If you can recall a college roommate whom you mildly disliked yet shared unforgettable experiences with, this is how I feel about reading the books of the French author Emmanuel Carrère. He was once referred to as “the French Knausgaard”—the ultimate hypnotically self-absorbed author. He can’t rue his male malfeasance without regaling us with the sex tricks he performed with his ever-so-beautiful wives. An ex-wife is suing him for indiscretion. His unreservedly honest (at least according to him) confessions tend to relativize his sins while stunning the reader with their lurid explicitness. I don’t admire his personality or approve of his self-promoting stories.
But they are really good stories and he tells them really well. As for me—a has-been academic and lazy tourist who couldn’t even make it to the Louvre during several extended stays in Paris—I passed my evenings reading Carrère in the Montmartre apartment where I stay or over my second and third glasses of rosé at BiBiche where I exchange an occasional word with Laure the barlady who shares my taste in literature.
What makes Emmanuel Carrère so readable? As with Montaigne, he gives us not only the insight or the snapshot but also the man holding the camera and his state of mind aiming it: paradoxically, this makes the picture more objective and convincing. Then there is his choice of subjects. They include the megalomaniac losers with whom we feel a certain kinship. Moi (as a slacker tourist and would-be public intellectual), I can imagine the lethal fraud of M. Jean-Claude Romand who chickened out on his medical qualifying exam, then invented a well-paid ghost career with a Swiss UN organization, all financed by his Ponzi borrowing scheme. As a Russophile reader and traveler, I devoured Carrère’s books about the flamboyant poète maudit and failed Russian nationalist revolutionary Eduard Limonov or his own adventures filming a documentary in the Russian province. A year ago when I was stranded in Hawaii rescuing my hospitalized son, I read Carrère’s recounting of his own brief Catholic conversion—a walk on the wild side in the France of laïcité—and his reconstruction of the travels of the Apostles Luke and Paul. Even the latter account is interspersed with admissions of the author’s sexual squalor. What is most shocking is often what is plain fact. Carrère’s book about the imposture of Romand reports the latter’s murder of his wife, children, parents, and dog—all in order to avoid having to face their “disappointment.” He killed them because he couldn’t stand to let them down!
Why this fascination with squalor and failure in which I am evidently not alone? They give voice to a double we bear within us. In our age of fragmentation and fluidity, all success and achievement is ephemeral and transient. Our inner Doppelgänger doesn’t believe in the real existence of creatures independent of our egos. Isn’t it possible that in our virtual world, Romand held no deep conviction that others are real and cannot be canceled simply by means of a few shotgun blasts? We now have cleaner tools for canceling others.
The exemplary embodiment of Carrère’s essayistic technique is his recent book Yoga. I consumed it in two audio versions, one in French and one in English translation. It covers the four-year period in which the author first sets out to write a “small upbeat book on meditation” and to that end enrolls in a 10-day isolation course of silent practice and concentration. Midway, the narration goes off the tracks. Carrère is unexpectedly pulled out of his meditation retreat when a close friend is murdered in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. He ricochets into a bipolar crisis. He is admitted, willingly, into a psychiatric hospital where drugs relieve his suffering and electroshock therapy eventually gets him back on his feet.
Finally, he finds himself on the Greek island of Leros where he engages with the teenage migrant guys who are held there. They receive classroom instruction from an odd but admirable American academic named Frederica. Nothing about this is overemphasized in Yoga, no moral extracted and preached. Yet it seems to me that his final arrival among the companionable young migrants from Afghanistan is a fitting resting point for a narrative that alternates between the mental serenity of meditation, the agonizing self-absorption of mental illness, and the compassionate involvement in refugee work. In the terms of Badiou, Western societies are dissolving unities, non-existent ones, confronting the infinite multiplicities of a world in flux and flight. This is the background of the society in which Carrère seeks success and attention, vainly trying to reassure himself with his own image in a broken and distorted mirror. Meditation had held out the hope of calming his insatiable ego. The quasi-family of Frederica’s instructional class which Carrère assists is a freely formed ad hoc association, a “count-as-one” (to adopt the term of Badiou’s transfinite mathematics).
Form follows experienced reality in the inventive picaresque narrative arc of Carrère’s Yoga. It progresses almost at random but comes up face to face with the axis of our contemporary world’s historical turning. The world is turning into a single great migration in which everyone—meaning the Badiouvian every one—is either seeking one’s self or in flight. Meditation had promised Carrère an escape from that hell of self and others. The island of detained migrants is a place where those who belong nowhere belong to one another, arguably an appropriate Patmos for an event of universal significance.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 