“You changed the novel’s ending?”
“I dared to do that, yes. And I’m not proud of it, far from it.”
“Félix Maltais’s suicide inspired the end of the novel, and not the other way around?”
“I only rewrote the final pages. Not many words, but I concede, they’re quite important for the end of the story. Alice might not have appreciated the very last lines. This heart that doesn’t burn … But that ending allows the reader to find again the theme of purity. The circle is complete.”
“You’ve betrayed Alice.”
“I repeat, I’m not proud of myself.”
“You have no idea how her novel has wounded me.”
“Antoine, it’s just a novel. Like all novelists, Alice took some elements from her own past to write a story that, in the end, has nothing to do with her life.”
“And what about my life?”
Before leaving Louis-Martin’s office, Antoine sneaks a look at the large photo of Alice that is judging him with its glossy paper gaze.
Never has Antoine found it so hard to embark on a new academic year. His heart is pounding as he enters his classroom. His legs are heavy, his mouth dry. Though after twenty years of teaching, he knows his subject: “What is a human being?” This is the question he’ll present to thirty or so students this late-August morning as the summer outside the broad windows of the classroom quietly bids farewell. This philosophy course requires little preparation. It’s a basic course that explores the major conceptions of man. Over the years, Antoine has simplified the subject matter, in particular its vocabulary. As a young teacher, he didn’t hesitate to talk about logico-mathematical deduction and hypothetico-deductive reasoning to signify that there were different ways of thinking. But he could read the boredom and incomprehension on his students’ faces, and little by little he acquired a certain linguistic humility. He lost his illusions, he was not, certainly at the college level he taught, going to explore the depths of human consciousness, but rather to modestly follow the Ministry of Education’s guidelines.
“What is a human being?”
He throws out the question so half-heartedly that most of the students keep talking among themselves, some getting to know one another, others talking about their vacations. He writes the question on the board. His head is buzzing, his hand is trembling, and he makes the chalk squeal as if each letter traced required a huge effort. He puts down the chalk, turns around. He wants to open his mouth to begin his lecture, but stands frozen before his students. He hunts for words, ideas, the meaning of the question he’s just inscribed on the board.
Plato. He has to begin with Plato: man is a being of reason. And end with Sartre: man is a project. He can’t forget Nietzsche. Nor, above all, Freud. To speak of that, of the chaotic impulses ruled by the pleasure principle. To deal with sex. Then to insist on what distinguishes man from animal. To introduce students to the cogito of Descartes: I think, therefore I am. For Sartre, it’s something else: I react, therefore I am. Because no one can exist without the other. Mention Kant. For morality. And come back to Nietzsche: to think beyond good and evil. God is dead. Alice is dead. And Félix as well. And finally to enumerate the three elements comprising the soul according to Plato: reason, emotion, and desire. Very important: the carnal element, because we must eat, drink, copulate; the rational element, because we must think so the body will not assume control; and … and the third element, which is …?
Antoine can’t remember. He draws a blank. He gropes, he loses himself, goes back to Descartes: what does he say? One must doubt. And think. And what is Antoine now thinking? He thinks that Alice is watching him, that she’s hearing him think, that she’s divining things. Maybe she knows it all. He mustn’t panic, he must simply lay out for them the broad outlines of his course. The question is clear: is he having illusions about himself? Is he hiding behind beautiful ideas so as not to see the abject person he really is? Is he one of those salauds, as Sartre calls them? He loses himself amid these dangerous questions. He has to come to himself, to focus on man as a social being … the Marxist analysis of social classes … consciousness that is just a product … to not talk to the students about what is tormenting him … to forget Freud, go back to Plato. What is important is the third element composing the soul … and which is … which is … it’s coming back … and which is the element of the heart … and what does Plato say? That the element of the heart reposes in the breast and that it incites the human being to prefer the beautiful to the ugly, the good to the evil … the evil … the evil … yes, the evil!
His wife describes him as an arrogant man, petty, pretentious. She has a reason, a purpose … It’s just a novel, Antoine repeats, a novel, just a novel … Don’t get lost, don’t fall into the trap, don’t try to say everything at once, focus on the question, and the question is: what is the human being when he loses his humanity, when he destroys what he most loves in the world, when he doesn’t know why he’s doing it? Does Antoine have a soul? Yes, a good question to ask his students: does he possess a soul? The soul that, according to Plato, is made up of three elements that are … that are … But no, forget Plato, he’s too distant, too disconnected, go straight to Sartre … Man is free … a being who renews himself at each moment of his
