Cynthia L. Haven: evaluation

Transcript context

…A writer’s trick, meaning he made it up? No, I was the writer. I was interviewing Jean-Michel Oughourlian in Paris, who was at one time . . . René said many people were his best friend. Jean-Michel Oughourlian was one of the people that he often said that about. He claimed that René had told him that he had witnessed a lynching. This was one of those moments, one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever had in an interview, and the floor opens up when someone says something like that. I thought, “Wait a minute, how can that be true?” But it was my job to check it out and see whether it could be true. More than that, it was an opportunity for me to explore what lynching meant in the US and abroad, and talk about that. I was surprised, in my research, to find out how recently lynchings had happened. I had thought of them as something from a much earlier decade in the 20th century, and having ended. It gave me a chance to think about it. It gave me a chance to talk about it, and later in the interviewing process with Jean Michel, I said to him, “Oughourlian — that’s an Armenian name. Were your family involved with that?” And his face fell. He had lost a number of his extended family in that genocide, and that is why he grew up in Beirut and not further east. What I concluded in that chapter was that Jean Michel Oughourlian, having been a second-generation Holocaust survivor — that had impressed him. That what seemed outrageous to us — the idea that René had seen a lynching — was not so outrageous to him because it had actually happened in the not-too-distant memory. So I told the story that way. I told that chapter that way. It was a way of going back and revisiting that past, and revisiting the impression that it had on the man standing in front of me. No, I don’t think he sees . . . He hadn’t seen a lynching. You don’t go and watch a lynching. You’re either one of the people throwing the stones or you’re the lynchee. It has that kind of attraction; it’s not something that you can watch from far away. Okay. How good was Girard as a critic of Shakespeare?…

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