(Login adurand) Forum Owner Posted Apr 17, 2007 11:00 AM
I translated into English the brief excerpt below from an interview I conducted with Frédéric Beigbeder in Paris in December 2006. The integral interview will be published, along with several essays on Beigbeder's works and a Beigbeder's original text, in 2008 by Rodopi in a volume I am currently editing.
A-P Durand
Naomi Mandel: Had you read Jean Baudrillard's "Spirit of Terrorism" before writing "Windows on the World"? Did Baudrillard influenced you? Do you see similarities between his texts and your novel?
Frederic Beigbeder:
I like a lot all Naomis : Naomi Campbell, Naomi Watts and now this Naomi, and Naomi Klein who wrote a great essay entitled « No Logo ».
No, I did not read Baudrillard’s "Spirit of Terrorism" but I read many others, including "America", I like Baudrillard a lot. I think that "Cool Memories" is a great diary. On terrorism, I had read articles published in the French press. I think that the text Naomi Mandel’s is referring to is probably a collection of essays. So it is possible that I read excerpts here and there. In any case, I believe it is a true influence because I find interesting the taste for paradox of someone who says that the war in Irak did not happen. Baudrillard’s theory is that everything is a simulacrum but try to explain to someone who dies burnt alive in the World Trade Center that terrorism is a simulacrum, it’s difficult. What is true, however, is that there is a derealization of the event, that’s for sure, that’s where my idea of writing a fiction on that topic came from: to enter in the real. What is 9/11? It’s a building which explodes and we see objects, we see a plane which are destroyed. We do not see human beings - except on a few very rare images of jumpers but other than that we do not see the human beings - and that’s what makes it that we are into Baudrillard after all, the fact that we see artifacts burning, exploding. It is somewhat beautiful. In fact, it looks like a Hollywood movie, it looks like special effects. Consequently, we do not suffer. My goal in writing a novel taking place inside this bawl of fire was to suffer, to feel something, in the end it was to humanize, to return something human inside that simulacrum. Perhaps, this is where Baudrillard and me we complete each other. We need someone to denounce the simulacrum but we also need someone to humanize it. And that is the novelist’s role.
A-P Durand: although it is, as you mention it in the novel when you talk about the Paul Virilio’s exhibit in Paris, at the risk of indulging into voyeurism and even to end up liking this kind of images.
Of course, but it is important to face this part of inhumanity that persists inside the humanity. All the witnesses of the attacks or those who saw them on television admit that there is a beauty in this horror, there is a fascination, that we cannot take our eyes away. The same way one likes to watch horror movies, there is an attraction for violence, that’s for sure, especially in a place completely protected and sanitized like New York City. That’s even more brutal in that context. I would not say like Stockhausen that 9/11 is a work of art but it is certain that Virilio’s exhibit, just like Ballard’s novels ("Crash", "The Atrocity Exhibition") where he describes car accidents, the pleasurable sensation of a carbonized corpse, are provocations similar to Warhol when he paints the electrical chair. This chocks us and attracts us at the same time. It is true that, on some levels, "Windows on the World" is an unbearably obscene novel. There is for example a sex scene in the French version that the American publisher cut off. It is unlikely that the victims of 9/11 violently sodomized each other in the WTC offices before dying. Even if it is true that during the periods immediately following a terrorist act, in the days immediately following an attack or bombings, in Israel for example where I have friends, I know very well that when there is a terrorist attack, the following days, there is an aphrodisiac effect. The danger’s proximity inspires a certain hedonism.
A-P Durand : Another thing that Anglo-Saxons publishers asked you to remove from the French original is the reference to owing to the victims of the Windows on the World the same kind of respect, duty of memory, we owe to the victims who were gazed in Auschwitz.
Yes indeed, I did not understand why one refuses to make the comparison, especially since it is not an identification, I am not saying that Auschwitz and 9/11 are the same thing. I am only saying that the people who died in that restaurant, were gazed, because most of them died of suffocation after breathing toxic emanations. Therefore, they had the same experience that people who were in a gas chamber. This is why they were fighting to open the windows and jump. Corpses piled up close to emergency exits were found exactly like in Auschwitz’s gas chambers. We now know that people were piled up because they were trying to find air. If it is chocking people, well, it is because it IS chocking, inevitably. My role is not to embellish reality.