Hygiene and the Assassin by Amélie Nothomb


How to Read

Reading is therapy for chaos. Thinking can only make chaos obvious. Sex is merely a temporary distraction from chaos. Gluttony can be an effective remedy to chaos but has its unfortunate side effects. No, it is only reading that provides a lasting cure for the chaotic meaninglessness of life. Reading does not answer questions, it frames them so that chaos appears orderly. To expect more from reading is a sort of sacrilege: “Nothing is more vulgar than to have everything explained, including the things that are inexplicable.”

As the poetically named Prétextat Tach says, “We need meaning more than anything else.” Some of us will kill for it. All of us search for it. Writers write in order to read about the meaning they have created out of chaos. “Writing begins where speech leaves off, and a great mystery lies behind the passage from the unspeakable to the speakable. The written word takes over where the spoken word leaves off, and they do not overlap.” It is only the written word that satisfies the therapeutic need to connect things which are inherently independent. “What is text,” asks Prétextat, “if not gigantic verbal cartilage?”

But most people don’t really read properly. “There are a great many people who push sophistication to the point of reading without reading. They’re like frogmen, they go through books without absorbing a single drop of water.” They are unaware that reading is meant to change everything about them. What they lack is an awareness of the motivation of the writer, which is not communication but influence. “Faced with a shapeless, senseless universe, a writer is obliged to play the demiurge. Without the remarkable assistance of his pen, the world would never have been able to give shape to things, and the stories of men would always have been wide open, like some horrible madhouse.”

People idolise the god-like writer when they overlook his intent to dominate their existence. “Great writers have a direct and supernatural access to the lives of others.” This is only a talent by convention; actually “writers are obscene; if they were not, they would be accountants, or train conductors, or telephone operators; they would be respectable.” So writers have to be interrogated carefully - like Job demanding a response from God, but with even more intense persistence. The divine does not give up its secrets or its motivations, easily.

The real reader kills the God who provides meaning by exposing him for what he is, and humiliates him for the deceitful order he has given to the world. This is a reader who has grown up and left the illusions of childhood. He is the one who gets God to admit that “Love has no meaning, and that is why it is sacred... Love serves no purpose other than love.” Recognising this, the real reader becomes... well, God.

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