Philip Roth en entrevue: "I don't smile"

Il faut que je lise plus fréquemment le Guardian; après cette super belle entrevue avec Myazaki dont je vous avais parlée, en voici une autre, très solide, avec Philip Roth. Je vous ai causé de Monsieur Rothil y a une couple de mois . Mais après avoir lu son entrevue je ne lui dirai pas que je cause de lui et de mes autres lectures, car s'il n'en tenait qu'à lui on arrêterait de parler de littérature et on s'en tiendrait aux livres (pas fou):

I tell him that interviewing him can be extremely difficult - like climbing an iceberg without clothes on.

"Well, I wasn't put on this earth to make your life easy. Ha!" His laughter is like a proclamation - no smile, just "Ha!"

"Maybe we shouldn't be talking about literature at all," I say.

"Ha, ha," he says. "Now you're talking! I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk. As soon as you generalise, you are in a completely different universe than that of literature, and there's no bridge between the two."

Quels sont les plus grands moteurs de la littérature? Vous pourriez en dénombrer plusieurs, mais je gage qu'en haut de toutes les listes on retrouvera la mort et le sexe, Roth nous sort quelques lignes à haut indice d'octane:

"Are you satisfied with your life?" I ask.

"Eight years ago I attended a memorial ceremony for an author," he says. "An incredible man full of life and humour, curiosity. He worked for a magazine here in New York. He had girlfriends, mistresses. And at this memorial ceremony there were all these women. Of all ages. And they all cried and left the room, because they couldn't stand it. That was the greatest tribute ..."

"What will the women do at your funeral?"

"If they even show up ... they will probably be screaming at the casket." He looks out of the window, across the buildings of midtown. "You know, passion doesn't change with age, but you change - you become older. The thirst for women becomes more poignant. And there is a power in the pathos of sex that it didn't have before. The pathos of the female body becomes more insistent. The sexual passion is always deep, but it becomes deeper."

"You said that you're afraid of dying. You're 72 years old. What are you afraid of?"

He looks at me. "Oblivion. Of not being alive, quite simply, of not feeling life, not smelling it. But the difference between today and the fear of dying I had when I was 12, is that now I have a kind of resignation towards reality. It no longer feels like a great injustice that I have to die."

(via snarkmarket)