Cercle de Lectures - Of words and wounds. The war of clichés

Beginning in October 2020, Corina Ciocârlie and the Cercle Cité introduce a new cycle of encounters devoted to the phenomenon of migration as seen by writers and photographers. 

With his characteristic humour and swift strokes, Dan Perjovschi the Romanian cartoonist reminds all who wish to hear him of that good old open secret: we are only willing to accept that which resembles us. The GOOD GUY will always be white and dressed in western clothes, the BAD GUY – necessarily black and/or wearing a turban.

This primary truth is reminiscent of The Dictionary of Received Ideas, which enabled Flaubert to transcribe the essential vocabulary of Bouvard and Pécuchet, the two copyists who meet on a public bench and only discover the world through some clichés borrowed from their reading. In this war of clichés, some survive better than others: "GERMANS: A people of (old) dreamers. ENGLISH: All rich. ENGLISH WOMEN: Surprising that they have pretty children. BLONDS: Hotter than brunettes (see Brunettes). ITALIANS: All traitors. NEGROES: Surprising that their saliva is white – and that they speak French."

BLOND – like POOR, or like SINGLE – is only an apparently banal label that is attached to one in the course of a conversation. Similarly, the black turban positioned on the head of the BAD GUY is only an accessory that is associated with him, like the moustache stuck to Mona Lisas's face. The Centre Pompidou nevertheless sees it as more than a hilarious prank: "What ‘MonaLisa-oclastic’ impulse drove Marcel Duchamp in 1919 to add to the face of a reproduced portrait of Leonardo's Mona Lisa a moustache, a goatee and a promising title L.H.O.O.Q. (‘elle a chaud au cul’ – she's got a hot arse)? (…) Duchamp introduced another preoccupation with this simple ready-made: that (…) of latent homosexuality: after shaving, he himself dressed up as a woman and took on the troubled identity of Rose Sélavy, a name that lent itself to puns.

We can ask the same questions about the Flaubertian dictionary: "BLONDS: Hotter than brunettes (see Brunettes). BRUNETTES: Hotter than blondes (see Blondes). NEGRO WOMEN: Hotter than white women (see Brunettes and Blonds)." Dismissing both, some will no doubt end up asking whether Flaubert shouldn't be censored – in the same way as the title of Agatha Christie's novel was censored – even if he only lists the vanity of others. Without going that far, let's open the debate, because the uneasiness is not getting any better in the present situation.

Less inclined to banter, Hannah Arendt demonstrates in Eichmann in Jerusalem, that having recourse to clichés in language nurtures the absence of thought and diminishes awareness of the acts committed, thus summing up "the lesson of the terrible, the unspeakable, the unthinkable banality of evil".

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