Night Spectator – on Diary of a Blackmailer de Philippe Vasset
Without seeming to, Philippe Vasset is one of the most exciting writers of today, who experiments from book to book with original forms to question the contemporary world and invent a kind of ironic and virtuoso virtual realism. His Diary of a Blackmailer testifies to this again, which questions the relevance of the very old activity of “crow” in the age of social networks, in a sort of documentary fiction which ends up putting literature itself into perspective.
Philippe Vasset is a funny guy who writes funny books. Let’s admit it, we have never really understood the precise nature of his professional occupations, from which we deduce that they relate to “information” in various forms, but without knowing exactly what this could correspond to in reality. Editor-in-chief of publications as lively asIntelligence Online or Africa Energy Intelligence, Would he be some kind of spy-journalist, an expert in dematerialized geopolitics? And is all this really serious?
What is certain, in any case, is that this writer with the appearance of an eternal adolescent is a formidable observer and ironic analyst of what we can call the functioning of the world, scrutinizing the cogs of a kind of general mechanism to which our eye is not necessarily attentive, where computer technology, digital surveillance and other virtual joys are mixed.
The most surprising thing is that this almost documentary (and slightly geeky) dimension readily finds expression in books that can be both funny and poetic, in their own way: this was the case, for example, ofA white paper (Fayard, 2007), an old but particularly striking novel, in which the author was interested in forgotten areas, areas that have escaped the radar, areas that are absent from the standard survey of plans and land registers… If we cite this book in particular, it is for the strong memory we have of it, but also because it can in a certain way serve to sum up the spirit of Vasset’s approach: identifying the spaces neglected by the generalized digital census, having an imagination open to voids, tracking down free corners that are still possible in a saturated order.
This kind of quest, quite manic but willingly tinged with humor, constitutes each time a formidable narrative engine, and this is the case again for the Diary of a Blackmailerwhich seems to be part of a series in which the Diary of a Gun Dealer in 2009, and the Diary of a Predator in 2010. The writer uses the negative to occupy his frenzy of discovering unnoticed spaces, which could possibly be exploited: this time, it is not a question of reinjecting poetry and randomness into hyper-gridded reality, but rather of staging the unhealthy potentialities of our networked society, based on the cynical figure, a priori sinister, of a modern-day blackmailer. Because there is still much business to be done in this area of blackmail as old as the world… (we can amuse ourselves in passing with the fact that Vasset’s previous book, A cappellawas dedicated precisely to… the song, the “real” one).
The diarist of the Diary of a Blackmailer thus proposes to take stock of his activity in confessions free from all scruples, impervious to all morality, inflated by the taste for formula and the almost exhausting art of the (narrative) punch. It is one of the singularities of this story, to be led by a voice without apparent awareness of evil: a very eloquent human machine, which disdains neither wickedness nor humor, to dismantle contemporary false pretenses as they are shown in a world of hyper-communication.
Our narrator is therefore in his fifties and has a taste for stories: he comes from a somewhat romantic world, a former photographer who liked old-fashioned blows and physically tasting the fear he aroused in his victims… But he is a clever person, who has understood the need to adapt the blackmail business to the demands of the present: he uses the Internet to optimize threats on the targets to be blackmailed, by creating the site Break-in using some kind of team quite original composed of seven young women full of energy, who will soon make our man look old-fashioned by considerably developing the business thanks to their initiatives, among other things, on social networks.
We are far from the traditional “crow”, even if it is, as in the past, about revealing the turpitudes of a famous footballer, a siliconized actress, a star chef familiar with drug trafficking… Basically, the springs do not change, and the question of the good reputation remains the same: guilty is he who hides and lies, in an era where displayed hyper-transparency is only a new means of the very old hypocrisy.
The supposed progress of our societies is only the development offered by technology to the oldest faults, and perhaps even motivated by them.
Vasset then has fun stuffing his Journal of various cases, like so many mini-exercises in denunciation and writing: insinuating letters to threaten a victim with a compromising disclosure, advertisements on the Internet arousing by allusion the attention of a potential target… There is, as we can guess, a form of jubilation in this way of putting oneself in the shoes of a pure bastard caught partly in the trap of his own frenzy as a blackmailer, when he sees himself overtaken by his small team of young women pires than him: more efficient and totally uninhibited, who run their business with a kind of paradoxical freshness, a spontaneous and joyful enthusiasm which contrasts with the shady files which they track down and deal with.
The Diary of a Blackmailer tells this journey (a career, one might say) quickly, and we understood that it can be read as a kind of swift and deflating fable, which ironically celebrates the triumph of contemporary modes of communication, and therefore of knowledge. Everything can be known, and above all, made known more quickly than ever, whatever the truth regime of the information that is thus circulated: from then on, blackmail, which seemed to be made obsessive in a time when everything is cancelled out by instantaneous disclosures, becomes, on the contrary, the kind of obsessive unthought common to all.
The web and networks are gigantic markets where we negotiate on a daily basis what we have seen, recorded, photographed, etc.: both the paradise and hell of the eternal “crows”, since blackmail consists, today as yesterday, in selling the key to access to the secret, whether it is the simple and harmless private sphere or unspeakable and reprehensible hidden turpitudes… What Vasset questions, thus, is not in fact of the order of morality, but first of all relates to a logic of device: his novel deciphers – with verve – the contemporary techniques adapted to the ancient tropism of denunciation. Better: it suggests that the supposed progress of our societies is basically only the development offered by technology to the oldest faults, and perhaps even motivated by them.
It is in this link between the old world and the virtual one of today that the question of literature finally slips in. And this is where Vasset shows himself to be definitively clever, he who has taken the trouble to point out from the beginning of his story that his narrator is also a very fine scholar, who willingly alludes to René Char and can gloss at length, even to the point of pastiche, on his favorite author, Restif de La Bretonne, the author in the years 1788-1794 of Nights of Paris :
“If Restif is so dear to me, it is because his life illustrates the paradoxes of my art: fearing exposure, the man who watches his fellow men gives himself up all the more as he withdraws. The crow traps its victims in the drifting nets of their past. Logic would have it stealthy, erasing its footprints as it advances. It is often the opposite that happens: despite the danger, Restif and I persist in recording, convincing ourselves that our directories of compromises protect us. Why such obstinacy in getting lost? It is because we, “night spectators”, as Restif liked to call ourselves, are deep down collectors. Keeping count is our way of preventing facts from disintegrating, and life from being ruined. Tirelessly, we transform the event into a sentence, and the sentence into a file, to postpone time.”
It is not far from a piece of bravura, from a blackmailer who definitely knows how to sing, who will also say his debt to Voltaire and delivers the considerations of a great reader on the current events of the Duke of Saint-Simon in our digitalized era… Beyond even these references, the last third of the novel seems to rush towards its literary destiny, telling how its hero struggles in his relations with his former emancipated team and grapples with new matters to settle: this gives rise to a rather intense suspense, which above all cleverly includes the book that we are reading, which we end up understanding is part of the device imagined by the blackmailer.
The narrative trick works perfectly, but goes further than the simple brilliance of a manipulative writer: it says something, ironically, about the power of the book in general, this object that does not fade away in the same way as online messages or warnings on X, and gives the truth a weight all the greater because it is displayed as fiction. And we say to ourselves that after all Vasset could well be, without seeming to, an authentic moralist.
Philippe Vasset, Diary of a blackmailer, Flammarion, August 2024
Fabrice Gabriel
Writer, Literary Critic
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