Desire is the gateway to the world

Stendhal and Balzac should be satisfied. If they get a glimpse of what's going on in the world of literature in their Olympus of writers, they could be satisfied that something is growing back. Because the climber story that came into the world with the two seems simply indestructible. Édouard Louis, her learned pupil, attests once more.

The almost thirty-year-old, who also became known in this country with books about his precarious childhood, his father, his mother and his experiences in the Paris gay scene, transfers the story of the riser to the present. And it is far less heteronormative than it was in Stendhal's and Balzac's time. Although Balzac was the first French novelist to introduce homosexuality into his novel cosmos around 1840: using the example of his character Vautrin, the mysterious seducer of souls.

But Vautrin is just one of several figures who heave young male heroes up the career ladder at Balzac. Above all, they go to women's schools to be successful. Women show the young men the way to fame, which always leads through the beds of the respective women. And since the heroes of Stendhal or Balzac love women, it runs like clockwork, at least initially.

With Édouard Louis, on the other hand, at some point there is a fork on the way up. After first a teacher, then a school friend and finally a head of the cultural office supported the sensitive boy from lower class backgrounds, the point came when they had had their day. The erotic dimension is missing. And the first-person narrator of “Instructions to become someone else”, behind which we can confidently recognize the author himself, is certain of one thing: “My desire opens the gates to the world for me.”

That's good French and above all thought à la Stendhal or Balzac. However, these two would hardly have agreed if their later successor immediately followed the first sentence with a second: “By having sex with a man, I rejected the values ​​of my class, I became part of the bourgeoisie. Here we have the snag of Louis’ story, which is so coherent and exciting in itself: he is so caught up in the categories of class and class struggle that he can only imagine the working class as homophobic and the bourgeoisie as gay-friendly; a double mistake!

The fact that the author sees it as the ultimate bourgeois accolade when one of his many gay patrons later takes him to the opera shows touching naivety and self-consciousness in an idea of ​​bourgeoisie that was only valid in the period before the First World War . But of course it reveals something about the need for distinction of this modern climber, who doesn't say a single sentence about what he appreciates about the art form of opera and which works he loves in detail.

But there are said to be people who feel drawn to opera for musical reasons. However, they do not occur in Louis' cosmos. Since he also eloquently expresses the opinion that "melancholy, exaltation and lethargy" are "bourgeois inventions" and not personality traits that occur in people of all classes, one cannot help the impression that for Louis it was more the social Stereotype counts as the individual.

But although the first-person narrator does everything right in terms of success (or at least in the way that the literary topos of the story of rising stars in France wants it to be), he cannot get over his unfortunate consciousness. No matter how clearly Louis' young hero can break away from his sphere of origin, he can go to Paris, take his exams at an elite university and, after initial failure, even finally write a book ("The End of Eddy") that will make him rich and famous : His guilty conscience remains. Because he accuses himself of using people to become what he is today.

But he doesn't have to worry about that. If he had read a bit of Goethe in addition to Stendhal and Balzac, Genet and (above all!) his spiritual teacher and supporter Didier Eribon, he would know: "And what one is, one owes to others." That's what the hero of the drama says Torquato Tasso. Every creative person exploits others in their youth in order to find themselves. That's not bad, it's normal. So the overall impression remains: as a contemporary new version of the French rise story, “Instructions to become someone else” is convincing; as a life she lacks the courage to emancipate herself from the literary models common in France.

Édouard Louis: Guidance to become someone else. Translated from the French by Sonja Finck. Structure, 272 p., 24 euros