Brother of the Above

By Jean-Bertrand Pontalis

After 1980, J.-B. Pontalis published literary works, and often with autobiographical resonances. Brother of the Above is no exception for a clear subtext from the author is "self-analysis." Biographical dictionaries often described the most important as "brother of the above." In this exploration of brothers in life and literature, renowned or a

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Unconscious in Translation
• Release date: Mar 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781942254218

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis

A student of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pontalis became a professor of philosophy in the forties, before undergoing an analysis with his associate Jacques Lacan the following decade. He was, however, one of the minority group of disciples/analysands who did not follow Lacan into the École Freudienne de Paris, but rather stayed within the legitimist sphere as founding members of the Association Psychanalytique de France, of which he later became president.Together with Jean Laplanche, he wrote the influential work The Language of Psychoanalysis in 1967; while among his later, more literary writings were Windows and Crossing the Shadows.His 1993 autobiography, Love of Beginnings, was deliberately ahistorical, emphasising what he called "holes" in discourse, where the process of slipping through or evading set formats and ways of thinking opened up new beginnings: "When words fail, it is because, without realising it, one is about to touch a different earth".

Book preview

BROTHER OF THE ABOVE

Brother of the Above

J.-B. Pontalis

Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith

Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis. This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

Copyright © 2006 by Editions Gallimard, Paris

English translation © 2012 by Donald Nicholson-Smith

ISBN 978-1-942254-21-8

Contents

J.-F. and J.-B

The List

Blocked

In the Beginning, What Kind of Murder?

Traces

Myself Alone

These Two (1) These Two (2)

Quest for the True Brother

These Two (3)

Two Intruders

Two Writers, One Pen

These Two (4) These Two (5) These Two (6)

Marcel and Robert

Fair Share

Time to Divide Things Up

Indivisibility

Birthright

These Two (7)

I Owe Him Everything

The Little Brother

The Metaphysical Age

Preserving Mother

These Two (8) Heads and Tails

What is a Pervert?

Zig and Puce

The Invention of Fraternity

How can I Get Rid of Him?

Fixed Point

Recess

A Dream Couple

A Farewell to Arms

Acknowledgments

Picture Credits

Translator’s Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the French Centre National du Livre for financial assistance in the shape of a bourse de séjour in 2012, which very much facilitated the present translation.

For their generous and indispensable help with the translation itself, I am greatly indebted to J.-B. Pontalis, Jonathan House and, as so many times in the past, Mia Nadezhda Rublowska.

D. N.-S.

To Serge Lafaurie

J.-F. and J.-B.

T

he tenth volume of Pierre Larousse’s Grand dictionnaire universel, which is comprised of seventeen volumes, contains the entries for the letter L, including one for my paternal greatgrandfather Antonin. His entry, which I suspect he wrote largely himself, takes up about a hundred lines. It is followed by another, shorter one: Amédée, brother of the above.

In the Larousse du XXe siècle my grandfather Germain appears. He is followed by Eugène, likewise described as brother of the above. In later editions, exeunt Antonin, Amédée, Germain, and Eugène.

The two brothers Antonin and Amédée were three years apart in age, Germain and Eugène two. My older brother Jean-François and I, Jean-Bertrand, slightly less than four. Our mother called us J.-F. and J.-B. Was this to save time, or to have a single letter differentiate us?

Antonin, born in 1830, and Amédée, born in 1833, belonged to what Daniel Halévy called the Republic of Notables. They both sat in the National Assembly. Sons of a notary, they were good Catholics, or at least kept up that appearance; they were well-to-do; and in the Assembly they proved eloquent, although Pierre Larousse (and here Larousse himself is the writer) described their elo- quence as cold and verbose and even went so far as to call it lemonade. In a word they were solid conservatives (let France be conserved as it is, and let the face of the world remain unchanged), the older close to Monsieur Thiers, the younger to the monarchists.

Antonin was also what was not yet called an intellectual. Among other works, he published a stout volume on Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland. He was a man of property, the mayor of a commune in Seine-et-Oise and several times elected as a deputy from that department. He fathered two sons, both eventually members of the École des Chartes, the one as student, the other as teacher: Germain was a prolific writer on Joan of Arc and a poet at his moments, Eugène a photographer at his, and the author of innumerable monographs on the region’s churches. In short, Antonin had every reason to be proud of himself. Which he was.

In the back of a closet I found relics of Antonin in the shape of tatty crowns of laurels and crosses of honor, all religiously preserved, dating from his earliest schooldays to the preparatory class for the École Normale. Later, in the attic of the house that now belongs to me, I came upon his full-length portrait in a frame with gilt moldings like those you see in museums. I could not get rid of these things quickly enough. This man, his side-whiskers, his supercilious look, his fat belly crammed into the regalia of the Academy of Moral Sciences — everything bespoke the self-satisfaction and certainty of someone who feels entitled to be what he is. Sartre, who wore no kid gloves, would surely have put this portrait straight into Bouville’s gallery of salauds. I know the last sentence of Sartre’s Les Mots by heart: A whole man, composed of all men, equal to any other, to whom any other is equal.

The very idea that I might, as I aged, begin to resemble my greatgrandfather, becoming a notable in my turn and serving lemonade to my readers made me shudder: no, anything but that! Was I fated to hold a grudge against this puffed-up personage, whom I had never known — he died in 1903 — but who was, like it or not, my forebear, simply because he was responsible for my patronymic?

Antonin was born a Lefèvre. Later, probably to distinguish himself from the long list of Lefèvres and with the hope that a doublebarreled name would sound aristocratic, he added the Pontalis, at the same time baptizing his country house a château. Les Pontalis was (and still is) a piece of arable land which was then part of the property. When I myself began writing — not, like him, in La Revue des Deux Mondes, but rather in Les Temps Modernes — I used only the Pontalis. I too wanted to mark myself off, but in my case from the family line. I was also rather tickled to bear the name of a field where barley and wheat were grown in rotation. Up until then my fondest dream had been simply to melt into the crowd of Lefèvres— to be, as it were, anonymous — an ‘any other.’

For all that, renouncing my burdensome family name was unthinkable. It would have meant rejecting my father, whose name appears in no dictionary but solely, forever, in my memory. Throughout my adolescence I had been faced by a contradiction: I longed above all to be my father’s son, but at no price to be descended from his family. It was probably in order to keep the image — no, not the image, but the very presence — of this beloved and loving father, who died young, alive in me and in me alone, that I was obliged to flee all the family members who had committed the unpardonable sin of not being him.

Antonin hardly matters to me. After all, he was perhaps not a bad man. Through him, though, I took aim at others. At all the cocksure — all those, Left or Right, bosses or ministers, great or small, who are convinced that the authority they exercise is deserved or, worse, justified — that it is theirs by right. Let me always repeat to myself, so as never to forget them, the words to whom any other is equal.

***

Brother of the above. One day, it must be twenty years ago, J.-F. said to me: You know, what I wish is that if ever your name appears in a dictionary, I’ll be mentioned as well, as brother of the above. At the time this made me smile; these days it upsets me. To think that a boy so brilliant, so charming, so adored by the grown-ups, a young man so full of promise — would he become an ambassador? a famous author? surely the Académie Française would one day welcome him with open arms? — a boy so gifted, so amusing, so intelligent (were so many so’s perhaps too many?) — to think that he should come, late in life, to make this admission to me, an admission which, sincere or feigned, turned me into his elder brother.

Which brings to mind an anecdote. At a school prizegiving, I was awarded (this time the laurels were for me!) a gilt-edged book entitled L’enfant prodigue (The Prodigal Son). I remember saying to the headmaster, Oh, no — my brother yes, but not me!, for I had misheard the title as L’enfant prodige (the child prodigy). It was simply natural in those days for me to take second place to my older brother, but now here he was, fifty years later, taking second place to me and humbly asking to be the brother of the above. Could we not exist without one overshadowing the other?

What did the erstwhile child prodigy do with his gifts? What did he carry away from all his reading, from rubbing shoulders with writers and poets — with Cocteau, Genet, Olivier Larronde, Violette Leduc, Louise de Vilmorin, and so many others — or from his extended reveries, stimulated for a whole stretch of time by opium smoke? What became of his journal, where I presume he spared no one, whether his friends or himself? It was he who once exclaimed, referring to me, "What vulgarity, to publish during one’s lifetime! Posthumous, my dear Jean-Bertrand, posthumous!" Of his writings nothing remains save for a handful of unfinished pages. Posthumous? Even that he refused.

What did you do with your life, Jean-François? You who loved me perhaps, and detested me certainly. And as for me, what can be said? Invoking ambivalence — the remarkable sturdiness of the alliance between love and hate — seems to me too facile, too allpurpose a response: what strong relationship — love, friendship — cannot be described as ambivalent? I want to go beyond that.

Yes, what did you do with your life, which you had been known to refer to