—is different in every language. The way we look forward to the potential of the human adventure, of the human condition, varies from language to language. Just as memory does, the huge mass of memory. If we were to become a single-language planet, or an almost single-language one, the loss would be nearly as great as losing all but one type of fauna or flora (which, as you know, we are doing everywhere in the world); it would be a terrible impoverishment. And I don’t have to tell you how disturbing the status of French is, given the conquest of Anglo-American.
That said, the victory of Anglo-American—how ironic!—the victory of that industrial, technological, scientific, economic, fiscal Esperanto, is not related only to the political power of America. In a way that is still hard to explain, Anglo-American is full of hope, full of promise, whereas other great languages now suggest fatigue and sadness. What a great subject for study! Some languages are crushed by the domination of the American continent, whereas others are being infused by a new vitality. Spain is benefiting from the great writers of Latin America, a huge boost to the Spanish language. The Portugal of José Saramago and Antonio Lobo Antunes (in my opinion, Antunes is one of the greatest European writers) has retaken the advantage from Brazil—which itself has a great literature. In other cases, languages are being crushed.
The destiny of the English language here in Britain is uncertain, because for the younger generation a sort of Anglo-American is taking over. A novelist who for a time was (and I emphasize was) the most promising of his generation, the young Martin Amis, wrote a book called Money, in which he handled that new American language with brio. But it didn’t really work.
For a British writer, becoming American isn’t easy and carries deep psychological risks. And where does living English come from now? The Caribbean, India, Pakistan (Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, et al.), and especially Ireland, an Ireland that has a formidable tradition of linguistic independence. It is from those places, from the margins of classic English, that new vital forces are emerging.
The narrow strip of water between France and Britain is wider, in a sense, than the Atlantic Ocean; the two languages, the two visions of the world that it separates, are profoundly and radically different. On the one hand, there was that great school of French moralism that is slowly being extinguished, perhaps, but will return. French thought has always had this dimension (certainly since the seventeenth century); it speaks to humanity, to the moral universality of the person. It’s very different from German philosophy or the British tradition. Metaphysics has never been very successful in Britain, but British empiricism, British irony, the skepticism of Hume and Bertrand Russell have had a universal impact. We must never forget that Britain is a paradox: it’s a small island in economic and political decline, deeply wounded by wars that it didn’t win or that it won by chance, with a language that dominates the planet. From that little island came Shakespeare and the English language, which is used throughout the world. I’ve traveled a lot, and everywhere I go, English comes to meet me—whether in China, among my Japanese students, or even in Eastern Europe.
Valéry—whom I adore but who could say wonderfully stupid things—declared, “I’m told you can learn English in twenty hours. To that I respond that you can’t learn French in twenty thousand hours.” A silly quip, but it is, in fact, true—I have taught those languages. English can be learned fast, but there’s more: it contains a message of hope. How can I put it? In English there’s a flying carpet to tomorrow. English is full of promises; it tells us, “Things will be better tomorrow.” The American Declaration of Independence contains the famous expression “the pursuit of happiness.” It’s really something to say to humanity, “Go pursue happiness!” It’s not at all obvious. In English there’s no deep despair, none of the great apocalypses of Russian, French, that metaphysical vision of the damnation of humanity, of original sin. Anglo-American has never believed in that.
L.A. I don’t see a computer here.
G.S. I’m woefully ignorant technologically. I can’t even understand how my phone works. And I don’t think you really understand, either. There’s a whole lot of bluff going on. We are surrounded by machines and technology that we don’t understand at all. The Kindle, the iPod, Twitter. I know they exist, thanks to my grandchildren, who are virtuosos in those magical arts. All of that is based on Anglo-American, on an economy of speech and an economy of syntax. Let’s look more closely. If computers and the first computer languages—which go back to Claude Shannon in the U.S. and Alan Turing in Britain—had been developed in India, and if the first computer languages had been based on Hindu grammar, the world would be different. The planet would not be as we know it today. The new conception of minimal language and the natural structure of Anglo-American are coincidental to an extraordinary degree. Why does German drive people crazy, and allow so much in philosophy? Because verbs come at the very end of interminable sentences. That means you can hesitate, go backward, think “or, or, or,” and ultimately fall headfirst onto the verb. It enabled Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Heidegger to develop their style. It doesn’t work in English.
English tells people not gifted in language (and let’s avoid harsh words like “illiterate” or “uneducated”): “You too can do anything you want.” There’s great promise in the eloquence of simple language.
In many countries—France, for example—making grammatical mistakes or other blunders, groping around in the language, are viewed very negatively. But in America, lack of eloquence is associated with honesty: someone who speaks poorly must be honest, he’s not twisting the truth. That’s a very profound dialectic, the antithesis of the Roman and French civilizations. In France you have to know how to speak well, and great French leaders have often been amazingly eloquent. France produced a Bossuet, a de Gaulle, among many others. In America, the basic vocabulary is limited to around eight hundred words. Studies have been carried out by the Bell telephone company: with eighty words you can say just about everything you need to say. In other languages, the immense wealth of vocabulary defines a sort of social elite, an educational elite; it’s very different.
L.A. So there are different ways of speaking, depending on the language. But also depending on one’s sex. I’m referring to another aspect of your work that’s not sufficiently talked about, the eros of language. What is the eros of language? What does it convey? In After Babel you touch on a theme that’s enthralling but has been little researched: you boldly suggest that there may be a female way of talking.
G.S. I’m more and more convinced of that, and it’s certainly a very rich theme. There are some languages, in Northern Siberia, in some of the Altaic languages, but also in Southeast Asia, that comprise two languages, one for women and one for men. Women aren’t allowed to use certain syntactic forms, for example, though they must learn the male vocabulary to teach it to their sons. This is one of the ironies of the injustice of the female condition; but it is crystallized there, anchored in form.
In our own languages, women spoke only among themselves for thousands of years. They didn’t participate in the political, social, or theological discussions held by men. Women had to develop frames of reference, allusions, understanding, that were almost organic and belonged to them alone. The entrance of women into the general discourse is quite recent. I personally experienced, at Cambridge and Oxford, an England where women left the table after dessert and withdrew to another room. The men stayed together to talk politics, to talk about “serious” things. That grotesque convention is gone now, thank God. But imagine! There are some colleges at Oxford and Cambridge—the practice is gradually disappearing—where at major events the men, in formal evening garb, dine at long tables on a dais in the refectory while the women eat in the gallery. The same is true in Jewish synagogues, and I often tease them about it.
Female discourse must have very deep roots in the experience a woman has with a child—one that men can never completely share—and with sex, of course. I’ve talked about a “Don Juanism” in languages. What a woman might tell us about sex (I mean a woman who has made love in languages other than her own) would be huge. Once again, that’s another planet.
The novel has widely become the domain of women. They are dominant in the form. And the novel is precisely the multilingual, polyglot form par excellence, using different levels of discourse and vocabulary. Virginia Woolf was acutely aware of this, and wrote about it. The major women novelists today have also discovered a misunderstanding connected to difference in gender; there’s a dark side to all that. Ultimately, we understand each other very poorly. All those stupid, vulgar jokes, such as “When a woman says no she means yes,” have a semiological foundation (that isn’t the right word, but I can’t think of a better one), an authentic and very profound base. In fact, the essential moments of an exchange are often “dialogues of the deaf,” as we say in French. And many men express an infantile sensibility (“No one understands me”), a resentment of female language, which is increasingly powerful. Who could have foreseen the electoral campaign that pitted Hillary Clinton against Condoleezza Rice, both talented women, both endowed with charisma far superior to that of the miserable herd of male candidates? And in other countries, too, the rise of women may unleash a brand-new political and sociological discourse. That’s going to be a great adventure!
And I’m convinced, incidentally, that great art is the reflection of a lot of suffering or injustice. Which raises this infinitely thorny issue: why don’t women create more?
L.A. Because men prevent them.
G.S. Not at all! No one prevented Pascal’s sister from creating. She was taught math, but it was he who, at the age of nine, rediscovered all of Euclid’s theorems. No, no, it’s much more complicated than that. Today there are remarkable women novelists in Britain and France. Their numbers are growing. Women poets, though, remain rare. However, you have to admire two women: Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. My hypothesis, probably inane, is that if you can create life, if you can bear a child, it’s quite possible that aesthetic, moral, philosophical creation is of less importance. But this is only a hypothesis. Some women get angry when I say that. They can’t accept such a notion—and perhaps they are right. Will there be highly distinguished women in future generations? The question arises in the sciences. At Cambridge University (which leads the world in the sciences, along with MIT and Stanford), they are trying to recruit talented girls in elementary and secondary schools. The campaign is supported by the government, which gives scholarships. I wholly support this type of initiative, because the hurdles are much greater for girls than for boys.
L.A. They’re lucky; in France, girls are more or less cast aside.
G.S. We are trying, we are trying.
L.A. There are more British feminists than French, obviously.
G.S. French girls manage to pass their exams brilliantly, and then they fade, and we don’t know why. It’s a fascinating subject and shows us once again just how primitive the tools of social and collective psychology are. The tool set is still rudimentary. What have we really learned since the great Émile Durkheim? Where does that seed come from, that creative germ that proclaims, “I can change the world”? Perhaps women have too much common sense? Common sense, no matter what Descartes says, is not well distributed; and common sense is the very enemy of genius. Common sense is what weakens irrationality, arrogance.
L.A. You’re quite a macho, George!
G.S. No, I respect facts. I’m waiting, I’m waiting.
L.A. You’re waiting, but there are women who have already existed, who exist right now, who are highly creative. So (and this may startle you), picking up your hypothesis that women don’t create because they have the ability to give birth, and that this prevents them from being creative, I’m going to cite three female philosophers. And, incidentally, none of these women ever had children—was that chance or necessity? In any case, they didn’t want to. They are Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. What do you think?
G.S. I don’t agree with your assessment at all. I was unfortunate enough to meet Hannah Arendt. Very little of her work is first-rate, in my opinion. A woman who writes a huge volume on the origins of totalitarianism and doesn’t say a word about Stalin because her husband was a true Stalinist-Communist? No thank you.
Simone Weil? General de Gaulle said, “She’s mad!” Which is an opinion difficult to refute. There is some remarkable stuff.
L.A. And yet you read Simone Weil regularly.
G.S. She writes some very fine things, but very little. And then, allow me a few blind prejudices. A woman who refuses to enter a Catholic church, saying she is too Jewish, at the time of Auschwitz? No thank you. It’s inexcusable! If there is a last judgment, that woman is in a lot of trouble. And who was the third?
L.A. Simone de Beauvoir.
G.S. She was a great woman. She was very lucky to live with Sartre! Very lucky! That was a truly intelligent choice.
L.A. I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre who was lucky.
G.S. That’s quite possible. Of course, she was greatly admired. There are certainly exceptions. But why don’t we find more women in the sciences, where there are all sorts of opportunities and where, at least in the U.S., women are positively encouraged? To say that the Nobel Committee members are misogynistic machos—no, I don’t believe that. Women are sought at the highest levels of the sciences; they are sought for the Fields Medal (the equivalent of the Nobel in mathematics). I have colleagues who say they really don’t understand what’s happening there. Maybe it will change.
L.A. In your 2008 book My Unwritten Books, in the chapter that deals with love and women, you say that women have not been sufficiently creative in the history of humanity. But would you yourself have been as creative if you hadn’t encountered women you loved, whom you made love with, who loved you, and who, in the very act of loving, taught you things about language and the meaning of existence?
G.S. That is absolutely true, but why don’t we have a book by a female Casanova, telling her side of the equation? That book doesn’t exist. Isn’t it time? The pornography of some French ladies—let’s not mention it. It’s childish rubbish. Rubbish can be very interesting and complex; it is in some great writers. But I’ve tried to show the “Don Juanism” in various languages, how each language has different taboos, different levels of slang (sexual slang is extremely rich), and constitutes a synthetic experience quite different from others. It’s an endless adventure. And if there is an expression I’m very proud of, it’s this: simultaneous translation is orgasmic. The opposite is also true: a true orgasm—which is very rare—is simultaneous translation. When I’m with a woman, she and I share a language at that delicate moment. It’s not at that moment that orgasm is reached. But the act of translation can be quite complex, quite erotic.
L.A. Let’s not go back to the intellectual realm, let’s stay in the sexual realm, since you approach it head-on in your book. I don’t know who S. is, but with S., you do things: “dard, lance d’amour, manche, or nerf. Foutre or chevaucher were too commonplace to merit more than half a point. Three points for trou mignon or trou velu, a bonus for the proper construal of enfiler and la petite cuisson. After which, in various stages of undress, S. would prepare one of her Breton dishes, its sea-brine tang or touch of cognac dead easy for her.” The calmer you get, the harder you get.
G.S. But I’m joyful, too. They say that joy is not my strong point, but that’s wrong. And remember what Nabokov said: “Only fiction speaks the truth.” Careful!
L.A. Right, right; you’re talking about Lolita, but I want to get back to George, who is sitting in front of me.
G.S. No, in that chapter, of course, there’s a lot of fiction and allegory.
L.A. And yet you dedicated that last book to your wife; it was to get the S.’s out of mind. But there aren’t just S.’s, there is also A-M. So: “A-M took pride in the thicket of her ‘burning bush.’ Gardens are the scenes of assignation, of sexual witchcraft (as in Tasso). First my tongue was to brush, barely brush, the dew from the outer petal. Penetration could ensue only with almost unbearable ralentando and lightness. The violets had to be . . .” I’ll stop there, because it’s—
G.S. But it’s very beautiful.
L.A. But why did you spend so much time telling us all that?
G.S. The chapter on the Don Juanism of languages had been living in a box since After Babel. I never published it because Oxford University Press would certainly not have allowed it at that time. But I always dreamed of it, and when I reached the point when I really couldn’t have cared less what others thought, I said to myself, “Okay! Make them smile, make them laugh! Laugh, yourself, at your memories.” And only Casanova has given us material here, a man who really lived polyglot love; it’s very rare. Nabokov, yes. I’m reading Ada or Ardor right now, there are magnificent moments of polyglot sexuality in Nabokov—which he also experienced, and how! Not, unfortunately, in Burgess, who spoke three languages and knew love, but in another way.
There are writers much greater than I who have tackled this subject, but for once I wanted people to laugh at me, to smile at a writer who is always criticized for being too dark.
L.A. Not only do we laugh, but we are enchanted by that penetrating analysis—forgive the pun—of your erotic adventures, and by the development of a theme that is essential in your work: the connections between sex and language.
G.S. Yes, it is a huge subject, and we’ve hardly scratched the surface. We know almost nothing about the connection between the parasympathetic system (a component of the nervous system related to sexuality) and the cerebral centers governing language. And yet man is a creature of language, and human sexuality is permeated with linguistic elements to which new elements are added very rarely. To add to the erotic resources of a civilization is infinitely rare, even for a great writer. Proust did it with the little phrase faire cattleya. It changes everything. Nabokov does it with Lolita; since the book was published, Lolitas can be found on every street corner. No one ever noticed them before. It’s one of the most remarkable inventions of perception. But it is very unusual for new possibilities of living eros to be added like that to the repertoire of perceptions, human sensibility, and linguistic sensibility.
We all have talismanic phrases, phrases that connect us to life. For me, one of them is René Char’s expression sereine crispation, in A une sérénité crispée (1951). That’s exactly what certain moments of love are like: a serene tightening. No one had put those two words together before Char. And it’s one of the phrases that truly define happiness in love. The tension, the peace—and the peace that is not a peace. But to express that takes genius.
L.A. While reading your chapter on love, sexuality, and language, I get the impression that pleasure, the climax of the act of love, can’t be experienced if the act isn’t accompanied by words.
G.S. I ask the question: what is the erotic life of deaf-mutes like? I have no answer. I can cite some half-dozen articles on blind people; studies have been done based on very interesting testimony. But nothing on deaf-mutes. How do they “speak” to each other? No doubt there are many individuals, perhaps millions, who experience the sex act in silence. It’s quite probable. It’s what I assume, even if there’s no way to prove it. But someone lucky enough to have a certain education, a certain upbringing, a certain aesthetic sense, what happens? At the Institute in Princeton, young mathematicians would go home in the evening and couldn’t tell their wives about their work. Not a word. But one wife explained, “When things are going well in bed, some nights, it’s the only way I know he’s had a creative day.” She was right. It’s very honest reasoning. Of course, we don’t have to use words to make someone else feel our joy, or disappointment, or sadness. But there are extreme cases that interest me a lot: couples in an intimate relationship who don’t share a common language.
L.A. I’m thinking of what you said about chess: that anywhere in the world, when you are traveling, you can go into a café and immediately be understood through that language.
G.S. Remember that in chess the rules are fixed: there’s no need for translation; you don’t even have to introduce yourself; there’s a marvelous anonymity of sharing, an immediate connection. As for desire, yes, it can be mute. Everyone knows what love at first sight means; it can’t be explained. It happens, it certainly happens: a look, a gesture that can change a life.
L.A. You deal with this business of a mute language in The Poetry of Thought. What does silence mean?
G.S. Ever since my first works, especially Language and Silence, I’ve been trying to understand what happens where speech is no longer involved. We’ve already spoken of mathematics and music as the two great voices of silence. I had a revelatory experience when I was very young, at Princeton: a door was open and a group of mathematicians was working at the blackboard at a dizzying speed, chalking up topological algebraic formulas. There were Japanese, Russians, and Americans. Complete silence. Because they didn’t have a common language, they couldn’t understand each other linguistically. But they understood each other perfectly in the silence of their thoughts. That was a revelation.
There are all kinds of communication outside and beyond speech. Mallarmé tried to make us understand what the white spaces between lines are; there are deliberate silences in music. I’ve tried to understand a bit better, too, why there are some things one shouldn’t even try to say. The ultimate experience of the Shoah, but also some moments of eros and language—these are themes I’ve worked on a lot.
Every language has its own eros, its own sexual jargon; every language has its erotic jokes. But there are those who say that in true love silence must reign. There are cultures that encourage erotic expression, and others where it’s taboo. I continue to be enthralled by the exchange between the possibilities of the spoken and the possibilities of love, of climax. We can hardly ever assign a precise birth date to a great intellectual movement, but in the case that interests me, it must have been around 1910–12, on an afternoon at the home of the famous father of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa (who at the time were the two major beauties in London). The brilliant, humorous, satiric writer Lytton Strachey arrives and has a cup of tea. Vanessa comes into the room, wearing a gorgeous white summer dress. There’s a spot on the dress, and he utters the word “sperm.” From what we know, it was the first time the word “sperm” had been said in public, out loud, in an educated, upper-middle-class circle. It would have been inconceivable. From that moment, everything became possible.
There are linguistic crises associated with modern sexual liberation, and with the liberation from taboos. It would be interesting to ask what is taboo today. What would be unacceptable, what would be forbidden?
L.A. In The Poetry of Thought (2011), you ask a question that’s in the forefront of all your work: “Is philosophy that which is not said?” In this dialectic of language and silence, where do you situate the philosophical enterprise?
G.S. All my life I’ve been jealous of mathematicians and musicians. Why? Because they know a truly universal language, as we’ve just mentioned.
The problem with languages is that we have to translate all the time. When you and I are talking, we are constantly translating things within the same language: we are trying to understand each other. No one uses the same words in exactly the same way. There are as many words as there are human beings. So I asked how a philosopher, who, after all, seeks universal truths, copes with the resistance of language. And this, I believe, is where the philosopher will encounter great writers. Conversely, those who struggle with languages and who tell us of their struggle—every poem is a struggle with the word—will encounter the problems of the philosopher. I wrote The Poetry of Thought, a book I’ve thought about almost all my life, because I’ve lived among philosophers as well as great poets.
France has a magnificent tradition of thinkers who are also among the greatest of writers, great writers that any philosopher should take seriously. And here—you’re going to laugh because it sounds old-fashioned—I’m thinking of the philosopher Alain (his nom de plume), who is still intensely alive for me. He, too, always said, “Reading Stendhal or Balzac is a philosophical exercise.” We can also think of the man who dominated our youth, Jean-Paul Sartre. What did Sartre want? “I want to be Spinoza and Stendhal!” It was an almost unachievable ambition, but he got close.
L.A. How did Jean-Paul Sartre, when he spoke no other language than French, succeed in building his huge philosophical, literary, intellectual, and political oeuvre? Isn’t he a counterexample of your Babel theory?
G.S. Descartes did it through his Latin, Leibniz through his Latin. Being a monoglot doesn’t preclude being universal; it’s just one aspect of literary and philosophical genius. But consider this! Sartre’s great philosophical building blocks—who is still reading them? And who read them at the time?
L.A. In my generation we read them, as many others did.
G.S. Yes, but not abroad. There is a very Parisianist side to Sartre’s existentialism. There’s a wonderfully local side; you could say the local is the center. Very well, but that isn’t a given. Camus certainly had a far greater international influence than Sartre. We forget that The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus were translated all over the world, in China and Japan, into Asian languages, into African languages, and so on. That’s something else: it’s the genius of the narrator, the creator of myth.
L.A. So you are one of those who rooted for Camus in the battle that pitted Sartre and Camus against each other throughout the twentieth century?
G.S. Oh, no, you have to read them both! And above all, you have to read Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was so upright, had such integrity of thought and such fundamental honesty—which is not always the case with Sartre.
L.A. The power of mathematics, of music, of a certain form of poetry of thought is, if I understand you correctly, that they achieve the universal without language, without requiring translation to be accessible to all. So, to have to be translated implies weakness? Can everything actually be translated?
G.S. A true work should resist translation, even if there are counterexamples of that statement. It seems that Hamlet, performed in Swahili in a mental hospital, is amazingly powerful and convincing. Shakespeare is translated into all languages. Japanese films of Shakespeare seem to me more important, more profound, than our own. Still, some giants can’t be translated. Any Russian will tell you, with tears in his eyes, “You will never understand a word of Pushkin, even in the finest translation.” There are certainly great poets, and even writers of prose, who can’t easily be translated.
A great work is one that always, mysteriously, tells the reader at the end, “You must begin again. This was the first try. Let’s try again.” Look at Beckett, who manages to say everything—you can get insanely envious of Beckett—who writes, “You have to fail better.” With each new try, I fail better. That’s what I’ve always said to my students: at our next reading, let’s try to fail better.
L.A. I’ve heard that when you taught Shakespeare, you sang him to your students. Is that true?
G.S. Teaching Shakespeare is attempting to say in each class, “This is theatre, ladies and gentlemen.” The idea of teaching Shakespeare in a university seminar, in a lecture hall—he would have been horrified! For me, he’s a supreme actor, a script writer who would have been thrilled with television. Imagine what Shakespeare would have done with television! He was essentially a man of the theatre. He starts over, he manipulates five versions of the same scene. We teach him artificially. What does that mean? He must be acted out at every moment. You have to act out a scene, and then, calmly, look back at every possible interpretation word for word.
A great actor or a great theatre director—someone like Peter Brook—is the best possible critic. These are masters of Shakespearean exegesis, not professors. And the dramatic dimension, the problematics of the ephemeral demanded by film, wouldn’t have scared Shakespeare at all. If he had been told there would be twenty-five thousand editions of his works, he would have been astonished.
Everything changes, everything changes—but not in literature. Everything changed on the day Beethoven said, “I am Beethoven.” Shakespeare never said, “I am Shakespeare”; he may have been the last person not to know who he was. What a happy man! He didn’t know. Beethoven knew he was Beethoven. The beginning of the persona creatis, the titan who creates from his inner, private genius, came later: Romanticism brought it. And ever since Romanticism it’s been harder, in my opinion, to understand great works that might have been anonymous. “Did Homer exist?” is a question of no interest.
The work is there, and what would have made Shakespeare very happy, what would have moved him, was not so much to be acknowledged as a universal genius but to know that something of his plays survived. With Mozart it isn’t clear. What did Mozart think of Mozart? We have no idea. Once Beethoven arrived, the persona of the genius, the titan, as he was called, began to impose itself. Just go to Paris and take a look at Rodin’s Balzac. That amazing statue would have been inconceivable before the modern discovery of gigantic, Promethean personalities. Shakespeare doesn’t have a good monument, incidentally; there’s not one good statue of Shakespeare. And the only two portraits considered authentic are not really believed. We don’t know what he looked like, we’ve no idea. It’s fascinating, but his lifetime was just about the last moment when a great work could be anonymous.
We often describe a literary, aesthetic work as unique. I don’t know, I’m not sure. It’s likely. We can’t imagine another Rimbaud, another Mallarmé. Once you reach modernity with all its creative neuroses, with Rimbaud’s cry “I is another” (je est un autre), you can no longer assert, as the scientist does, “Tomorrow someone else will make my discovery if I don’t do it myself.” In the sciences, the collectivity is good fortune. Even if you are a quite mediocre scientist—and believe me, they exist—but are in a good team, the escalator goes up, the flying carpet takes off, you’re carried along. And next Monday we may know something we didn’t know this Monday. The arrow points to the future. For us, a contrario, 90 percent of what we teach is from the past.