Report on Lydie Salvayre's Subversive Classicism

Abstract

"Tout le monde abomine les explications de texte, c'est bien connu. Il n'y a que les professeurs de français pour ne pas le comprendre et commenter pesamment ce qui ne doit que s'effleurer."1 Lydie Salvayre, La puissance des mouches, 121 Dear Reader, I am happy to tell you that as far as our selection trials are concerned, your performance has been laudable. Your conformity is flawless, your behavior exemplary, and your endurance index, on a national scale, is very high. Your dedication to critical inquiry and obscure French theory does not cease to amaze us. Ladies and gentlemen, bravo ! In the following you will be rewarded with a surprising piece of postmodern literature. We do not refer to Lydie Salvayre's novels (if indeed they are novels, or even postmodern), but to fragments of a report from the SBLI (the Special Bureau of Literary Investigations, European Department, French Division) one of the CIA's most secret branches. Thanks to a leaked report, we now know that certain French writers are under surveillance. (This should be good news for students of French Literature, trained as they are in hermeneutics, deconstruction, and French sibylline writers—they are well-positioned to join this special branch of the CIA, putting their talents to use for national security and for the protectionof moral literature.) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) "Spot Report" Microfiche : 2003-120C Date issued : April 31, 2003 Date Declassified : [No date] NOT disinfected Lydie Salvayre is a French author of Spanish origin. Her parents were Communists, and left their country in 1939 after the Rightist victory of General Franco. This is a first motive for suspicion. A second: she is a psychiatrist. A third: she writes strange stories where humble people have an (intolerable) freedom of speech. Actually, her fictions are long and eloquent soliloquies by the most illegitimate persons, confronted with officialdom: workers decorated with a medal for their [End Page 46] labor (La médaille); a criminal (horrors!) telling his life to his judge, psychiatrist or attorney (La puissance des mouches); a man from an absurd provincial town giving a lecture on conversation, and who slowly reveals that he is the true cause of his wife's death (La conférence de Cintegabelle); a young woman who tries to prevent a bailiff from seizing her few possessions (La compagnie des spectres). In each instance, these people do not try to usurp authority, but the legal (or medical) system orders them to talk, resulting in incalculable damage. At other times, people with the right rank and true authority also talk (managers in La médaille, or a bailiff in Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers), but a certain irony is perceptible (even for people like me, so blindly in favor of authority). The worst case is her last book, Passage à l'ennemie, where a policeman, infiltrating a suburban gang, writes reports that are less and less respectful and trustworthy, since he sides with the gang against his colleagues and superiors. Such a fiction casts doubt on any police report, beginning with this present one. I truly despised this confusion of truth and fiction, this blurring between discourse by rule and playfulness with codes. It engenders a chaotic world, where it is impossible to recognize who has the right to speak and tell the truth. This is why I would like to draw my superiors' attention to this French writer. I am informed that a very disturbing journal (with the enigmatic title SubStance), founded in the 1970s by two suspicious University of Wisconsin junior faculty (one from France, the other from Egypt !) with the intent of infiltrating American academia with French theory, plans to publish a special issue on Lydie Salvayre. They have already published papers on a post-exotic writer (Antoine Volodine) who is suspected of dealing in international communist rumors, virtual revolutions, and cosmopolitan shamanism. This issue on Lydie Salvayre must then be controlled, and my superiors should...