The Impostor by Jade Lindgaard

Author:Jade Lindgaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

‘YOU DON’T PUT WORDS INTO THE MIND OF A DYING MAN’

In a more general way, the outlandish dramatization with which Bernard-Henri Lévy dresses up the data he throws to his readers is accompanied by innumerable factual errors. While many are too trivial to list here, it is worth noting some of the more striking and revealing ones.

For a start, the description of Pearl himself. In keeping with his vision of things determined by the struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness, Bernard-Henri Lévy portrays Daniel Pearl, a journalist he has never met, as a ‘luminous character … who had chosen to answer evil with good’ (p. xvi), or, quoting Emmanuel Levinas, someone who felt ‘an obligation to the world’ [l’obligé du monde], or a ‘just man’, an ‘old-fashioned man’, ‘the enigma of those “gentle men” of whom Dostoevsky speaks’. But Henry Samuel, who worked for the English language service of Radio France Internationale and was a friend of Pearl, disputed his view of the murdered man’s character: ‘I didn’t feel that the Danny I knew had “an obligation to the world” or anything like that … he didn’t seem to me to be a man haunted by evil all the time’.63 Marianne Pearl, whom he likened to a Vestal Virgin in the book and to Antigone on the radio,64 has never replied publicly to Bernard-Henri Lévy and maintained an admirable dignity, refraining from all comment on the book. She met him in New York at her own request to convey privately, in the absence of any recording device, what she had thought of it. Although normally quick to put himself in the frame, he has never given an account of that meeting. (In 2005, she described him as a man ‘whose intelligence is destroyed by his ego’.65)

‘Faction’, Bernard-Henri Lévy might reply, permits literary appropriation of a character. But what are we to make of the long chapter he devotes to the journalist’s execution? The sound of the steely blade slicing through the carotid artery, the victim’s tears and gurgles. The reader is spared nothing, made into an unwilling accomplice, a voyeur despite himself, of the sordid spectacle forced on him by the narrator with manipulative insistence, at the same time scrolling through Pearl’s imagined internal monologue: a narrative technique that raises ethical issues a good deal more fundamental than the mere questioning of the ‘faction’ form.

The use of video by these murderous terrorist groups is a trap, an unprecedented challenge in the history of contemporary media. Should the images be broadcast or not? The question is a serious one, touching on such essential principles as the right to information and respect for human dignity. In this context, the negligent attitude displayed in his book by Bernard-Henri Lévy – an author who claims to be a philosopher and one of whose earliest works was a reflection on violence and ‘barbarism’ – when he dwells upon this scene verges on cynicism. He must have known that Pearl’s family, his wife and parents, had publicly declared that they did not want to see the videotape of his murder.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.