French “intellectuals” and “artists” have been practicing the perilous art of petitioning for a long time, for the better, sometimes, rarely, very often for the worse. “According to a good old French custom which says that someone who has once taken up the pen and is caught committing a criminal act immediately becomes the great hope of French literature”, as Stephen Vizinczey writes in Truths and lies in literature, Most of the famous writers of the interwar period signed a petition to defend André Malraux, who had been caught for the theft of bas-reliefs from the temple of Banteay Srei in Cambodia. Then “Malraux became one of the committed writers of the thirties who thought that one had to love Stalin, simply because he was not Hitler, writing novels based on the most widespread illusions on the left: on the character deeply philosophical about terrorist action, about the revolutionary struggle in China, and about the civil war in Spain.
These are the mediocre descendants of Malraux’s petty-bourgeois defenders, galvanized by the thrill of transgression in the face of a banal thug’s theft, who gathered, in a great moment of courage and stupidity, to protest, like good Stalinists, against the appointment of Sylvain Tesson as godfather of the Spring of Poets. Because he would be a “reactionary icon” that must be fought… In the name of what, again?
Signature of Aragon
I have a heavy memory, I forget nothing, especially not when we talk about Stalin and intellectuals, and this affair goes back a long way, to the betrayal of Kharkov – there were many other betrayals before and after, but this -this is the mold of that of today, of the submission of art to the politics of “spoiltness”. In 1930, Aragon, who had just become a couple with Elsa Triolet, embarked for Moscow and the Kharkov Congress, which intended to discuss proletarian literature. And there, betraying André Breton whom he has known since 1916, betraying surrealism, betraying his integrity and his past, Aragon signs. He signs a paper that Jacques Prévert refuses to initial. Aragon apologizes and denies surrealism, “a reaction of the younger generations of the petty-bourgeois elite, provoked by the contradictions of capitalism in the third phase of its development” and “social-democratic and counter-revolutionary ideology “. Aragon lies down and accepts control of the Party.
Back in Paris, Aragon cries, apologizes (again), threatens to commit suicide. André Breton forgives (it’s very rare, memories of youth and war have tenacious leather). And then it starts again. Because of Dali and Dulita, a little 11-year-old girl who makes the Spanish painter “fantasize” in an issue of Surrealism in the service of the revolution. The party chokes, speaks of a Freudian and pornographic text, summons Aragon, who this time chooses his side, that of Stalin and revolutionary purity. The rupture is worth a collective text (the tribunes of the time) by Char, Crevel, Dali, Eluard, Ernst, Péret, Tanguy, Thirion and Tzara, Bench, which denounces “the ideological jumble” of the traitor Aragon and his “intellectual cowardice”. Then Paul Éluard, royal, delivered the fatal blow in a poetic tract, Certificate : “Incoherence becomes calculation, skill becomes intrigue. Aragon becomes someone else and his memory can no longer cling to me. I have to defend myself with a sentence which, between him and me, has no plus the exchange value that I lent him for so long […] : ‘All the water in the sea would not be enough to wash away an intellectual bloodstain’ (Lautreamont).”
It is certainly not Victor Serge who will prove him wrong, he the anarchist condemned in France for having hosted the Bonnot gang – without supporting the death of civilians in indiscriminate attacks – he the idealist who settled in the USSR , where he was arrested, deported, tortured, came back ideologically and intellectually wounded and warned his comrades against totalitarianism, against the USSR where man does not count, he who, conchied, fired from all the newspapers, isolated , shout attention! in the desert will be censored by those who knelt down in Kharkov for their dishonor. They are still there, puffed up with pride and self-importance, far, so far from poetry.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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