In “Le Festin nu”, William Burroughs had, without knowing it, anticipated the communication misadventures of Bruno Le Maire. In the passage that we quote below, an “ass” gains voice and gradually takes the upper hand over its owner. Isn’t this what happens to the Minister of Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty? As we know, in his latest novel, “American Fugue”, Le Maire describes “the brown bulge of the anus” a woman’s “expanded like never before”. The scene was intended to be erotic and realistic. In the incandescence of the social crisis and the revolt against the pension reform, it reads like an involuntarily carnivalesque fable.
This brown woman’s anus has become, so to speak, that of its creator, Bruno Le Maire: we can no longer speak of one without speaking of the other. This anus, by dint of talking, ends up talking itself. It’s an indiscreet anus, as Diderot, the author of “Bijoux indiscrets”, would say, where a genius named Cucufa has a magic ring that has the power to make jewels, that is to say, vaginas, speak.
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“At the ministry, strange atmosphere”: the Journal of Bruno Le Maire
In recent days, at the time of his ” France’s new stability program », Bruno Le Maire, as in a nightmare by William Burroughs, sees himself overwhelmed, subverted, erased, devoured by his anus.
A cannibalistic anus.
A Gallic and refractory anus.
An anus more sonorous, more dizzying than a hundred thousand pots.
An anus more vandal and more Molotov than a hundred thousand black blocks.
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An AAA anus, the credit rating agencies would say.
Beyond his personal case, we can see in this French charivari as a parable on the vicissitudes of political communication: since the adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the ass, ennobled by Rabelais, is a metaphor: it is the incarnation of the people at war against the elite, power, authority, or, as the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) put it, the organ of “unofficial popular truth”, the revenge of the bottom against the top: “The material and corporeal ‘low’ asserts itself in a demystifying role. » To the elements of language and verbiage of governments, to lies and false promises, to “whatever the crap”, the anus-people, armed with a liberating, punitive and laughing scatology, opposes its “elements”. Elements of engluage, of engadouillage. A kind of “cacarante-nine-three”. But William Burroughs will tell you that a thousand times better. Excerpt from “Festin nu”, in the translation by Eric Kahane:
“I never told you the story of the guy who trained his asshole to talk?” (…) I have never heard anything so strange… This ass had a kind of visceral low frequency (…) This guy was doing fairs and markets, you follow me, and at the beginning it was a number of ventriloquist, of a new kind, but nothing more. Funny as anything, by the way. There was a scene in medieval costume called “The Green Hole” which was to roll on the ground, I tell you. I don’t remember very well but it was full of gags galore. Of the kind : “Hey down there, are you still there? I need you to sit down!” And her ass replied: “Don’t piss me off, I have to go to the hole.”
“But after a while the ass started talking about its own ‘chief’, no more need to be held out to it. The guy came on stage without having prepared anything, he threw some joke and his ass grabbed it on the fly and threw it back in the face (…)
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Little by little, his ass changed, some sort of little teeth sprouted from him, like badly filed hooks, and he demanded to eat. The first few days, the guy thought it was funny and he put on a gastronomic number… But the asshole took it seriously, he nibbled at an opening in the bottom of the guy’s panties to make speeches and demanded the equality of rights… “
In the end, the “type” sees his own mouth gradually sealing up. A kind of translucent gelatin, “a bit like tadpole flesh”, prevents him from opening it, from speaking, from “dialogue”. « QWhat was our method? It’s the same as the one I apply in all circumstances, dialogue, more dialogue and always dialogue”, likes to say the Mayor. This troufignolisation of the truth is today becoming inaudible.
Histrionism and debacle, this is the moral of this American fable with its deliciously carnivalesque buffoonery: too often and, all the more so, in periods of insurrection, when the politician speaks, we no longer hear, alas, that his “asshole”, seems to say Burroughs to our Minister of Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty. Or to put it like Rabelais, the most gloriously and continuously French of the French: “A bastard always abounds in shit”“Gargantua”, chapter IX.
