The Goncourt Academy announces its latest selection each year in a different place. This year, to celebrate the Francophonie, they have chosen Beirut. Lebanon being in a tragic situation, both from the social and economic point of view, we readily conceded the good idea. Especially since I am one of those who think that a book in particular, art in general, can save people from misery. Sometimes, all it takes is a book found by chance, a melody heard unexpectedly, to see the unlimited world of possibilities open up, allowing one to escape from social determinism. In The heart is a lonely hunter by Carson McCullers, Mick, a teenager from a poor family, captures an air of classical music that has escaped from a bourgeois house. She returns there every day, discovers an unexpected talent for music, begins to compose before having to work in a drugstore to help her family survive: “She no longer heard music in her head. It was weird. She no longer had access to the space within. Sometimes a short melody came and went – but it no longer locked itself in the space within. It was too tense. Now it was too tired.” We don’t measure enough the importance of the inside to survive all the “shit” of despair.
Here, then, is the Goncourt Academy accompanied by 110 authors from the Francophonie ready to fly to Beirut on October 24 to take this salutary step aside from misery. Emmanuel Macron had a fine nose when in August 2020, on an official trip to Beirut, he went directly to the diva Fairouz, who symbolizes what Lebanon was, what Lebanon is no longer, and what Lebanon should be: a universalist culture capable of making any beating heart vibrate. But we are not there. On October 8, the Lebanese Minister of Culture, Mohammed Mortada, close to Hezbollah, thus declared, with an entirely Eastern emphasis: “The Ministry of Culture cannot allow the door to be opened for Zionist culture, even masked, nor that Lebanon is a propaganda springboard for Zionist literature and literary content with Zionist aims and inspiration.” And if we hadn’t quite understood, he adds that he does not want certain writers who “had embraced the Zionist projects in thought and in practice”. Couldn’t be more explicit. Was he directly targeting Selim Nassib, a French writer of Lebanese Jewish origin, who gave up going to Beirut? Was it a verbal one-upmanship intended to make people forget that Hezbollah had sat down to negotiate with Israel on the delimitation of the gas exploitation zones between the two countries?
What does it matter, finally! Because what is amazing is more the reaction of French institutions and media. Mathieu Diez, attaché for books and the debate of ideas at the French Institute in Lebanon and curator of Beirut Books reacts to the salutary refusal of four members of Goncourt, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Pascal Bruckner and Pierre Assouline , to go to Beirut (officially under the pretext of “the general deterioration of the situation in Lebanon”, I pinch myself to believe it): “There is no runaway effect. The main thing for us is that the Goncourt Academy honors its commitment to be there and that it will announce the four Goncourt Prize finalists from Beirut.” As pointed outRelease (October 25, 2022) under an incredibly light title (“In Lebanon, a controversy pollutes the announcement of the Goncourt finalists”): “The controversy must not make us forget the essential”, namely the announcement of the four finalists. So much cowardice for so little humanism.
Literature, this world without limits, where it is a question of laughing at the drama, of making fun of good feelings, of offering a thousand looks, a thousand sighs, a thousand questions to the reader who abandons his nationality, his ethnicity, his family, his religion, his prejudices, his anger, his laughter at the book open before his eyes. Literature has just crawled under the fire of “no waves” injunctions. Just as it was largely silent after the attack on Salman Rushdie, literature is being scuttled, preferring a deadly niche anti-racism to universalist humanism. This controversy is not one: it is a shameful capitulation to anti-Semitism, which has once again become popular in the name of fear. The fear of damaging the illusion of living together, which is only the cover of victimhood competition. Literature lost, anti-Semitism won, we can only applaud the five French writers who refused to kneel.