Frédéric Beigbeder’s new book is bad – but also wonderful – culture

In Germany, Frédéric Beigbeder’s novels are often viewed with a lemon-sour grin. Perhaps because this writer is also in his books who the German public has long perceived him to be: a bourgeois bohemian with a claim to represent the intellectual elite of his country and at the same time connection to the international drug market. Beigbeder’s novels are about, he would like, and this is how his critics see it, of Beigbeder; his daily champagne bath, his erotic raids in the eleventh arrondissement and playing with political and moral obligations – every sentence a cork squirting away, every television appearance the penultimate relaxation of a cynic who has grown rich and grown in the routines of the public.

Because Beigbeder is all of this and at the same time seems disgusted by it all, his novels are not what is commonly teeming at literary festivals: those picked up by the hill of moral infallibility critical inventory of the now and here, written by authors who whisper to the world’s conscience about what is supposedly “sayable”, but who say everything that can be said in a padded, almost illegible language of care. Beigbeder’s new novel is that everyone who finds this man so horrible can click their hearts right away: a really bad novel.

The thing has no clever plot, it is a cardboard house without a support beam, and its narrative technique cannot be represented with any technical term. And yet it is also a wonderful book. With “The man who wept with laughter”, Beigbeder presented a, no, definitely not a satire, but an indictment against our media public; a linguistically powerful – yes, that works, even if it is poorly told – panorama and at the same time a caricature of a hysterical present, just in a funny way. Everyone is ridiculed, declared a child molester for fun or, if he is a politician, a corrupt or money-hungry sack.

Are Villiers de L’Isle-Adam and Théophile Gaultier still suitable as antidotes to Instagram and Twitter terror?

Beigbeder’s voice in the novel is again Octave Parango, whom his readers know from the novel “39.90”. Octave is now in his mid-fifties, has lived in advertising and fashion, and has kept himself happy with cocaine and sex. Now he speaks a weekly humor column for France Public, which is in the French reality France Inter is called and is a public broadcaster. In French reality, clowns have meanwhile gained the authority to interpret politics, culture and morals – they also exist in enlightened France, which is significantly higher than Germany’s: the jokers of public law who have found out that you Wit is impregnated against any contradiction.

They have made use of “the rule of the LOL”, which, writes Beigebder, “is above character assassination”. It doesn’t matter whether an actor is accused of abuse for fun or Macron is said to be wearing suits for 10,000 euros, which he doesn’t. Nothing has to be right, the main thing is that it’s funny. Mercy is the calling card of those jokers who only take a break when they have finished with the person who has made a mistake. The linguistic frenzy with which Beigbeder accompanied his husband through this epoch of media unleashing is the only but highly efficient engine of the text. Beigbeder’s poetics unfold under the billing bar of French cultural history. The decadence of the 19th century, with its anti-social habitus, was the reaction to the technology of the industrial age. But are Villiers de L’Isle-Adam and Théophile Gaultier still useful as an antidote to Instagram and Twitter terror when a resilient poet like Michel Houellebecq has to be protected from moral guerrillas?

What can the subject of a novel offer besides a rancid past and a present in which one has to defend the residual dignity against one’s own, rather repulsive, greed for old age and the gradual humiliation by the younger ones? Actually, for this Octave, the Saturnalia of the eighties and nineties were, looking backwards, early exercises in the humiliation that now shadowed the mid-fifties through the nights of the early twenties of this century: “I am a white, straight man, yes, me I’m a bunch of shit who thinks it’s God, I want to get all women laid, even though the patriarchy is about to leave. ” With the practiced techniques of initiation, Octave hardly gets any further, because “the #Metoo movement has considerably extended the span between encounter and penetration”.

Beigbeder’s book is the literary text accompanying a cultural and national molt

Despite the celebration of the excess with the revolting drug ketamine and the dogged eulogy for the brainless cock as the final stimulant of self-awareness, Beigbeder’s novel is the almost touching confession of a culturally conservative writer. It is not indifferent to him that the language degenerates into a kind of SMS root code. The rule of the emojis, a secondary dictatorship of humor, is the departure from all grace and intellectual claim to reality. One chapter is written almost entirely in emojis. Also the famous first sentence from Proust’s “Recherche”. One suspects that nothing good will come of it: just a watch and a bed. But there is still a fearful opponent even for the media and culture industry, which has long since run empty and is embalmed with cynicism and sometimes fees. These are the yellow vests, whose here silent, there brutal protest drives the breath of 1789 into the country.

They not only occupy the monuments of representative France. In front of the burlesque and vulgar Caca’s Club, where Octave and his friends used to soak their shirts at foam parties, the police water cannons are now aimed at protesters demanding an increase in the minimum wage. They say. But actually nobody in the Parisian Bobo bubble really knows exactly what they actually want. Octave, who this time resembles his creator Beigbeder even more than in previous books, at least suspects: They want revenge on at least two centuries of state arrogance and feudal elite politics. Frédéric Beigbeder is one of the most astute intellectuals in France, a country that is about to come to terms with itself and its elites. The sexual assaults committed by Gabriel Matzneff and Bernard Kouchner have been described in novels and discussed on literary talk shows; Their deeds are no longer, as they used to be, discreetly concealed as a gentlemen’s agreement or glorified as a customary libertinage. Beigbeder’s book is also a product of this radical reckoning. It is the literary text accompanying a cultural and national molt.

The novel begins with a self-inflicted, possibly calculated embarrassment: Octave comes into the studio unprepared, stutters crazy stuff and is fired. It ends with a utopia, namely with the usual rescue program of the rich and weary of Paris: Octave returns to the quiet of the provinces. There, where – and whoever believes it will be really blessed – even fucked-up old men are allowed to take off their smiley masks.