Dharma Drama: On Emmanuel Carrère’s “Yoga”

Emmanuel Carrère, transl. John Lambert | Yoga | Farrar, Straus, & Giroux | 2022 | 335 Pages

Contrary to no one’s expectations, Emmanuel Carrère has written another book about himself. If you’re just being introduced, this is his fourth or fifth. If you’re not, you may feel apprehensive counting 2009’s Lives Other Than My Own, for titular reasons. Yet even Carrère seems to consider his breakthrough, The Adversary—a true-crime biography in the tradition of In Cold Blood—as much a metaphor for his own writing life as a profile of evil. To die-hard fans, it doesn’t seem to matter. They have come to anticipate his writing to fall somewhere between autobiography and self-inflicted fan fiction, a style that has established Carrère as one of the most exciting authors in France today. Unlike the French literary establishment’s other king, Michel Houellebecq, the morally squeamish will have no problem with Carrère. He’s not difficult to grasp, no matter how difficult it is to place his work. To put it glibly, he’s a little annoying. Though readers must find it in themselves to accept that although a pure taxonomy of his books is impossible, the author presents what is termed biographical (auto or not) with great empathy. Regarding facts, he fabricates workarounds, stretching and abandoning the truth—a brutal twisting that bears no small resemblance to his romantic entanglements—but he never takes truth for granted. But does he tell the truth? “What I write might be narcissistic, but I’m not lying,” he writes. Close enough.

Yoga came out in France in 2020, and was released in English translation by John Lambert this year. Embroiled in controversy, the French publication of Yoga was attended by an op-ed penned by Carrère’s former spouse, who had ordered in their divorce agreement all mentions or depictions of herself be omitted from the final draft. She also accused Carrère of arranging (or inventing) certain details to inflate his own character in Yoga. He mostly adhered to the dictate that she not be mentioned, but he defended his prerogative to augment the narrative. When he circumvents the legal occlusion, he does it so intelligently and tenderly that we can’t fault him: “Where so many others failed,” he writes of the love he once harbored for his former spouse, “I thought I would succeed.” He didn’t. Even while distorting the mirror, Carrère rarely angles it toward his own beauty.

John Lambert, three-time translator of Carrère, has reservations about translating a body of work that plays fast and loose with its own claim to “not lying.” In his introduction to The Kingdom, which he also translated, he notes the challenge of “finding the right balance between [Carrère’s] personal use of his many sources and the text of the sources themselves.” Occasionally, Lambert doctors the text, though more often than not he relinquishes authority to Carrère, agreeing to “leave the text behind and follow [Carrère] as he strikes out on his own.” His translator doesn’t think that Carrère lies as much as his work requires a kind of faith. It’s not difficult to find Carrère dipping into falsification. His writing about life operates similarly to the enjoyment of a sexual fetish, which requires one to be intimate with another regarding a taboo that must be, nonetheless, shared to be enjoyed. To be open with others about private desires isn’t to diminish the public or private, but to collapse the two into their more compelling proximity. And to the delight of our crisis-addicted taste, Carrère is always on the verge of collapsing.

He’s titled the book Yoga, although as he admits early on to using the terms “yoga” and “meditation” “more or less interchangeably.” Even sex can be yoga, he concedes at one point. By the end of the book, even yoga can be yoga—that is, even the secularized fitness regime (a “vulgar gymnastics”) can approach the same centeredness as the disciplined, religious kind. Over the course of the book, Carrère suggests somewhere between thirteen and fifteen definitions of yoga. One takes great pleasure in reading Emmanuel Carrère for touches like this, as if it never dawned on him to flatten out the wrinkles inherent in the compositional process. It’s clear how much he acknowledges, prior to the drama of narrative meaning, the drama of the rhetorical. It’s the typing that matters. Or else: what it takes to write. This is why critics often commend the books as “feats.” After Carrère reveals in the final chapter of Yoga that he types with only one index finger—and has written all of his books this way—that drama becomes physical, not just logical. I think of a zygote pecking its way out of the ovum. 

Imperfect as ever and compellingly so, Yoga recounts yet another series of disconnected events in the author’s life that, though they might not always follow sequentially, connect via their inner resonances. Such is the Carrère form. On all other formal accounts, he can be predictably candid. There’s death, rendered as its most heartbreakingly human, explicit sex (rendered likewise), and of course a characteristic negotiating of the weight between empathy for others and the egotistical compulsion to tell about it, that is, it all. He’s frank about his overstepping of others’ boundaries for the sake of personal artistic achievement. In My Life As A Russian Novel, he deliberately discloses the political ugliness of his grandfather’s past—a Nazi officiation his mother, a diplomat, wished to keep hidden. Only in reference to this downright obfuscation of the truth has Carrère ever implied that what he writes in his books could be beneficial to the reader, even medicinal, though it is unclear whether his mother ever came around. His frequent use of the drama of certain fall-outs would be nothing but gossip if the pain of those disconnections didn’t play into the work. His other books are often summarized as memoir plus something else: true crime novel (The Adversary), biography (Lives Other Than My Own), journalistic profile (Limonov, as well as the book he purportedly works on now, a collection of courtroom sketches of the 2021 trial of the terrorists invovled in the Charlie Hebdo attacks). The new book sticks pretty close to autobiography. If there’s anything else there, it’s the ghosts of at least three books that didn’t get written: the one on yoga, the one about the divorce, as well as the lawfully rejected draft of the book we have now. Compulsively, Carrère is always writing between books. As he’s mentioned in both his books and interviews, the next book often begins before the last one has gone to print, resulting in a hysterical written timeline of a hysterically complicated life. Maybe someday we’ll get the story of Yoga’s publication struggles. Perhaps he’ll still be mad it wasn’t nominated for any awards.  

Yoga begins at a Vipassana yoga retreat, “the commando training of meditation,” the kind of hardcore Buddhism practiced by Ram Dass, though few of his contemporary followers actually have the endurance to practice it as prescribed. It’s no longer the 1980s, and like any religion, the Western fervor for Buddhism has waned. Religion has become, at best, a health food, and at worst, a politics. Carrère is one of the few who, still tempted by the spoils of capitalist decadence, takes pride in his dedication to an ancient art. Despite all his emotional setbacks and personal disasters, not to mention the breaks he’s taken between spiritual bouts, he’s had his practice. Though he only gestures at the coming crises, he frequently reminds the reader that the book they’re reading is not the “upbeat, subtle little book on yoga” he intended to write years ago. The account of his time at the retreat drags on for a hundred or so pages.

Like the Christianity he practiced in a previous book, Carrrère’s Buddhism is conducted with a healthy skepticism while being refreshingly devoid of irony. “I feel immune to sectarian indoctrination, I’m even curious about it,” he writes. Think of a book by one of Carrère’s favorite writers, Paul Veyne’s Did the Greeks Believe In Their Myths? Its central thematics of the divide between myth and truth, and its claim that many distinct regimes of truth have existed throughout history, “involving different distributions of knowledge, that explain the subjective degrees of intensity of belief, the bad faith, and the contradictions that coexist in the same individual,” could just as well be read as Carrère’s ars novela. 

Still, this section feels the most hollowed out by editing. He’s clearly running from something, and though we’re not sure what, we can guess it’s his marriage. Many readers will abandon the book here, whether or not they already know anything about Eastern practices, or whether they find the characteristically pornographic scene of Carrère’s affair with a woman from the retreat as popcorn-entertaining as I did. The initial section is relatively subtle in its interweaving of the author’s experience at the retreat with multiple foreboding allusions to the ramifications of his affairs, the tragedy that led him to leave the retreat, and a fairly weak narrative of his coming to dally with Eastern practices. Contemplative and thorough as this chapter is as an introduction to, at least, a life of yoga practice, there quakes underneath it an uneasiness. It reminds the reader of Gide or Mailer: the male author-obsessive whose effort comes at the cost of fracture. For Carrère, the tremors aren’t so subtle. One counts several instances where the author explicitly clues us in on the coming shift. The bulk of the book is still ahead of us, after all. The move seems beneath an author who began his career writing novels of suspense. In most instances, Carrère is unreserved in his philosophical-artistic declarations. “Writing down everything that goes through your head ‘without fabrication’ is exactly the same as observing your breathing without modifying it,” he writes. His conclusion that both are “impossible,” then, gestures to the author’s perseverance as well as struggles to come. After all, he says, “a whole day, maybe even a whole life, wouldn’t be enough to fully describe that quarter of an hour making breakfast.” If, as he claims, “a book justifies anything,” then what it justifies most immediately is the constitutive failure of any impulse to tell the whole story within the apparatus of the book. History has given us a form and we’ve stuck with it longer than anyone will undoubtedly have believed viable. Forget Yoga’s missing chapter on the author’s divorce. Think about breakfast! Dickinson was right—the truth must dazzle gradually. And in Carrère it does, though not, as the poet believed, because it would blind us, but because we are already blind to our ambitions of what a book is capable. The drama of composition: that’s what moves the book along. It’s only due to the fact that Carrère's stay is cut short by the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks that this experience at the retreat is retold at all. Otherwise, the retreat may have remained the unspoken reference for that ever-deferred little book on yoga. 

Whether Carrère is to be seen as an expert in such matters as meditation or autobiography depends, at least a little, on our collective, cultural definitions of truth, and upon our belief as to where that truth resides, and whose authority decides it. Prior to the retreat, Carrère had amassed at least twenty years of meditation and tai chi practice, and even more years of writing. He wasn’t supposed to write about the retreat, or bring anything from the outside world to it, yet he was able to write:

The air enters my nostrils. I observe it as it enters. The air leaves my nostrils. I observe it as it leaves. It’s calm, regular.

Carrère is always consuming and integrating: breathing it in, so to speak. Such an experience as the inhalation and exhalation of meditative breath need not come from anywhere other than the imagination—as with memory, its source is the body—yet we’d never think to test its veracity. This could be one reason why a meditation practice has been so important to Carrère, and why it is so difficult for him to write about. 

It’s not entirely clear where such intensity for the moral requirement that authors tell the truth came from, necessarily, other than the backlash James Frey received in 2003 for deceiving his readers with his book A Million Little Pieces. Though marketed as a memoir and beloved by many readers (Oprah, famously), it had been fictionalized to take advantage of the demand for addiction redemption stories. Much like the “death of the author,” announced throughout the early 60s, the debacle resulted in an entrenchment of the memoirist as truth-teller, rather than its waning. It resulted as well in a market saturated with memoirs just as saccharine but bolstered with the irremovable genre-stamp. Authors are implored to reconstruct their times of grief, madness, and innocence from the vantage of lucidity. Otherwise, how can they be trusted? What are we supposed to do with the writer who hasn’t sublimated their madness but, instead, writes from inside the jar?

In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Carrère writes of his negotiation between empathy and resignation in mourning the journalist Bernard Maris, employee of Charlie Hebdo and husband of his friend Hélène. This section moves relatively quickly, due possibly to Carrère’s lack of acquaintance with Bernard or his unwillingness to dwell on yet another account of death in his career. Ambivalences such as this are trademark. Wishy-washiness often refreshes the text by allowing multiple paths, all of which can be taken in time. Carrère’s punctuation only vaguely conceals the ellipses underneath. When he’s diagnosed with bipolar II disorder in the next chapter, his flat reportage isn’t totally convincing as a coping mechanism. Regarding the diagnosis, he is at first incredulous. “You can’t trust yourself because there are two of you in the same person, and those two are enemies,” he writes. Soon, however, he adjusts to the news, jumping upon this new research opportunity. 

[You] read what you can on the subject, you reexamine your whole life from that angle, and you realize that the shoe fits. Perfectly, even. That all your life you’ve been subject to this alternation of excitement and depression.

He sticks to his guns: “The thoughts come thick and fast, twist like flames…If I can’t be cured of this disease, I can describe it. That’s my trade.” He even thinks to rewrite his life in books as a narrative of this disorder, beginning with his novel The Mustache, wherein a young Carrère-like husband undergoes such a swing from mania to depression that he kills himself. The idea, however, is dead before it hits the ground. Madness descends. 

The lack of an oral history of what led to his breakdown will likely frustrate readers expecting a set of conditions, other than Carrère’s late diagnosis, to pin it on. Several crises could fit the bill, of course—terrorism, divorce, the engulfing pain of the world—but the attendant understanding is that he has not just become bipolar, but likely exhibited symptoms all along. However much pain he has caused those he loves, he never suggests that we make apologies for his actions. Though a long-time analysand, Carrère has never been one for teleologies, anyway. He is, to put it simply, exhausted. 

Eventually, as he always does, Carrère seems to claw his way back to the surface, to work. After a few more false starts, he travels to Greece: “I board the ferry to Leros, where Frederica Mojave awaits me.” Mojave is a writing workshop facilitator for a group of refugees, “the boys,” most of whom hail from Afghanistan and speak only Farsi. Carrère tepidly agrees to help her out. Their relationship is odd, sexually tense in the way of Friday and Crusoe. She’s also marooned by divorce and deep loneliness. The acquaintances created within this group start both Mojave and Carrère on their own flights of salvation. Mojave eventually leaves for Spain in the middle of the night. Carrère’s path entails an attempt to make one of the more conversational boys into a subject, and he interviews him a few times. The person sitting across from the author proves impervious to the both pitiful and elevated stance required by journalism. Not only has he endured unfathomable pain, but such trauma has made it difficult for him to return: that is, so much of his story is unspeakable. In Carrère’s quest to become a trustworthy listener, he hits another wall. Still, like the “glimpse of paradise” seen in a pianist’s eyes (Carrère directs us to a YouTube video of the young Martha Argerich): “By watching her we have access to it. Access by proxy, but access nonetheless.” Similarly, yoga provides access to unity, to peace, piecemeal. New paths are found in resistance, Freud said. So Carrère will continue to look at himself obliquely, through the mirror of the Other. Through the mirror of the Other, he will continue looking for himself. 

Although critics perennially charge the author with narcissism, Carrère is the first to admit to it as a theme in his writing. Call it, rather, a preoccupation. His focus is rare today and rivaled only by the patron saints of French literature, Rousseau and Montaigne, whose bare expressions of opinion challenged the entire notion of what literature could contain. This is to say nothing of Stendhal, whose own Memoirs of an Egotist and The Life of Henry Brulard—the latter with its infamously matter-of-fact admission of incestual desire—reads far ahead of its time. Tracing such influences, however important these authors are to English history of letters, reveals a gulf in the distance between the Anglo veneration of French literature and the Anglo ignorance of its contemporary practice. The warts-and-all autobiography is not original to Carrère, yet its practice has evolved. Simone De Beauvoir’s memoirs were extensive and at times exceedingly cruel, but they were excavations of stolen memory, rather than the presentation of personal opinion. And though underread, those great mid-century examples of Michel Lieris, who Sontag called a “shameless” writer, and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who begins his anthropologic travelog Tristes Tropiques, “I hate traveling, and explorers,” typified the anesthetic, ironical distance French writers of that period that kept them from getting too close to a sovereign self that, after the ravages of two world wars, hadn’t much air left to breathe. 

A contemporary of Carrère’s, Annie Ernaux, the most recent Nobel Prize winner, became popular in America for her work’s proximity to, and role in helping define, the autofiction genre (though she herself rejects this term). Spare, lucid, and paratactic, Ernaux’s books evoke the existence of a real life out of which the depicted experiences come, presented in the typical first-person narrative style of many reality-shaded fictions. The most divergent of her works, The Years, creates a portrait of the author within the universal “we” of history. The parameters of autofiction have always seemed too limiting to describe what Carrère does, which is less fictional in form even if readers can sometimes catch him in a lie. Any effort to remain verifiably truthful is carried away by the unstoppable machine of his writing. Digressive, recursive, inconsistent, and, yes, even boring (depending on who you ask, these descriptors are either essence or antithesis of the self), his books stake out a genre distinct in autobiography: auto-criticism. Carrère is and isn’t the king of his utterance. A child of deconstruction, he’s done more than anyone to bring personal, public writing into the post-truth twenty-first century. Life has become a construct whose maintenance we’ve moralized, which makes it even more difficult to truly cut loose in memoir. Even in experimentations on the form such as The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (a book she herself calls “auto-theory”), summonings of philosophy and critical theory serve to bolster and justify, never to counteract, the accumulation of empirical experience, of real life. You can really write anything and the form will back you up. If one associates narcissism with stubborn myopia, it doesn’t fit Carrère, whose myopia, seemingly unintentional, is let loose. At the risk of harping too much on sexual fetish, Carrère writes with a perpetual foot in his mouth. 

Carrère’s abdication of personal responsibility isn’t the only thing that makes him distinct in the tradition; so does his abdication, in an entirely self-de(con)structive way, of authorhood. This irks readers because it implies the limits of their authority—the autonomy of readership. His first crisis is always that of the book. People want to trust in their myths. One myth Carrère is particularly good at sullying is the originality of the work of art. Prevented by the terms of his divorce from telling the readers of Yoga about his break-up in detail, he gives them a passage from a previous work, Lives Other Than My Own, in which he wrote of his life with his wife. In that same book about the deaths of others and the lives of their survivors, Carrère allowed those he interviewed first edits on the original manuscript. This lent a bleeding, rather than conspicuously authored, nuance to these people’s depictions. And in The Kingdom, he relies on the advice of his uncle, as well as the editing of his then-wife, to devise “ways back into the book,” which, although drawn from a decade’s worth of notebooks, threatens to stall. Where there is faith in the writing process, there is an even greater faith in the reader to remain constant where they bristle, where they—often justifiably—find means to hate this author. I hated him, for example, for what he did to his now totemic beloved in his first real memoir, My Life As a Russian Novel: torturing a poor woman with his jealousy and knee-jerk accusations. Although, sitting with it—sitting with the author with it—I began to resent my own reaction as well. I wouldn’t say a mirror had been held up to my life, although I’ve had my hours of misogyny. The shoe, nonetheless, fit.

When Carrère is honest—which is most of the time—he is brutally so. In Yoga, truth (its smack) resides somewhere between the writer and the ‘dear reader’ that he loves to invoke. “You’ll have to put up with the fact that authors relate these kinds of things and don’t delete them,” he writes of personal memories. “Because they’re precious, and because one reason to write is also to save them.” Honesty takes the form of a gift, and its brutality comes from the congruity to one’s perceived nature, rather than its failure. To write an honest book—and I would count Yoga on a short list of the most honest I’ve ever read—means to return the living, breathing complication of subjecthood to its inception point: the author’s and the reader’s. As much as we write, we are written beings. Someone wants to save us. In the end, honesty makes characters of us all.