And if, each great work by enlightening us also tended to stifle in its shadow other works which without it could have flourished?
What would our humanity be without the masterpieces that our great minds and artists have given us? We have been taught to revere them as the stars of our civilization. However, it is from another perspective, a bit more iconoclastic, that Pierre Bayard considers them in his latest essay, And if the Beatles were not born? published by Editions de Minuit. What if, he wonders, their unanimously recognized brilliance produced collective blindness? What if each great work, by enlightening us, also tended to stifle in its shadow other works which could have flourished without it?
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What would our humanity be without the masterpieces that our great minds and artists have given us? We have been taught to revere them as the stars of our civilization. However, it is from another perspective, a bit more iconoclastic, that Pierre Bayard considers them in his latest essay, And if the Beatles were not born? published by Editions de Minuit. What if, he wonders, their unanimously recognized brilliance produced collective blindness? What if each great work, by enlightening us, also tended to stifle in its shadow other works which could have flourished without it? If a certain Raymond Jones had not walked into a certain record shop in Liverpool on October 28, 1961, and advised the record store, a certain Brian Epstein, to take an interest in four boys who were not yet in the wind, this one would not have become their producer, would not have deployed tenacious energy to impose his foals that no record company wanted to sign. So, nothing perhaps could have stopped the Kinks, the group led by Ray Davies, from becoming as famous as Christ and Kinksmania from sweeping over England and the world with songs like Waterloo Sunset, Sunny Afternoon , You Really Got Me or Lola… Who knows? But Pierre Bayard does not limit himself, as the title of his essay suggests, to imagining a world where the Beatles would not have existed (according to the same principle as Yesterday, Danny Boyle’s film). It considers over 12 chapters what a world would be like without Rodin, without Marx, without Freud, without Shakespeare, without Kafka, without Proust, without Simone de Beauvoir… Thus, the author brings to light all the people or works eclipsed by the crushing shadow of masterpieces. Page after page, the essay deploys the jubilant appeal of uchronies, this narrative genre that explores alternative scenarios by imagining what would have happened if events – and often only one – had taken a different turn. From its creation in 1836, with Napoleon and the conquest of the world by Louis Geoffroy to Civilizations by Laurent Binet (2019), this genre has been emulated by many. With these micro-uchronias, we discover with Pierre Bayard, that if Karl Marx had not been saved from tuberculosis at birth, it is perhaps the role of the French political theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, eclipsed by the German ideologue, which would have been manifest, even capital. And with the latter, follower of a federalist and decentralized society unlike Marx, perhaps we would have given birth to another form of non-violent socialism. Or that if the Romantics in the 19th century had not been infatuated with a certain William Shakespeare, we would continue to praise the one who was recognized in his time as the most important playwright of the Elizabethan theatre: Ben Johnson. Or that if the parents of the young Sigmund Freud had not met, we would pour out on all the couches in the world, not our unconscious, but our multiple personalities. Beyond the playfulness of these narrative twists, the “what if…?” of uchronia allows Pierre Bayard to give us access to the deep understanding of what makes a masterpiece, namely a complex social game where it is a question of “paradigms”, “canon”, “bias receptive” and even of “theory of parallel universes”… A nicely iconoclastic approach since it questions the divine right of masterpieces, but which in return allows other masterpieces, unknown or unknown , to finally reach the light. Only one being is missing and your entire personal museum is repopulated.
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