Wilt in the 'woke' era: "I am terrified of the rigidity of the activists, that aspiration to moral purity"

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There is a moment in

, by Abel Quentin (Asteroid Books), in which the narrator says that "nuance is neither compromise nor haggling: it is the supreme courage", and that sentence sums up the moral sense of the novel.

The literary sense is also easy to explain: the protagonist of

is a French and slightly more intellectual version of Sharpe's Henry Wilt.

Jean Roscoff, the visionary of the title, is a man exposed to embarrassment but no longer before the masses of viewers and readers of

but before

: activists, journalists, Twitter users and company.

And in his journey through shame and absurdity he will learn that

.

Quentin's character is a recently retired college professor after a lackluster career.

He drinks a lot, he bothers with the memory of his youth as an anti-racist activist in the 80s, he has a millionaire friend, an ex-wife who despairs of him, an only daughter who is good and loves him, and

and who treats Roscoff as if his father-in-law were

.

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has an interest in his critique of republican universalism," explains Abel Quentin.

"I have tried to represent it without being too caricatured, but there is

of some activists, an aspiration to moral purity and a willingness to impose their point of view through boycotts, excommunication, the

of the individuals whose thinking 'doesn't conform to the norm'. I don't like purity, we know what gave rise to that concept.

thinking also has a nasty tendency to assign individuals to communal membership and

.

For example, Jean Roscoff is discredited for being white, straight and cisgender, so he can only be an oppressor, when in reality he is nothing more than a failed alcoholic, discredited in his college and dominated by women " .

How does that irrelevant man come to be seen in the worst racist in France?

To kill time, Roscoff writes the biography of

.

An elusive and marginal character that everyone should not care about... Unless he had a couple of days or three of

fun in store .

Roscoff bases his biography on the fact that his trumpeter was a communist, he gives more importance to that militancy than his black race.

And that is wrong in the world of intellectual decolonization.

Roscoff's book falls into the hands of a reader eager to throw

and the comedy begins.

Why do these things happen?

Where have we learned to disguise our narcissism as morality?

"Behind the decisions of each character in this novel there are pure and impure motivations," explains Abel Quentin.

"Roscoff writes about a forgotten poet to rehabilitate him but

. Jeanne, his daughter-in-law, is an activist by conviction, but also to satisfy her will to power and to instill a sense of guilt in her. others. Is it irrelevant that the motivations for a commitment are dubious as long as they are at the service of a just cause? I don't know. I know that

, the fact of wallowing in someone else's feeling of guilt".

In

, not only are the furious left-wing tweeters who vote for Melénchon portrayed.

There are also the opinion makers of Rassemblement National,

, who pretend that they are interested in Roscoff, the trumpeter poet and freedom of expression but that in reality they only want to fight.

Even more painful is the portrait of the more or less progressive bourgeoisie that in the Mitterrand years slid from idealism to the social democratic good life and that now feels equally hated by its

children and by their yellow vest cousins.

His pettiness is portrayed in a specific scene from

, the story of a Canal+ party in 1985, the moment in which, according to Roscoff, the

.

"That Canal+ was the television of

, who gave up addressing them.

The left of modern and urban elites, reconciled with capitalism, which only aspires to defend minorities.

This is not a value judgment of mine: an internal report from the French Socialist Party that was leaked to the press in 2011 basically said that there was no need to sweat the shirt for the workers anymore, because they were no longer voting for them anyway, and that it was better to focus on minority advocacy," says Quentin.

Could the same be said of the Spanish Canal+ in the 90s?

.

Last question: is the

culture war?

Some of us thought it would be a measles that would pass, because everyone fears becoming the next Roscoff and because there is something just and generous in the culture of nuances... But the years fall and there is no change.

"For the

theses to really stick, a favorable context is required," Quentin replies.

"I will talk about the case I know best: France is a society that is more fragmented than ever, polarized in part by the algorithms of social networks. There are companies -and especially the audiovisual industry- that make the most of this polarization to gain market share. However

's no coincidence to me that these concepts were forged in the United States, and I would say they have more future in a society impregnated with puritanism and religiosity, a society that maintains a much more relaxed relationship with communitarianism"

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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