Lydie Salvayre: "What is unbearable to me are the false virtuous people who give moral lessons"

With

, Lydie Salvayre signs a text halfway between a treatise and a pamphlet, which holds up a mirror – grimacing – to an era rewarding exposure, even self-exhibition;

where success, which has become the measure of everything, asserts itself as a universal religion.

While brushing the portraits of the "bookstagramer" with millions of subscribers, of the "influential man" or even of the different specimens of writers that can be observed today, she borrows both from moralists and from the textbook of personal development to deliver, in an ironic mode, the keys to literary, artistic and social success in the 20th century.

Interview.

In video, Taubira moved by reading a passage from her book on November 13

Lady Figaro.

– Would you say that your essay is inhabited by a form of fury?

I was angry, and for me anger is driving force.

She is the source of many of my books - "Sing, O Muse, the wrath of Achilles...", as it says in

.

I was angry to see talented people ignored at the expense of others whose success was perceived to be due to market construction.

Angry to see people fooled by mediocre badges extolled by advertising and the cult of appearance.

Then I went on the Net to see if there were advice sites for success in life.

They were innumerable and I saw in them the symptom of a time when success had become the value of values, with all that that implies of violence, lies, base manoeuvres, since success is placed above above all and that the means employed do not matter.

And, in the background, I asked myself the question of what it was like to succeed in life.

Is it really practicing "show off and bragging",

, who lamented that they had become the values ​​of his time?

I had in mind the satirical tradition which began among the Greeks with Theophrastus, and continued with Horace, Juvenal, Petronius, Rabelais, Swift - from whom I stole the title, since he himself wrote An

– and La Bruyère, which I adore.

These authors are moralists and not moralizers: it is not a question of catechizing or brandishing a vigilante word but of taking a step back and questioning what success hides, on what it is based.

Taking the example of these writers, I thought I would make an inventory of the best ways to achieve this.

I had fun mixing in references to personal development manuals, which since the famous

, by Dale Carnegie, abound today until they are devoted to entire shelves – “How to become an infectious optimist” , “How to overcome your fears”, “How to achieve your goals”…

I thought that our beautiful sensitivity, which today we would call sentimentality, was disappearing in favor of performance, mastery, self-praise

Lydie Salvayre

Doesn't this

I hadn't made the connection, but we are sometimes blind to what we write.

There is indeed in these two books a paradoxical eulogy, a practice of the antiphrase and an address, to Cervantes in

, and to the candidates for success in this

.

As well as a celebration of the same ideals.

I am happy to have ended this book with a sentence from Proust: “Real books should be the children not of broad daylight and conversation but of obscurity and silence.”

I thought that our fine sensitivity, which today we would call sentimentality, was in the process of disappearing in favor of performance, mastery, self-praise.

And I was afraid that this would be detrimental to literature as well.

When I see books by talent show singers or reality TV stars promoted on television, when everything seems to be reduced to the visible, to glitter, when it seems to me that is the vocation of literature than going to see, precisely, behind appearances...

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What has changed compared to, say, the time

Alas, we read La Bruyère, Balzac or Jelinek, and we see everywhere the same taste for success, the same appetite for glory at a low price, the same immense vanity – and little virtue.

And then, what is unbearable to me above all, are the false virtuous people who give themselves the right to give moral lessons to increase their compassionate capital, speaking in the name of all the victims, of all those who are in punishment, to better profit from a just cause.

In Balzac's time, at least, we were not so aware of all the suffering minorities!

And, of course, we didn't have social networks, which increase the possibility of showing off.

“Show up, show up, show up!”

: such seems to be the motto of our time, accompanied by an incredible passion for the like, that is to say for

We find in this book the mixture of tones and registers of language that you also like in your novels…

I appreciate in the manifesto its lapidary, collected, piquant character, which does not bother with contortions.

The longer it goes, the more I like biting books.

Lydie Salvayre

My birth in a Spanish family that jabbered French gave me a taste for the baroque and mixed registers, as one finds in Cervantes, Shakespeare or Quevedo, a great writer of the 17th century who can practice the most sublime language while intertwining the coarsest strokes.

He thus wrote a text whose title was translated by: "Heurs et Malheurs du trou du cul"... What was for me a reason for shame - to speak in spite of myself a language punctuated with misunderstood, faulty expressions - is become a honey and a way to claim my origins.

There is in Spain – we see it today with Rodrigo García and Angelica Liddell – a taste for vulgarity that Picasso had noted and which seems to have been curbed in France by classicism.

Rabelais marvelously blends the most diverse registers,

then come the classics, who have at heart to live up to the royal prestige and make sure to evacuate everything that touches on popular defilement.

And this is how a French cannon was born, from which fortunately Céline or Queneau derogate...

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Through this false praise of a literature without transgression or stomach, did you have the idea of ​​writing a literary manifesto?

Rabelais said that there were those who wrote with frozen words and those who wrote with jokes.

We don't really know what that means, but we see right away that it's above all a question of not complying with norms and rules in order to break taboos and received ideas - and laugh a little under your breath, too. … I appreciate in the manifesto its lapidary, compact, piquant character, which does not bother with contortions.

The longer it goes, the more I like biting books.

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Does this parody manual also have a political dimension?

I would say that my journey as a class defector, or transclass, made me all the more sensitive to ill-gotten successes, linked to the fact of being born into a prestigious family, having money, power , network or influence.

While others have neither the codes, nor the culture, nor the knowledge of the rules to follow to achieve... And I was led to reflect on what meritocracy really meant, which is perhaps not than a mask of virtue placed on an uninhibited Darwinism.