Indifference and Vertigo. Autorretrato [Self Portrait], by Édouard Levé
Autorretrato [Self Portrait], by Édouard Levé
Madrid, 451 Editores
Two obsessions in French literature: the inventory and the list, the exhaustive description and fragmentary enumeration. Of course, both themes are deeply intermingled, so much so that they could be taken as just one. However, it is advisable to distinguish between the two, for they give rise to different forms. On the one hand, Proust’s project, the production of a continuum which enables the subject to unfold, literature as the uncovering of the Self, a panorama of the world. On the other hand, Mallarme and his broken book, Bouvard and Pécuchet taking everything into account, the whole world as an aggregate of discreet units, the catalogue which, when all is said and done, makes representation and subjectivity explode into pieces. Two very different versions of the book of the apocalyptic angel “in quo totum continetur”, written, according to Gómez Dávila, so that not even the smallest trace of fragrances is lost. Eschatology is the ironic phantom member of a literature that claims to be totally secular. Thus, Perèc’s work can be read as a winding road between the two versions: continuous and flexible time in La vida, instrucciones de uso [Life, Instructions for Use]; the quantum time of Me acuerdo [I Remember]; the attempts at reconciliation of the two temporarinesses in W. or Las cosas [The Things].
Autorretrato [Self Portrait], by Édouard Levé (451 editores) takes up Perèc’s challenge and proposes a subtle variant of the problem. The book is made up of a collection of random sentences which are superimposed on a small autobiographical, misshapen, asymmetrical and crooked photomontage. In those sentences, mixing cut-off poems, opinions, notes and aphorisms with simple lists of banal information, Levé enumerates a wide range of experiences, phobias, loves, anecdotes, fears, manias. A very simple concept, with an admirable formal elegance, whose rhetorical effect is vertigo. Its reading falls headlong like a body thrown down a flight of stairs. However, despite being constructed according to the parameters of the list, the book manages to gradually give rise to a coherent universe, a world. Or at least to this side of the world, which seems to have accepted its mediocrity as the best of all possible states, a world which has definitely changed ritual for law, where everything carries the label post and where people like Levé –polite, a goody-goody− feel permanently dissatisfied.
Levé, however, does not complain, he does not rant and rave or tear his hair out about the ills of the welfare society. Levé is not Vaneigem; he is not a hysterical post-situationist. Neither does he defend, even in a veiled or devious way, this welfare: we are definitely not up against one of those writers who denounces the postmodern decline and ends by insinuating that, in spite of all the bad things, western societies –democracy and consumption− are still the only acceptable ones on the planet and that, therefore, people’s distress is really a glamorous, pop form of existentialism. Levé is not Houellebecq.
The philosophical posture of Autorretrato is closer to an aesthetics of indifference like that practices by stoics and certain eastern schools. “Not wanting to change things does not mean that one is a conservative”, wrote Levé, “I like things to change without having to do anything”. An indifference, however, that has nothing to do with cynicism. On the contrary, solid honesty, a vital attitude, the insipid and cold gaze, curiosity and an almost obsessive respect for the natural rhythms of reality’s phenomena, enable Levé to avoid even flirting with the wickedness with which, according to Eagleton, his countrymen hide their terror at seeming ingenuous. Levé does not fight against the devil of his internal contradictions: he lives in them, contemplates them with a sweet irony, he turns them around, touches them and leaves them in their place waiting for them to mutate on their own, in accordance with their own dynamics. He loves the world more than himself and prefers to experience problems rather than sit and think about solutions: “I believe that the people who make the world are those who do not believe in reality, such as, for example, for centuries, the Christians”.
The author of a photographic work, no less thought-provoking and strange, in which, as occurs in his books, the conceptual and the existential constitute the same material, Levé committed suicide in 2007, at the age of forty-two. One could believe that this was not a desperate act, but a consequence of his vision of the world, another vital experience, perhaps thoroughly prepared in Suicidio [Suicide], the book he sent to his publishers three days before he took his life. Pop mythology hunters can search somewhere else: his death is closer to the moderation of Seneca than the nightmare of Kurt Cobain.
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