For some time I have been looking at my library with increasing concern. From day to day, it seems to me to be as much an outlaw as the last bastion of creative freedom. My library respects nothing, neither melanin, nor the sexes, nor propriety: the Marquis de Sade rubs shoulders with the Bible, a few centimeters from the adorable monster Françoise Sagan, not far from Ian McEwan in whose pages all the sinister human ambiguity unfolds unhindered, from euthanasia in the name of (vengeful) good toamsterdam to incest in The Cement Gardenthrough the innocence of a child who sends an innocent person to prison in Atonement, and Salman Rushdie, every page of which could be blacklisted. Tova Reich and her squeaky My Holocaust walks with Aharon Appelfeld and Isaac Bashevis Singer, while the immense Philip Roth chats with the massif Beauty of the Lord that we no longer forgive Albert Cohen.
In my library there are crimes, incests, pedophiles, rapists, bastards, Nazis, regretful men and harsh women, evil children and old men capable of killing – and even some good humans . In my library, there is humanity in shambles, and when I say humanity, I mean all humanity, from the worst to the least bad, from the grandiose and the stinky, from the violent and the tender sometimes. My library refuses hierarchies and especially to turn a blind eye to ugliness, prohibitions, taboos, whispers. My library is a magnificent example of what is most beautiful in man: the imagination which liberates, which satisfies, which grows. Sometimes I come to say to myself that fortunately Pierre Louÿs is only known to a few bibliophiles, otherwise all his work would be banned, and people would come to reproach him with hysteria for what he has never done other than by writes it. John Irving and his cohort of whores, blind men, dwarfs, incest, mature women who sleep with an almost adult – who reminds him of his dead sons -, his transsexual fathers, his overly beautiful mothers, his healthy obsessions could soon to be sold under the cloak at the Barbès metro station.
I can’t get over it so I’ll come back to it. Petitions and complaints are linked against Bastien Vivès. I admit I don’t know the guy who hasn’t committed any crime, and I don’t care: what interests me are his works. Small idiot or big mouth, all this concerns only his friends, his intimates, me, I only see what I read. Céline was an odious anti-Semite, that doesn’t prevent me from reading him, what matters is knowing that he is an odious anti-Semite. Virginia Woolf was also an incorrigible anti-Semite, that does not prevent a cohort of feminists from claiming it – in the forefront of which the Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux who shares with the Englishwoman a certain detestable tendency to anti-Semitism barely hidden behind left-wing parlor anti-Zionism.
If Bastien Vivès committed a crime through his comic books by representing the taboo of incest or pedophilia, if he questioned fantasies, made people laugh with pornography, because he could have influence the passage to the act in the real world, or worse, give birth to pedophile “vocations”, then we must ban any representation of murders, store Agatha Christie in the renewed hell of libraries, censor all police series, all historical films that tell of mass murders for fear of “giving the wrong ideas”. For the distracted, I remind you that Hitler painted in (very) bad watercolors and not in bloody gore, and that, as a vegetarian, he wept bitterly in front of slaughterhouses. The argument of acting out through art is so stupid that it forgets that pedophiles revel in photos of adorable children posted on social networks, more than sensual representations of a child in a museum or a poisonous tale.
In the United States, Texas, the comic book adaptation of Log by Anne Frank but also Maus of Art Spiegelman are banned for images deemed offensive. In Missouri, it’s the Batman by Sean Murphy that we can no longer leaf through because of trauma. Harper Lee and his masterpiece Took no mockingbird and Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the wind) are banned in many schools. Hoping for a society rid of its criminals by censoring its artists amounts to creating a sanitized world of mindless people who, for sure, will come to compensate by gouging out their mother’s eyes.
