The discovery of the fragility of my incipient writing, mainly attributable to my scant experience as a reader, which led me to decide, given that I could barely subsist on literary material (I had little reading experience), that I would draw sustenance from the visual, cinematographic lessons the drug had provided me.
Okay! Since this three-day lecture is an ironic review of the years of my youth in Paris, I can now find it very easy to laugh about the
non
-literary material that began to nourish
The Lettered Assassin
from that day on. Certainly an author who has come to the experience of writing after having imbibed the contents of the family library seems much more respectable than one who has begun to construct his literary edifice after an acid trip. The quality of my early poetics seems scant if, as I’m saying, it was basically sustained by a drug that simply widened my visual field of perception. And yet, I’m not sure now that I should reproach myself at all, rather quite the reverse. Because while it’s true that later on I read quite a lot and my literary knowledge was strengthened, it’s also true that LSD, by opening up my visual field, was not at the time by any means an insignificant source of inspiration. Besides, some of those perceptions of a distinct reality have lasted firmly and still today carry a highly remarkable energy, and are the reason I can laugh at realist writers, for example, who duplicate reality and so impoverish it.
43
A few days after the party with Isabelle Adjani at Duras’s house, I was sitting calmly in the Flore waiting for Jeanne Boutade when the person at the next table, a young man who said he was called Yves, began talking to me just like that, in somewhat accelerated speech at first, but soon acquiring a slow and lucid rhythm. He went from asking me if I liked
croques-monsieur
— he scarcely heard my courteous reply — to talking about the neighborhood, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He’d spent his whole life there, he told me. He was very fond of Rue Mazarine, where he’d been born. When he was a very young boy, Saint-Germain was still a provincial neighborhood. I looked at him quite carefully: I saw a sweet smile beneath curly hair and two myopic or worried eyes behind a pair of round glasses. He liked me, that seemed totally obvious. I entrusted my fate to Jeanne Boutade and hoped she’d be on time and help me escape, without offending Yves, from that small misunderstanding.
In two minutes we’d covered seven or eight different topics and I don’t know how we settled on the subject of May ’68. Just a few years had passed since those events, he said, but it felt like an eternity. I thought he was right about this. Since I’d arrived in Paris I’d barely thought, nor had it occurred to me to think, that I was in the city where, just a few years before, events had taken place, according to what I’d been able to read, that had convulsed the Western world. If I really thought about it, none of the people I spent time with talked about May ’68. And besides, that student revolution mattered very little to me; I felt only a certain curiosity to know what had happened.
“Nothing happened,” Yves told me. “Nothing?” I asked. “That’s right, nothing. All I remember from it all is a feeling of great emotion as dawn broke, that day we thought the world was going to change,” he said. “What sort of emotion?” I asked, sincerely interested. “We were on the barricades and no one was tired and it seemed like Paris was waking up from years of a dull and cretinous life. We had a very exciting moment of collective inspiration, started to sing Jacques Dutronc and that really seemed like the Revolution:
Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille . . .”
“And that was it?” I asked him. He became thoughtful, concentrating very hard. At that moment, as on so many other evenings at that hour, Roland Barthes walked into the Flore and quickly glanced around at the
Okay! Since this three-day lecture is an ironic review of the years of my youth in Paris, I can now find it very easy to laugh about the
non
-literary material that began to nourish
The Lettered Assassin
from that day on. Certainly an author who has come to the experience of writing after having imbibed the contents of the family library seems much more respectable than one who has begun to construct his literary edifice after an acid trip. The quality of my early poetics seems scant if, as I’m saying, it was basically sustained by a drug that simply widened my visual field of perception. And yet, I’m not sure now that I should reproach myself at all, rather quite the reverse. Because while it’s true that later on I read quite a lot and my literary knowledge was strengthened, it’s also true that LSD, by opening up my visual field, was not at the time by any means an insignificant source of inspiration. Besides, some of those perceptions of a distinct reality have lasted firmly and still today carry a highly remarkable energy, and are the reason I can laugh at realist writers, for example, who duplicate reality and so impoverish it.
43
A few days after the party with Isabelle Adjani at Duras’s house, I was sitting calmly in the Flore waiting for Jeanne Boutade when the person at the next table, a young man who said he was called Yves, began talking to me just like that, in somewhat accelerated speech at first, but soon acquiring a slow and lucid rhythm. He went from asking me if I liked
croques-monsieur
— he scarcely heard my courteous reply — to talking about the neighborhood, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He’d spent his whole life there, he told me. He was very fond of Rue Mazarine, where he’d been born. When he was a very young boy, Saint-Germain was still a provincial neighborhood. I looked at him quite carefully: I saw a sweet smile beneath curly hair and two myopic or worried eyes behind a pair of round glasses. He liked me, that seemed totally obvious. I entrusted my fate to Jeanne Boutade and hoped she’d be on time and help me escape, without offending Yves, from that small misunderstanding.
In two minutes we’d covered seven or eight different topics and I don’t know how we settled on the subject of May ’68. Just a few years had passed since those events, he said, but it felt like an eternity. I thought he was right about this. Since I’d arrived in Paris I’d barely thought, nor had it occurred to me to think, that I was in the city where, just a few years before, events had taken place, according to what I’d been able to read, that had convulsed the Western world. If I really thought about it, none of the people I spent time with talked about May ’68. And besides, that student revolution mattered very little to me; I felt only a certain curiosity to know what had happened.
“Nothing happened,” Yves told me. “Nothing?” I asked. “That’s right, nothing. All I remember from it all is a feeling of great emotion as dawn broke, that day we thought the world was going to change,” he said. “What sort of emotion?” I asked, sincerely interested. “We were on the barricades and no one was tired and it seemed like Paris was waking up from years of a dull and cretinous life. We had a very exciting moment of collective inspiration, started to sing Jacques Dutronc and that really seemed like the Revolution:
Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille . . .”
“And that was it?” I asked him. He became thoughtful, concentrating very hard. At that moment, as on so many other evenings at that hour, Roland Barthes walked into the Flore and quickly glanced around at the
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