"A maker of witticisms, a bad character", Pascal
said. I don't
know. Maybe the
author is a victim of what Salinger says in the
Catcher: when you do something very well, after a while, if you are
not careful, you start to show off. And then you are not very good any more.
I read Michaela's phrase "To walk on the
sea you need either faith or boots" and I wonder how that phrase
influences or could influence or has any meaning at all inJean's life. He
will search until the end, he will promise until the end, like an ancient
hero he will deny a miserable fate, so that, what I see here is not
Platonic irony, neither a zen-like gesture (she shouldn't have contrasted
faith and boots, which is, at least here, misleading), nor, surely, an
angel's caress. By transmuting a
biblical fact into a quasi-zen witticism, I think that Mr. Lefévre just
continues to try
to bring fresh life to traditional symbols, to discover a passion long
forgotten by professional theology, to treat the Western history like what
it is, like his own personal story. My impression,
for the moment is, that, even when witticism is not the problem - which is
very often, and beyond the aesthetic annoyance it causes, as the
above example shows - the mismatch between an angel and a zen master results, more or less, to none of them being
real, so that what should be fresh life becomes a pointless intellectual
pirouette.
We would
wrong the book and ourselves if we stayed to Mr. Lefévre's weaknesses as to
an author's weaknesses. A
discussion pointing beyond judgment might have a meaning, as far
as a shared living and experience exists and understanding is able to imply
it. Such a discussion, although based on the text, is not interested in what
has been done, but in what can be done beyond writing or reading.
I wonder what the consciousness of the book would be like
if it managed to see death clearly in one more, crucial, way which it now
entirely misses: the simple sorrow of
missing someone that you love.
