“You are reactionary, that's good. All great writers are reactionaries. Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky: only reactionaries”
, Houellebecq has Philippe Sollers say in his novel
Les Particules elementaires
.
He took up here a tropism already spotted by Albert Thibaudet, a literary critic from the beginning of the 20th century, who affirmed that French political life was sinistrogyrous (new political ideas always emerging on the left) while literary life was dextrogyrous.
In France, politicians are on the left and writers on the right.
One could explain this summary sharing of the waters by a different anthropology, a different temperament.
On the right, the taste for the particular, for individual destinies, the Stendhalian cavalcade, anthropological pessimism, attachment to the tragedy of the human condition, ingredients of a good novel.
On the left, the taste for the collective, for abstract causes and beautiful principles (and we have known since Gide that
“it is with…
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