Trevor Butterworth
Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, bookends The Ethics of the Lie with Jacques Lacan, the French psychiatrist who connected the anxieties of poststructuralism to those of psychoanalysis. At the beginning, we have the proposition, apropos Monica Lewinsky, that Bill Clinton may have been “the world’s first Lacanian president” because, as Lacan saw it, “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship” (and as Clinton tried to explain to a mortified nation, oral sex should be thought of as an aperitif rather than an entrée). At the end, and apropos Pinocchio’s nose, Timothy Ryback, a lithe, affable fifty-four-year-old, originally from Michigan, is in his favorite Paris haunt, the dark upstairs library of the bookstore Shakespeare & Company, on the rue de la Bûcherie. A haven for serendipity—Ryback pulls down a volume at random and it turns out to be a history of the Bodley Head press, his publisher in Britain—the store is also a peculiarly American testament to a belief in literature and its endurance. Founded in 1951, by an American expat, George Whitman, it revived the name of the legendary store opened in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, who published the first