Brigitte Le Juez
( 1959- 2025)
A Personal Tribute
I have only just yesterday become aware of the death of my former professor of comparative literature, Dr Brigitte Le Juez. Having disengaged with social media, I had lost contact with my former professor who had become a friend who I had known since I first met her in one of the cafes at DCU, where she lectured, back in 2011. This is my first memory of her, she had her back to me and she was speaking with some of the other students who would be studying for their MA in comparative literature like me. We were a small group of students, no more than seven if my memory serves me right.
I had a copy of Brigitte’s book, Beckett avant la lettre ( Grasset, 2007), in my hand which I had bought the year that it had come out, which was the year that I had just graduated and upon reading her book I had decided that if I were to do a Masters I would do it under her guidance, and so, here I was four years later standing in front of her with my copy of her book, which I placed down in front of her on the table. I wanted her to know that I was familiar with her work, and that is why I was there. Brigitte seemed a little taken aback, as she laughed in that very particular way of hers. Brigitte had a keen sense of humour, this is something that we both shared together. It became a kind of bond, both being fans of Beckett our sense of humour was kind of particular. Not exactly the usual, but, at the same time, fundamentally human.
I remember us speaking about the importance of having a sense of humour and particularly in relation to academia and academics in general. Brigitte spoke about one of her former lecturers in the École Normal Supérieure who had made a great impression on her, and one of the reasons she told me that she liked him so much was because he had a sense of humanity, and having a sense of humour was a big part of that. This is something that we both shared, very much. In fact, most of the writers that we admired, Beckett of course being one, had a great sense of humour. This was a particular quality that we looked for in them, the comic element. As it was what made them human.
Raymond Chandler was another writer that we both admired very much, and it was the fundamental humour of the man and his writing that, once again, attracted us both to him and his work. In fact, my last memory of Brigitte is when she called out to my apartment in Skerries to have lunch with my family in June, 2018. June the 15th, to be exact. I know that this is the right date as I asked her to sign my copy of Beckett avant le lettre which I had forgotten to ask her to do back in November, 2011. Knowing my love of Chandler, Brigitte had gifted me a beautiful first edition of a biography of the author by Tom Williams. She loved the movie, The Big Sleep, and we spoke about it on a number of occasions and upon giving me the biography of Chandler she told me that she thought that I might like the insights into Chandler that the biographer had uncovered.
Chandler, of course, like Beckett, was a very colourful character. He liked to drink, and wasn’t exactly known for his political correctness. This, again, is something that Brigitte and I shared. You must remember, the world of academia, when I first met her almost fifteen years ago, was already pretty much in the grip of political correctness, and this is something that we both felt rather uncomfortable with, in the end. Literature is a human science, and humour is an incredibly important aspect to exposing human failures. This is why you had the tragic and comic masks to represent the dual nature of man and which were the sign of the theatre; man, since the time of the ancient Greeks, had both a tragic and a comic nature. These twin masks, according to Beckett himself, were equally represented by the two ancient Greek philosophers Democritus, the laughing philosopher, and Heraclitus, the weeping one. The latter was to become very important to me, as after I graduated, in 2013, Brigitte helped me to prepare for my first ever academic presentation which took place in UCD on the 3rd of August.
I was having difficulty focusing on the subject, I remember, and Brigitte had agreed to meet up with me over a coffee in order to give me a little direction as to how I show approach my presentation. I shall always remember what she said to me that day. Heraclitus had to be like the sun upon which all the other topics which came up in my presentation had to gravitate around like the planets in our own universe. It was a very apt analogy, and of course this was so typical of Brigitte. She was aware of Heraclitus and the sign of fire, the Heraclitean element par excellence. So, she chose the fiery planet, the one which generated the most heat and fire, the one which was central to our universe. The Heraclitean planet par excellence…the Sun!
Well, I gave my presentation. It was a memorable day for me, so much so that I even wrote a short novella, More Micks than Dicks and which Brigitte was kind enough to help me launch in The Palace Bar, in 2017. Heraclitus was, once again, the main protagonist apart from Beckett in my novella, and Brigitte did a wonderful thing as she managed to trace, in that forensic way of hers, the first appearance of Heraclitus back in the writings of Samuel Beckett. She knew that this was a topic that was very dear to me, and so she went out of her way to bring me back this bit of knowledge to which I could add to my existing stockpile. It wasn’t the first time that she had supported me in this way. As she had equally helped me launch my first real collection of poetry, The Dark Pool, two years earlier as part of Donkey Shots a poetry festival that I had organised in the spring of that year.
I was quite sick at the time, I was also unemployed and things were not easy. Having worked in education, like Brigitte, for over ten years (we were actually working colleagues for a year in DCU the year that I eventually obtained my Masters, in 2013) and suffered a complete physical and mental break down, what is called ‘burn out’. I don’t know to what extent Brigitte was aware of my declining physical and mental health at the time, but what I do know is that when I asked her if she would write the preface for my book, she did so without hesitation and she wrote me a preface in both English and French that I remain extremely proud of to this day. You see, Brigitte had an intellectual honesty about her when it came to literature particularly. Despite her good sense of humour, Brigitte was no fool, and she did not suffer fools. She had an iron discipline, as any of her former students will testify to. She did not enjoy making fools of people, she let them do that all by themselves. But, whenever someone was being annoyingly foolish, egotistical say, Brigitte had a very gentle yet firm manner of letting them know when they should remain silent.
She had a dual nature, I suppose and it was not one or another but rather it was altogether more than that, it was syncretic. Nietzsche was at pains to point this out whenever he spoke about Heraclitus, as it is the most common error people make when they are referring to the pre-Socratic thinker. As people who do not fully understand him tend to think about him in a categorical way, which of course is an Aristotelian notion. How can you think categorically about a pre-Socratic thinker? No, you had to think in an altogether other way about him, as he did not think categorically. He thought about of things being in a permanent state of being, in other words in simple aspect if you will, but only as in eternal flux, so a continuous flow of BEING eternal. This is what I mean by syncretic. This is a very difficult thing to think about, as we live in a post-Aristotelian world, but if you wish to really get an understanding of the way in which Heraclitus thought, you had to make the very considerable effort to do so and not fall into lazy habits or practice.
This is what Brigitte taught me as a teacher and as a human, I would say. I want to just end on parrots, as Brigitte Le Juez loved parrots. She once gave a presentation about Elizabeth Bowen and how she viewed writers as nothing more than highly skilled parrots. Brigitte loved animals and nature in general. But, parrots were her favourite bird. And so, when I came across her article on parrots in Beckett, I was very excited. As this theme seemed to embody so much so the very spirit of Brigitte. In this article, she was particularly interested in the parrot in Molloy, Beckett’s first real novel in French ( 1951), and perhaps his greatest. I particularly love Molloy, I have just completed a 6000 word article on how it is a Heraclitean novel, which if it is ever published I promise I will dedicate to Brigitte. But, to get back to the parrot. Let me leave you with Beckett’s own words, as they will tell you a lot about Brigitte’s humour and why she loved so much animals and literature, and why she thought that all writers were but exalted parrots in the end.
Il ne disait de temps en temps, Putain de conasse de merde de chiason.
Il avait dû appartenir à Lousse. Les animaux changent souvent de
propriétaire. Il ne disait pas grand’ chose d’autre. Si, il disait aussi,
Fuck! Peut-être qu’il l’avait trouvé tout seul, ça ne m’étonnerait pas.
Lousse essayait de lui faire dire, Pretty Polly! Je crois que c’était
trop tard. Il écoutait, la tête de côté, réfléchisait, puis disait, Putin de
conasse de merde de chiason.[1]
[1] Beckett, Samuel: Molloy, Collection “double”, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 2002.
