This is the last in a series of essays about changing one’s mind about Éric Rohmer. The first is here.
I moved to London to be able to fall in love. But I also moved to London to become a writer; and I have spent most of the last two years trying to work out how to see these as not opposed. I wrote last week of having felt taken to task by Sabine in The Good Marriage, trying to force Fate’s hand. But I also felt taken to task by the lawyer she pursues, who gets rid of her by giving a speech about how his career comes first; and by Magali in The Tale of Autumn, also played by Béatrice Romand, who uses her work as a way to not have to open herself to the risks involved in trying to find a partner:
Over the summer before watching The Good Marriage I had, as I wrote about last week, been in a relationship that I’d pulled out of. I pulled out of it because I felt trapped within my type, doomed to play a particular role – which, in pulling out of it, I was fulfilling. But I also couldn’t picture a way of continuing to see someone and being able to work at the same time. The university teaching term was about to begin, eight weeks so intense that I had often found it hard to make any social plans at all. And that year I had decided that on top of the teaching I was going to try to start writing professionally.
Writing thus became a kind of moral problem. It was something I wanted to do, and wanted quite deeply; much more, I realised, than I had ever wanted the job of an academic. But it was also something incompatible with the thing I saw as necessary to be in any way morally flourishing, which is being open to others. To choose to write felt wicked. Or at least felt as though it ought to feel wicked. In fact, it felt right. So the work of the last two years has been to find a way to a moral acceptance of writing.
One way I had tried to do this in the past was to write to deadlines set by other people, whether editors, conferences, my PhD supervisor. At one point I was editing a magazine and the person giving me the deadline was me, commissioning myself under a pseudonym to fill a gap in the next issue. But the deadline still existed externally in some cosmic sense, in the projected expectations of the very small readership for regular content. The deadline has (for me) two functions. One is to curb perfectionism, which I’ll come on to. The other is to make the writing seem necessary, or rather, to make the necessity of the writing come from without and not within – a task. Perhaps the world doesn’t need an essay on theory of mind as explored in the novels of Barbara Pym. But for whatever reason of their own someone has commissioned you to write one, and so you do it. No matter that the idea was yours in the first place.
Something I have managed to do since moving to London has been to shake myself free of this need to see writing as a duty or a service I am performing for a specific other, whom I can imagine sitting waiting, looking anxiously at the calendar. Perhaps too much so. There is a piece of writing I promised someone now nearly eighteen months ago and haven’t delivered – for complicated reasons, but one being that I have got a taste for pursuing a project that I have set the terms of, that is entirely the thing I have chosen to write.
In the first instance this was a novel. Once I had a draft of that I wanted to start something new. When I first thought of writing an essay on Rohmer, it was as a brief pause from ‘creative’ writing. It then became the thing I had to get done before I could start the next big project. But then, as I planned it, I found that it was a big project, or at least a medium-sized one. I felt a kind of despair at the time it would take to write a book that would, like the novel, remain unpublished. But then I remembered the Substack which I had signed up for in the autumn of 2021 as a way to mark this shift of the centre of my sense of professional identity from academia to writing. I had so far used it to publish a review I had entered into a competition that I then couldn’t publish elsewhere, a piece of memoir that I wrote because I had felt a duty to, and a proposal for a book I would never write, as well as two reviews I had written specifically for Substack, one of which took something like six weeks to prepare, which felt an unsustainable way of approaching the form.
Sam Kriss wrote this week against Substack and I agree with most of what he says there in principle. But I never had a blog when I was younger, nor Livejournal or Tumblr or even, really, Twitter. The possibility of writing something and being able to press publish (or send now or whatever the Substack button says) without sitting around waiting for weeks or months or years is still novel. And terrifying, of course. Unlike Sam, I do have editors – that is, a friend who has patiently vetted most of these posts for objectionableness or unclarity. Last week he was ill, as was the other friend whose hand I force to hold mine in these situations. For the first time: the true blogging experience. It was worse, as an experience, than when I had been able to discuss the post beforehand. I don’t know if it reads less well – I certainly think I’m less brave when I don’t have encouragement. But it was probably good to have done it.
I don’t think getting friends to vet things is a bad thing. I do this for them too and I enjoy it. And with quite a lot of writing, including some things I have been asked to review, my first feeling is, why did your friends not stop you? Did no one read this in advance – not just the editors at the publisher or magazine, who don’t necessarily have your best interests at heart, but your friends, who care about you looking stupid – being wrong – in public? Some writers are wilful and some friends are indulgent. But it has always seemed to me the job of a friend to hold their friends back. Or else to get them not to pull their punches. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing truthfully.
My main hand-holder thinks I am too afraid of being wrong. That having people messaging you to say you are wrong is the point of posting. But there is being wrong and being wrong. I don’t write to be agreed with, necessarily, although I certainly don’t write to be disagreed with, either. More on this later. But what I don’t want is to have misjudged my aim, or misidentified my target. I want to have correctly described a problem, even if my solution to or even explanation of the problem isn’t one everyone agrees with. If someone were to read this series and not recognise anything in my presentation of the films of Éric Rohmer or the social world of elite-educated left-wing London (and Oxford, and the provinces) then I would have failed.
Another way I don’t want to be wrong is to have misjudged the reader. I sometimes find the process of writing sort of mad. You’re sitting there, entirely alone, obsessed with your own thoughts, trying to work out a way to get them in order, which in my case is often literally about what order they come in, the path I can find through them that makes them magically line up, like iron filings drawn by a magnet. And yet as you do this you somehow are also, without being aware of it, trying to make it comprehensible to someone else who has not yet had any of the thoughts, and needs an introduction to them. And this stuff comes as if by instinct, if not always well. To write at all seems to involve imagining an other that one is writing for.
Perhaps this is not the case for everyone. And as I say, it doesn’t always go well. What editing is about is becoming that other, marking the points at which the way one is addressed by the text feels wrong: because one is imagined to know more than one does, or less; because one is assumed to take a certain position, which one doesn’t; because too much or too little is being demanded of one in terms of following the thread of the text; or, perhaps most wrong of all, because one feels one is no longer in fact being addressed.
You can’t please everyone. But what you can’t do is just please yourself. And good writing, if it is anything, is something that somehow, magically, aligns the self-pleasing and relief that writing brings the writer with the pleasure of the reader – a pleasure that may not feel like pleasure at all because it could be the deep discomfort of having one’s mind changed. At the beginning of the summer I had a ‘bit’ about a theory of the sext. Not all of it is relevant here. But writing, at least as I see it, and acknowledging the ahistoricity of what follows, is erotic. When it is really happening it is a way of offering oneself up to another, even if that other is just the idea of the other. It is letting one’s thoughts and fingers be taken over by the needs and desires of another, a blending of two consciousnesses. It’s miraculous that we know how to do it, but also not at all – it is human.
*
The point of posting is to get people to fall in love with you, I said to my friend. But that’s not quite it. I sometimes imagine that what I want is someone who has read things I have written to write to me confessing their love. But if that ever happened, it would be unpleasant. I would feel I could not possibly live up to my writing – that the person they thought of as me was not me. The best writers do not possess, in person, the clarity and grace that they achieve in their writing. As I say, there is something miraculous to how writing comes about, and one of these miracles is the way that writing can transcend the moral limitations of the person doing it. Obviously it goes the other way too. Unclear writing is not a mark of moral failure, which I sometimes forget. (Well, it is. But not the failure of the writer – the failure of the friends, the editors.) It is often the small moments of failure in my friends’ writing that make me love them the most, when something of themselves comes through. Writing, even aside from all of the opportunities for self-fashioning and for having things on one’s own terms that it offers, will never contain the whole person. There have been times when I have wanted this – to be utterly taken up in it so that nothing remains. But that’s impossible. No writing could ever live up to being fully human.
I write to change people’s minds, I sometimes say. But that is too adversarial. In the end I don’t presume a reader who I think is wrong, although I do imagine one who for whatever reason has not thought the things I am thinking: if I felt I was repeating word for word a common thought I would not do it – there has to be something that the writing contributes to the world, even if just a new formulation for an existing thought. I write to clear up situations where I feel people are not saying what they mean, or are talking past one another. To identify problems, to make distinctions. I write to change people’s minds about what sorts of things can be interesting or complex. But I also write to make something beautiful in the world. To go back to the idea of the sext, I write to make something happen. To leave – not minds, but – people changed. It’s embarrassing to admit ambitions of this sort, but I feel that any actual writing has to have this as its aim.
*
When I came back from Berlin in 2010, dissatisfied with the life I had been leading there, I turned to a project of becoming masculine. When, in 2015, I left Berlin for a second time, dropping out of a graduate student exchange, I turned to a project of becoming English. In both cases by ‘becoming’ I mean coming to terms with something that I already was. By Englishness I mean a combination of things. I mean it in the ordinary sense: what it meant to have been born in England to parents also born in England, to have lived there most of my life, to have grown up with its food and landscape and customs, to have English writing and cinema and art as culturally closer to me than German or French or American. Specifically after the general election, which is when I moved back, this engagement with Englishness was also to do with national electoral politics, and the history of left movements within that. And also, not unrelatedly, what it meant to be interested in folk music, and the claims for national or regional culture that this made. This particular engagement with Englishness, particularly regional Englishnesses, between 2015 and 2019 I have in common with a lot of people, and is also part of a general national nostalgia.
But my return to Englishness was also about an intellectual mode, a way of thinking and of writing. Clarity, plainness, concreteness, modesty, empiricism, a kind of pig-headed, almost obtuse resistance to abstraction. Not all of this is actually true of English thinking, or of me. But something like these things guided me for the next however many years. There had been points during my PhD when I believed I could be a ‘theory bro’. Certainly some of the intellectual games around the theory of, for instance, the lyric, had excited me. But gradually I became less and less interested in that and more interested in English stuff. Biography. Nature writing. My field is Modern Languages but I wanted to write about things written in English and that were English in character. (Or else Scottish, whose relation to Englishness I won’t go into here.) Hence the essay on Barbara Pym – but also Gavin Maxwell, folk song, Duncan Grant, Derek Jarman, etc.
Part of this turn to the English was because German and French were ‘work’. To insist on writing about English things was a way to make something of my own, something done entirely for the love of it and not as part of a career. (A way to ‘win without playing’.) But it was also a way to get Englishness out of my system. To get to the bottom of an affiliation I had, for almost a decade before that, tried to pretend I had nothing to do with. Not all of the writing was explicitly a project of political (self-)critique but some of it was. It reached its end point in a review of a film which was about the wickedness of the English, where I suddenly felt disgusted at what it had all become, a form of self-obsession as limiting as the affirmative patriotism it opposed. But how to get away from Englishness?
Rohmer has often stood for Anglophones for Frenchness. He was surprised at how warmly he was received in the US and UK, as well as the Nordic countries. His biographers suggest that the popularity of some of the films abroad was the ‘thrills and chills of adultery French style’. Rohmer attributed it to the way that subtitles simplified the dialogue and made the films less nuanced. But later in his career he said something else. When asked about his connection to the French tradition he resisted, saying that that he felt just as close to the English tradition, English novels – he elsewhere mentions Conrad, Stevenson, Henry James – or Shakespeare. (One of his first films was an adaptation of Poe’s story Berenice; but in an interview with Gilbert Adair in the 1970s he claimed only to have read American detective fiction.) Perhaps, he said, it was in fact his foreignness that appealed to these foreign audiences. They watched the films for a vision of France and the French understood as exotic, but what they were getting was in fact their own culture and their own representative modes.
Some of the writing on Rohmer that presents him as quintessentially French has seemed wrong to me, not because I think he is or isn’t, but because what Frenchness seems to mean to some, monoglot, Anglophones is different to what it means to people who have spent time studying French, particularly but not exclusively at university. I don’t mean that one gains a kind of special insider knowledge – some people do, but my experience is more the opposite, of gaining ‘outsider’ knowledge, of learning through being aware of one’s foreignness and the gap in one’s own way of thinking from that of the ‘target’ (to use the jargon) culture. This can become a kind of block: I left Berlin in 2015 because I felt deeply alienated by and under a kind of psychic threat from German cultural mores.
What I mean is that Frenchness or Germanness, or whatever it might be, and in particular the language, stops being something you can romanticise or see as possessing magical powers (something I intend to write about separately). What you learn from having to do vocab tests and translations, and write essays on German literature or French phonology or European cinema, is to see these languages and cultures as no more nor less ordinary than your own. Their otherness makes them more, not less, real. I turned to Englishness because after the psychic damage of Berlin it was comfortingly familiar, and because I might be able to master it in a way I knew I would never master German and Germanness; but also because I was better able to see it as contingent, not the only way of being.
But I came to find this limiting, not only politically but also aesthetically and intellectually. Or rather, I had been told many times by my friends that I was rotting my brain by writing and thinking about minor English writers and artists, and finally I felt that they were right. The last couple of years I have resolved to read more literature in translation, also American literature. I have just about managed this, though I relapse now and again. And in terms of writing I have been looking for a project that would mean I had to approach un-English things in an un-English way.
Rohmer hasn’t been it, though. The films have helped me break through a block on speaking and listening to French, partly because the French is so clear and so close to the formal and old-fashioned kinds of French I learnt to read and tried to learn to write at university, and so is easily comprehensible and in a particular way attractive. It’s made me want to spend time in France, and I have.1 But the project that has come out of the films has been, I think, very English.
The model for the posts, I came to realise, was the essay. I am not about to make an etymological point about ‘attempts’, ‘soundings’ etc. or else refer to Montaigne – although they have been essayistic in that sense too. I mean the kind of the essays you – an English you – write at school and in exams, and which I wrote at university: not term papers or coursework essays, something summative, but quick and provisional, responsive to a particular prompt, done to a deadline. Not saying all that you know, but what you can in the space of a week, or two.
I hated this at university and developed a block, which I only overcame by spending a year in Berlin and becoming bored of not writing essays. But there is a lot to hate. I hated not having time to consider everything. I hated not being able to produce a masterpiece of original critical writing, a product of wide reading in the existing literature that would address all possible objections. The Oxbridge tutorial essay has been blamed for the failures of the British political system, the way that it encourages a pose of authority when it is badly-researched rubbish written the night before the deadline and then arrogantly defended. It is impossible in a week to feel you have done justice to the kinds of question asked, and, in the vanity of perfectionism, I didn’t want to try.
What I couldn’t cope with was the possibility that I might be wrong.2 But that is the point – the tutorial essay is at its best a place to be wrong, to try out ideas and ways of writing and subsequently develop them through dialogue. When I was teaching at Oxford I felt a kind of displeasure when I received an essay in which there was nothing wrong, because I felt unable to do my job. I begged the students to be bold, to push themselves to say something they weren’t totally sure about, just so that we would have something to work with. The pedagogical essay is an exercise and a way of demonstrating one has done the reading, but it’s also a way of getting to the bottom of something for oneself. Under the pressure of the tight deadline to say something you hadn’t yet known you thought. And it’s an offering to a receptive other, someone who is also interested in you getting to the bottom of things; who wants you to be wrong for the sake of a greater rightness.
I say I hate to be wrong. But I also love to be told I am wrong, because this means I have been right enough to be worth correcting – after all, if something is really wrong, the temptation is just to dismiss it or to avoid speaking of it out of tact. To be told you are right feels good, of course – although not to be told you are right by someone you fundamentally disagree with. But for it to feel good, in its proper sense, there has to have been some risk of being told you are wrong. You can’t only have been writing to flatter your audience. You write for a reader who might think you are wrong, and who loves you enough to tell you.
*
I promised early on in this series to talk about identifying with Rohmer the man. I had always pictured him as someone cool, urbane; playful and ironic, but also mysterious, forbidding, distant. The main facts one knows about him as a person is that ‘Éric Rohmer’ was a pseudonym and that very little was known about his private life, which he kept separate from his work to the extent that his mother didn’t even know he was a film critic and director. Watching the interviews he participated in after his mother’s death I found the complete opposite of what I had expected. He came across as awkward and earnest, unable to finish a sentence, tripping over his words in the rush to respond, to correct and clarify. His insistence on actors articulating properly in the films, on particular intonations, the dialogues full of long, correctly punctuated phrases – this was not in imitation of his own speech, but a kind of wish fulfilment. The withdrawal was not coolness, but shyness and an inability to conduct the performance of a public persona. In the 1970s he refused to attend Cannes, saying, ‘I am no longer of an age where I can get over a timidity before crowds that I grant you the right to call pathological.’
I hadn’t realised either to what degree Rohmer was a failure. He failed to get into the École Normale Supérieur despite trying several times, and failed the agrégation twice; he failed to get a teaching job in Paris and had to commute to the provinces; he failed to get a permanent lectureship at the University of Paris-1, only ever hired on temporary contracts. I knew he had edited Cahiers du cinema, which sounded to me the highest point one could reach in French film in the 1950s; but then I found that he had taken over because no one else wanted to, and was paid so little that he wasn’t eligible for a press pass. (During his tenure he was mocked by Jacques Rivette – who was instated as his successor when Rohmer was fired in 1963 – for preferring inexperienced young writers whose work he could encourage, an encouragement that partly took the form of insisting on clarity and precision, and correcting their grammar.)
He is, at least according to his biographers, far more present in the films than just as a controlling ‘demiurge’, whether as the man who has become feminine in The Romance of Astrea and Celadon or in the many awkward, indecisive characters who watch and wait; and the characters who are not this, the men and women who are wilful or charismatic or seductive, these were based on real relationships Rohmer in Rohmer’s life, such as his friendship with Paul Gégauff, whose moral recklessness and pose of empty opposition fascinated Rohmer as well as Chabrol, Godard and others. The more I learned about Rohmer, the more it was his own life I felt taken to task by, my mistakes and failures and obsessions I saw reflected back at me. The films were then freed from the instrumentalising and rather blinkered project of moral self-criticism that I’d forced them into. And the more I knew of how they were conceived and made, the more miraculous I found them for how much they float free of their maker.
There are many ways I’ve been wrong in these posts. As I’ve read more and also gone back and rewatched the films, I’ve seen new things that would alter what I’ve said. In some cases I just hadn’t understood. For instance, I said that the teacher in Rendezvous in Paris has postings in the suburbs of Paris and the provinces. But actually, like Rohmer, he has postings in the provinces, to which he commutes.3 Some of the writing on Rohmer has similar little errors in, which is part of the history of writing on film. (I remember clearly the shock I felt on reading the Foreword and Preface to Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed where he talks about how much teaching and writing about film relies on memory and the kinds of errors this necessarily involves. It somehow hadn’t occurred to me that before the development of certain technologies – I don’t actually know what the first ones were – there was no way of rewatching a film to write about it.) I haven’t had access to all of Rohmer’s films while writing these posts and this too will have produced misreadings or misrememberings. I also had constructed for myself a narrative about my re-encounter with Rohmer that, looking back at text messages I sent people at the time, I realised wasn’t true: the order and timings were different, even the people who had encouraged me were different to the ones I had remembered.
There are many ways I feel I’ve failed to do justice to Rohmer. The differences he saw between cinema and other art forms, particularly literature; the difference between moral and moralising. The fact that he repudiated his early film criticism, was always changing and adapting to new technology; the idea put forward by one of his biographers that his faith in cinema surpassed that of his Catholicism. His interest in daydreams and fantasy. The figure of Gyges, with whom he identifies himself as a film maker, ‘a partial observer who does not have access to the secret of beings. […] That’s what interests me in cinema, respecting the mystery of subjectivity.’
Someone said that these posts haven’t really been about Rohmer. I was taken aback. But of course I saw what she meant. At the start I wasn’t sure how to connect the two sides of the project, the films on the one hand and the experiences of the person watching them on the other, and sometimes I have just left them basically unconnected. And I can see this gives the sense that Rohmer is there either as a safety blanket – the humanities academic unable to let go of an attachment to the text – or as window dressing, a way of making respectable a project that was really about myself.
When this was put to me it felt wrong. I felt that it was the other way round: I wanted to write about Rohmer, but I needed the personal stuff and the ‘takes’ to get people to read it. Often I have cut bits where I feel I am going on too much about Rohmer, when I know that most people reading this haven’t watched any of his films, and aren’t here for that. When I wrote about other minds in Barbara Pym, I was really writing about myself and my sense of moral failure in not being open to others. (As is also the case when I wrote about Gavin Maxwell and his books about otters.) It seemed both intellectually proper and ‘chic’ to hide this autobiographical side. But I am pretty sure that nobody read it.
But that too is wrong, because I knew that I saw the ‘personal stuff’ as no less central. I started this project because I wanted to get to the bottom of Rohmer. But not as a film scholar, an academic, rather as a viewer of Rohmer, and in particular a viewer who had changed their mind. What re-watching Rohmer a decade after my first attempt made me acknowledge – which, as someone who teaches film at university level, felt embarrassing and professionally risky to admit in public – was how much my responses to works of art had been affected by my age, my stage in life, my temperament and obsessions, the circumstances of watching them, even specific experiences in my life. It wasn’t that I’d been wrong before but now was right, was closed and had become open. Neither time had I been able to watch these films impartially.
I was encouraged by Rohmer’s own comments on the reception of his films in an interview with Cahiers du cinéma, translated here by Daniel Fairfax:
I think I’ve been better understood, better received, by the public rather than the critics. I have the impression that the public was touched in a more original way, while the response of critics seemed more banal to me.
[…]
But every text, it seems to me, allows for two readings: an immediate reading and a reading between the lines, resulting from a deepened reflection, with reference to aesthetic theories. But I don’t think that this simplistic interpretation is worth less than the second. I always thought, even when I was a critic, that the brutal and simplistic reaction of the spectator is a good thing. I know that back then in Cahiers, we praised very commercial films in trying to defend them from a point of view that was not that of the man on the street. But this point of view doesn’t bother me. If people want to take things literally in the film, things that I myself may not take literally, I don’t say that this goes against its meaning, I say that it’s a more unsophisticated way of receiving the film, that’s all. I absolutely take on board every interpretation. That doesn’t mean I have to accept them, but once I finish a film, it escapes me, it closes itself off from me, and I can’t enter it any more. It’s up to the public to penetrate through whichever door they wish. I am not speaking about critics, who claim to have found the key, the right key, the only one which opens the big entrance gate. But that’s not my problem any more, thank God. I am not looking for the keys to Hitchcock any more, like I used to.
And in the project I have wanted to show how much this intertwining of living and watching was not just about seeing Rohmer differently, but how Rohmer affected how I saw my life. That however far-fetched it may sound, all of the takes in these posts, whether about dating apps or the provinces, the sexlessness of sex, risk, danger, gender, I had formulated in connection to Rohmer, over the last two, two and a half years. The fact that Rohmer made me have takes that were about the possibility of transformation through being open to the other is not a coincidence, because that’s, as I say, something that preoccupies me. But it’s also in Rohmer. This is why I’m drawn to him. And I want you to be too.
*
Even in these takes, however, I know I’ve been wrong, in some cases deliberately wrong. The series has been about my experience, over this time, of having moved to London, an unfolding story of realisations and responses, some of which I have already come to see differently. I wrote them out to be done with them, and to have space to think of something new.
This makes me doubt my picture of writing. How can it involve the kind of surrender to the needs and desires of another I described above when I am really just trying to ‘get something out of my system’? – a grotesquely visceral image. I don’t know. I like the dialogue of posting, its openness as a form. But I also like the way that each post ‘escapes me, closes itself off from me’. Becomes something that I’ve let go of and which is no longer my own.
***
Thank you for reading, whether the post or the series. I hope it’s been possible to read them separately, and, if this is the case, that it then hasn’t been too repetitive overall. Thank you also to anybody who has recognised themselves in the unnamed friends, housemates and someones. This was a project that came out of talking to people, or perhaps talking at them, but either way these others were what made it possible.
I have other things I intend to write about here but am going to take a break for the next month or so to concentrate on work promised elsewhere. If you’re interested in my non-Substack writing, a short dialogue on birdsong and AI – and the uncanny experience of being sent a thank-you email written by ChatGPT – has been published at creativecritical.net, alongside an essay in heroic couplets by Hugh Foley as well as contributions by Lavinia Singer, Jess Cotton, John Wedgwood Clarke and Denise Riley. These were produced in response to a symposium on the relation between poetry and institutions organised by Sam Buchan-Watts and Lucy Mercer. Thank you to Sam and Lucy for putting on the event, which ended up, I thought, far less a space of self-congratulation or complaint and far more one of actual discussion than these sorts of things can sometimes be.
This wasn’t just Rohmer. The relationship I’d had the summer before had been with a French woman, to whom I had sometimes written in French. She teased me by saying that I didn’t actually fancy her; what I fancied in her was just her Frenchness. That I didn’t know this, but were I to go to France I would find out that all French women were like her, and I would stop finding her especially attractive. While I like to think that my decision to start going to France more was because of something Rohmer opened up in me, perhaps I just want to find out if she was right.
Or else ‘basic’: as now, if I wasn’t writing to say something new, or newly, I didn’t want to bother. This is a very arrogant position, but I think it has to be what anyone writing thinks to be able to write at all. I certainly feel that the pressures of contemporary academic research culture, for instance, produce a lot of writing that makes claims to being new when its writers know or suspect it is not, a kind of non-writing, a simulacrum of thought.
As also did Gilles Deleuze, who taught philosophy at the same lycée in Vierzon as Rohmer; Rohmer later said that they had never spoken, and that he had known him only as someone who smoked a great deal on the same commuter train – which made Rohmer, a vehement anti-smoker, avoid him.