The Literary Magazine July-August 2007: The silly thing, a modern invention

A stupid history
By Jean-Louis Hoots

Let us not rock the reader d’illusions: the silly thing does not leave not grown this file. Qu’il s’agisse of literature, of philosophy or of policy, it appears equal to itself. Monster afflicting, underhand, relentless, which binds the spirits and involves them towards the abyssals zone. The reign of the silly thing starts with the death of God and his angels, when l’Histoire and l’opinion public s’emparent world. Exit l’idiot and the insane one. Place at the animals and rough, with remained and stupid, with the imbeciles of the plains and the cretins of the mountains.

This n’est not a return towards the Middle Ages but well a modern diving in l’âge, of which Tocqueville was the first to have a presentiment of the dangers. The democratic capacity, prophesied it, "does not tyrannize, it obstructs, it compresses, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and it reduces finally each nation to n’être more qu’un d’animaux shy persons and industrial herd whose government is the shepherd". All is in order so that the silly thing triumphs and becomes, crystallized in its torpors, its tricks and its buffoonery, l’obsession of the novelists. Flaubert made his preferred enemy of it, and sought to muzzle it "We suffer only d’une thing: the Silly thing, entrusted it to George Sand. But it is formidable and universal "the Such white monster continued by Achab, the Animal, qu’il had tracked through its œuvre whole, escaped to him. The Dictionary of the generally accepted ideas was to be used as common grave to all the conneries given birth to by ḻhumanity. Mow. This work d’ensevelissement remained unfinished, as if the silly thing were a subject too vast and proliferating to be able to be thus contained. D’autres, after Flaubert, dreamed d’un catalogues which would garner all ineptitudes, remarks useless and dilatory, stupid things and boobs encumbering this low world. Titanic ambition, so much the tricks and the faces of the silly thing are multiple. It proceeds by metastases, plays of mirror, put in abyme. It is prodigiously talkative, and quasi inexhaustible when it speaks d’elle-même. Very like televisual nothing, which proceeds by the same set of repetitions and narcissistic assemblies to carry out the greatest number to l’abrutissement, the silly thing likes s’autocélébrer. "In the large idiot, all is good", assene l’un anonymous imbeciles whose Jean-Marie Gourio s’est makes the faithful rapporteur in her Short of counter. And still: "When you have a life of idiot, is not necessary especially to be intelligent, you suffer more" Or: "connery, c’est that the immersed part of l’iceberg. Below, one does not see what you think "One would like to quote, jusqu’à more thirst, because the silly thing thus ingurgitée by small glasses is like the song of the sirens, it fascine and petrifies. Thus let us let spread out it its sufficiency in a long procession of matter of counters, commonplaces, well-worn jokes. And fault of being able to make it burst, let us take the party d’en to laugh.

::source http://www.magazine-litteraire.com/