Stéphane Zagdanski's Collected Writings: A Defense of Swagger

Stéphane Zagdanski publishes two hefty volumes with Éditions Pauvert collecting his articles, interviews, lectures, and notes from the past decade, without indicating their original publication venues, as if preparing his definitive collected works. The author, known for novels like "Les Intérêts du temps" (1996) and "Pauvre de Gaulle !" (2000), and essays such as "Céline seul" (1993) and "Le Sexe de Proust" (1994), presents a diptych titled after Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." The books treat Proust, Céline, Kafka, Claudel, Hemingway, Nabokov, Rachi, Nietzsche, Picasso, and Soutine, but Zagdanski admits he is really talking about himself. The critic notes that official criticism initially saw him as a youthful double of Philippe Sollers, but others played that role more docilely. Zagdanski's work posits the artist as a solitary hero resisting barbaric mediocrity—a romantic, anachronistic hypothesis that nonetheless proves operative. His writing displays joyful intelligence, pugnacious perspicacity, and erudite energy. The critic acknowledges Zagdanski exaggerates, adopting a heroic pose that both exasperates and amuses, but argues that his swagger, when accompanied by joyful and generous thought, becomes a virtue—the antidote to calculating arrogance.