“I’ll tell you, in reality literature can do nothing
,” writes Nicolas Mathieu on the first page of his new book.
It is a scholarly coquetry that dates back to ancient times.
“You will find many more things in the forest than in books, the trees and stones will teach you more
,” wrote Saint Bernard in the 12th century, when the abbey of Clairvaux had a vast library and a scriptorium set up by the Burgundian monk whose Complete Works number 30 volumes.
“Literature is useless.
If it served any purpose, the leftist scum who monopolized the intellectual debate throughout the 20th century could not even exist
,” observed Michel Houellebecq in the
NRF
in 2002.
To discover
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The clever paradox with which
Open Heaven
opens is more stimulating than one might think.
Because if literature is deprived of power over the world, it is deprived neither of being nor of saying what is happening in the writer at the moment...
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