Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
French Literary Snobbery to the Rescue
The choice here is to go berserk with fury or laugh, and fortunately, France–vive la France!–has made it possible for me to do the latter. You may have heard that 145 members of our Anglophone literary establishment covered themselves in glory by signing a letter in protest of PEN’s award to Charlie Hebdo. Peter Carey criticised “PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.” If you haven’t heard, and if you’re otherwise having an acceptable day, don’t click on that link–I can’t understate the degree to which it will ruin it.
Beyond demonstrating an absolutely awesome and preternatural cravenness, the authors displayed what you’d think would be an even more deadly crime in fashionable literary circles: an inability to read what’s fashionable in fashionable literary circles. (They also demonstrated an inability to write–the letter is almost incomprehensible–but I suppose that’s not generally considered an impediment to success in fashionable literary circles.)
Clearly, they’d never read a single issue of Charlie Hebdo. And by this point, they certainly can’t plead that it was impossible. It’s been translated now a million times, with a billion commentaries. So basically, they were just too lazy even to read a Wikipedia entry about the damned magazine.
As you can imagine, France is disgusted. Because the alternative is vomiting, I’ll translate the comments published under various reports in the French press. For once, you will fully enjoy a sample of full-on French literary snobbery and contempt for the primitive culture of les Anglos; and alas, it is precisely what these contemptible fashionable cowards deserve. Sadly, since they don’t read French–or anything, apparently–they will probably never know how idiotic they made themselves look.
Il y aurait 145 “écrivains” aux USA? Ils n’ont pas peur du ridicule, les gars …
(There would be 145 “writers” in the USA? They’ve no fear of ridicule, these kids …)
Splendide liste de personnes qui sont plus des écrivassiers que des écrivains. Je me demande ce qu’en auraient pensé Norman Mailer, Henry Miller et John Steinbeck.
(Splendid list of scribblers, not writers. I wonder what Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck would have said.)
—-Et William Styron … Je l’adore.
—-(And William Styron … I love him.)
——-Bien sûr, mais je ne pouvais pas citer tout le monde. Que James Ellroy veuille bien me pardonner également …
——-(Sure, but I couldn’t include everyone. James Ellroy will forgive me, too … )
Bon, et bien voilà qui va simplifier ma découverte de la littérature américaine… 145 auteurs que je n’ai guère envie de connaitre …
(Well, that will simplify my discovery of American literature … 145 authors that I’ll never have a desire to know …. )
Comment pouvez-vous émettre un jugement sur Charlie si vous ne pouvez pas le lire? Ça suffit de regarder les images? On n’avait pas pris l’habitude d’hésiter avant de faire quelque chose d’aussi sereinement stupide avant?
(How can you make a judgment about Charlie if you can’t read? You think it’s enough to look at the pictures? Don’t they hesitate before doing something so serenely stupid?”)
Unfortunately, a lot of the sentiment is less generous. And so is mine.
Published in General
The French are…..the French, what else can one say.
Or, as Steve Martin once said:
“Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything.”
Bravo…and if there’s one thing the French know, it’s enculant.
Is it worse to suggest that they should only live to know what it is like to live in the same climate of fear and intimidation that Charlie Hebdo does or that if they did, they would be the ones with the guns?
I wish shame upon them. I wish upon them their worst fear–that everyone laughs at them as the obscurantist reactionaries they are.
I’m trying to laugh at this, but it depresses me terribly. 145 people signed that letter. My country is exporting dangerous radicalism. The French are right to be furious with Americans. How did this happen?
Well, after M. Normal sent troops into Mali, I started thinking it’s getting harder to ridicule the entire race; after M. Fabius complained publicly about what the Americans were doing in Geneva colluding immorally with the Iranians; & after M. Normal proved to be more serious about Syria than that pink thing that seems to run England & your own incomparable president; well, he’s no de Gaulle, but then again no one is. If the socialist of the race can do all these things & your supposedly less irresponsible authorities cannot–I cannot say it, it is not acceptable to follow that thought to its conclusion. Let us say of the race what de Gaulle said: Ils ne sont pas serieux.
Now, as to these writers–at least you do not see them going into the Middle East posing among the artillery & wishing hell on their own countrymen. I call that progress.
Le code du conduite, il ne s’applique au lexique des manchettes français, hein? Vive la France!
Once societies become unmoored from the Judeo-Christian foundation of objective truth, it becomes increasingly difficult for individual members to form coherent moral judgments.
It apparently takes several generations, but we’re beginning to see the full effects emerge in situations like this one.
Oh, come one–how well do you know that in less degenerate times people in the American South argued God was ok with slavery, at least when they were not enslaved themselves, perhaps especially when they were doing the enslaving?
Don’t let’s go back century after century to find out just how many terrifying things were done in societies less unmoored from foundations–that’s a really funny mix of images, no?
Don’t let’s look at all the great things going on in the world today, as unmoored as we are, what with historical lows in criminality & historical highs in prosperity, longevity, & silly quarrels between strangers on the internet…
J’avoue ne pas du tout avoir réfléchi au territoire …
Moral laziness.
Either one of two related things is happening:
1. In a situation where one person kills another, the “artists” in question decide the merits of the matter based on the characteristics of the killer and the victim and not on the circumstances.
2. In a situation where one person kills another, the “artists” in question decide the merits of the matter by looking at the characteristics of who is rallying to the cause of the victim and deciding to stand for the opposite of their domestic political adversaries.
I have redacted this to uphold the Code of Conduct, but frankly, there is no other way to put it. He has used a vulgar epithet for cowards that invokes … female anatomy. And cats.
Salman Rushdie
✔@SalmanRushdie
.@JohnTheLeftist @NickCohen4 The award will be given. PEN is holding firm. Just 6 [redacted]. Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character.
12:07 PM – 27 Apr 2015
475475 Retweets
374374 favorites
How can you make a judgment about Charlie if you can’t read? You think it’s enough to look at the pictures? Don’t they hesitate before doing something so serenely stupid?”
Well, you know–at least some in the Anglosphere are honest enough to admit that we look at magazines of a type for the pictures and not the articles.
Peter Carey criticised “PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation….
Ah, yes, the Left’s moral equivalence sewage. Taking on the French in that cesspool of all cultures equal seems an easy shot given France’s cultural arrogance. After all, the rude illegitimate sons have the effrontery of not walking in lock step with us and our BFF Brits. And especially do they dispute the Left.
obscurantist reactionaries
Now, now, Ma’am. No fair driving them to the thesauri. You’ll make them break out their bicycles and pedal on down to the library.
Quinn: Moral laziness.
Yes, but it’s circular: it’s at once a necessary outcome of moral equivalence and the excuse for it.
You redacted Tweety Bird’s puddy tat? Poor Sylvester….
By the way, I’ve figured it out. The Six and the Gang of 145 are not serious. They’ve written a satire of the thing that, in our best Anglo fashion, was too subtle for the Frenchman. Just as Pajama Boy and a Rapper were satires about ACA….
Eric Hines
Being fashionable will always trump being courageous.
In any semi-functional moral and intellectual culture, they’d be ridiculed. If not for cowardice, then for being members of PEN who can’t be bothered to read the publication they’re denouncing.
We’re supposed to deal with people like this by shaming them.
I see that Wallace Shawn is one of the protesters. Would that be the actor (Princess Bride) or a different Wallace Shawn? I think Salman Rushdie was wrong to use the vulgar epithet that he used, because depending on the definition they are wonderful things. He should have called them worms.
Hypothetically turning the tables:
It is a certainty that if a bunch of Zionist terrorists had gunned down a bunch of lefties who had been publishing Der Stürmer style anti-Jewish cartoons, this very same group of 145, i.e., the identical persons, would be demanding a PEN award for the cartoonists.
In the examples you cite, we see the depravity mankind is capable of with the restraint of a Biblical worldview where it is taken for granted that objective truth is knowable, and objective morality is applicable.
In the totalitarian slaughters of the 20th century we see what depraved mankind is capable of without those restraints.
Sadly, you’re probably right.
I think that’s the common sense of the matter. I cannot quibble, much less disagree. But when Americans were far more moored, there was the Civil war. With less mooring over time, Americans have done ok–with the enormous exception of abortion, of course. Things have got much better, but also worse…
That mooring & unmooring is not as obvious to me as it is to you. It’ makes for a lot of arguing–I’m not adverse to arguing, to say the least.
The problem that the French face here is that their go-to insult for Americans (and the one which is 100% guaranteed to reduce this particular target set to weep tears of bitter shame) is “cowboy.”
Nope. Doesn’t fit. Sorry ’bout that, pardner.
We’re supposed to guess what PEN stands for? I didn’t see it at the link, either.
It ain’t truth, justice, & the American way-
Perpetually Eunuch Nerds?
I guess that would be a little redundant. Once a eunuch, always a eunuch.
It stood for Poets, Essayists, and Novelists originally, but they’ll let any ink-stained wretch in now.
It’s original stated purpose was to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers.
Personally, I find writers more entertaining when they are surly and ready to express it.
Now that’s writing.
Didn’t Byron say Keats died because of a bad review?
Titus, there’s some question as to that. I read that once before but I can’t remember where. This guy seems to think that Byron didn’t think so, though other people did.
Les 145…these invertebrate writers are of the same ilk that right after 9/11 started saying, “Wait a minute! This was all America’s fault!” I thought I was a good liberal until that moment; then I looked around and said to myself, “Get me out of here! I want nothing to do with these braindead leftoidal loonies.”
As I’ve written before somewhere on Ricochet, the great Mikhail Bulgokov — who wrote his courageous and witty and moving, The Master & Margarita in the darkest days of Stalin’s Soviet Union — said: ‘Cowardice is the worst sin’.
A post 9/11 novel that tries not to be cowardly: here…
Where can a find a full list of the 145 who signed? I want to make sure I don’t accidentally start reading one of their books.
There are some books that are biting into a bad chocolate. You are set for a wave of new pleasure but then suddenly become aware of a stale and rancid taste and can’t spit out the half-chewed mess fast enough. I’ve had that experience with quite a few contemporary novels, and generally find, even if it not specifically political messages that are at fault, that the writer is a typically liberal beautiful soul. Their prose becomes rotted with all the pretty lies they have happily swallowed and regurgitated.
I found a list. I had only heard of a few of the names. Wallace Shawn writes plays and appears in movies. (Voice of T.Rex in “Toy Story” for example.) Russell Banks wrote “The Sweet Hereafter” and “Affliction”, both of which were adapted into movies. (James Coburn won his Oscar for the movie adaptation of “Affliction”.) Eric Bogosian wrote the play “Talk Radio” and was the villain in “Under Siege 2.” Michael Cunningham wrote that novel for “The Hours” which later became a movie. Eve Ensler wrote “The Vagina Monologues.” Rick Moody wrote the novel “The Ice Storm” which was made into a movie. Joyce Carol Oates is famous, but I can’t seem to identify anything I’ve read in her bibliography. Michael Ondaatje wrote the book “The English Patient.” The names I don’t recognize I am not going to bother to search on Wikipedia.