Je viens de terminer la lecture de Runaway, un recueil de nouvelles de l’auteure canadienne Alice Munro, et comme c’est le cas à chaque fois que je la lis, je suis sur le cul. Ça a l’air bête à dire comme ça mais c’est la meilleure image que j’arrive à trouver pour vous exprimer l’effet qu’un talent pareil peut me faire.

En faisant des recherches sur Munro je suis tombée sur une critique de son travail écrite par Jonathan Franzen dans le New York Times. Franzen, lui-même romancier, a rédigé une critique absolument géniale, presque aussi brillante en fait que l’objet de son attention. Il s’agit d’un texte plutôt mordant où il explique en 8 points pourquoi la renommée de Munro n’est pas à la hauteur de son immense talent. Un exemple:

1. Munro’s work is all about storytelling pleasure. The problem here being that many buyers of serious fiction seem rather ardently to prefer lyrical, tremblingly earnest, faux-literary stuff.

En plus de réussir à bien décrire la beauté du travail de Munro, Franzen chante aussi les louanges de la nouvelle comme style littéraire, un style malheureusement sous-estimé. Il réussit du même coup à faire un texte critique sur la critique littéraire telle qu’elle est pratiquée de nos jours.

Je me permets de citer de longs extraits ici, au cas où vous seriez trop paresseux pour aller lire l’article en entier.

When I close my eyes and think about literature in recent decades, I see a twilight landscape in which many of the most inviting lights, the sites that beckon me to return for a visit, are shed by particular short stories I’ve read. I like stories because they leave the writer no place to hide. There’s no yakking your way out of trouble; I’m going to be reaching the last page in a matter of minutes, and if you’ve got nothing to say I’m going to know it. I like stories because they’re usually set in the present or in living memory; the genre seems to resist the historical impulse that makes so many contemporary novels feel fugitive or cadaverous. I like stories because it takes the best kind of talent to invent fresh characters and situations while telling the same story over and over. All fiction writers suffer from the condition of having nothing new to say, but story writers are the ones most abjectly prone to this condition. There is, again, no hiding. The craftiest old dogs, like Munro and William Trevor, don’t even try.

Reading Munro puts me in that state of quiet reflection in which I think about my own life: about the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve done and haven’t done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death. She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion. For as long as I’m immersed in a Munro story, I am according to an entirely make-believe character the kind of solemn respect and quiet rooting interest that I accord myself in my better moments as a human being.

Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There’s always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can’t. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you’re unhappy about the hatred that’s been unleashed in your heart, you might try imagining what it’s like to be the person who hates you; you might consider the possibility that you are, in fact, the Evil One yourself; and, if this is difficult to imagine, then you might try spending a few evenings with the most dubious of Canadians. Who, at the end of her classic story ”The Beggar Maid,” in which the heroine, Rose, catches sight of her ex-husband in an airport concourse, and the ex-husband makes a childish, hideous face at her, and Rose wonders ”How could anybody hate Rose so much, at the very moment when she was ready to come forward with her good will, her smiling confession of exhaustion, her air of diffident faith in civilized overtures?”

Mon vieil ami Jean-François Labadie travaille à Port-au-Prince pour une durée de deux ans en compagnie de sa conjointe, Johanne. Depuis 2008, il publie un blogue fascinant et très bien rédigé sur sa vie là-bas: Pour ne pas oublier. Comme Internet fonctionne toujours chez lui, il est en mesure de mettre son blogue à jour. C’est chez lui que se sont réfugiés la nuit dernière les 2 journalistes de La Presse.

À suivre… On pense très fort à vous!

With a new year comes new resolutions. This year, you are going to do what you always told yourself you should do and damn it, you’ll be successful at it. You’ll work hard because you know success is based on merit and it comes to people who truly deserve it because of their relentless efforts. You will go far and perhaps even become your own brand. Why not? If you are not succeeding in your goal, it’s because you are not trying hard enough, right?

So what does that say about people who are not “successful”? Does that make them losers? Or are they maybe just too lazy?

For years, especially in the U.S., positive thinking and meritocracy have been pushed forward not only by popular show hosts like Oprah but also by psychologists, doctors and entrepreneurs. You are sick? Think in a positive light, don’t let any negativity creep in and you will beat your disease. You want to be a famous singer? Stand on the street and sell your show ticket by ticket if you have to. They say Marilyn wasn’t the most talented young actress around. She became famous because she wanted it MORE than any other girl did. (Or maybe she said that herself. I can’t seem to find the original quote.)

Because I’m not an optimist by nature – a result of personality and unhappy childhood – this kind of positive thinking has always made me cringe. “Yes we can” is nice and all, but I’m more of the “Okay let’s give it a try but don’t get your hopes up too much” type of mentality. It freaks me out to see positivity elevated as the new moral standard, the new religion to follow. My lack of faith may not allow me to fly as high as a kite, but it keeps my feet well grounded. It also means that I often have a plan B, which makes me ready to move on when something doesn’t go my way.

Thankfully, we are slowly hearing voices rising up against this excess of magical thinking. Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote the famous book Nickel and Dimed just published another book with an exciting title:
Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

The practice of positive thinking is an effort to pump up this belief in the face of much contradictory evidence. Those who set themselves up as instructors in the discipline of positive thinking— coaches, preachers, and gurus of various sorts—have described this effort with terms like “self-hypnosis,” “mind control,” and “thought control.” In other words, it requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and “negative” thoughts. The truly self-confident, or those who have in some way made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts. Positive thinking may be a quintessentially American activity, associated in our minds with both individual and national success, but it is driven by a terrible insecurity.

For a fun take on the book, watch the interview that Jon Stewart did with Barbara Ehrenreich.

Going in a similar direction, the writer Alain de Botton recently gave a TED talk titled A kinder, gentler philosophy of success.

There’s a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything, and the existence of low self-esteem.

Everybody agrees that meritocracy is a great thing and we should all be trying to make our societies really meritocratic. A meritocratic society is one in which if you’ve got talent and energy and skill you will get to the top. Nothing should hold you back. It’s a beautiful idea. The problem is, if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top get to the top, you’ll also by implication, and in a far more nasty way, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there. In other words, your position in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved. That makes failure seems much more crushing.

We’re perceived as being in the driving seat. That’s exhilarating if you are doing well but crushing if you’re not. In the worst cases, it leads to depression and suicide. They own their success but also own their failure.

The whole talk is available on video here.

If you’re not convinced yet that grumpier is better, you might want to consider this recent study:

An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.

In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.

Professor Forgas said: “Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world.”

Grumpy people of the world unite! Let’s all get a sweet, global reality check. Way to start 2010!