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L'herbe Rouge by Boris Vian

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Intimate anarchy and the tyranny of memory: a political reading of L'Herbe rouge

There are times when science fiction abandons the stars and galaxies far, far away to plunge into the abyss of the human psyche. With L’Herbe rouge (which translates to "The Red Grass"), published in 1950, Boris Vian created a strange tale, somewhere between poetic narrative, existential satire and speculative fiction, making it a suitable object for study. By far his most personal tale, L’Herbe rouge reveals, beneath a layer of grotesquerie and absurdity, the wavering of a self that no longer believes in its own continuity. This bitter novel seems haunted by an intimate disenchantment, that of a man who, even by submitting his world to his will, fails to love, remember or live. It is as if Vian, through Wolf’s main character, was staging the fiction of absolute disengagement, an attempt at mental retreat in the face of the contradictions of the modern world. Yet here is an enterprise that fails precisely because it rejects connection and memory.

Its hero, Wolf, who is a taciturn engineer, invents a machine designed to purge his mind of all suffering, to free himself from the weight of memories that oppress him, from his lingering coming of age anxieties. But this project to radically lighten one’s load, under the guise of intimate technology to better lead one’s life, opens onto another kind of vertigo, that of literal self-effacement, of complete emptiness, of an autonomy that has become a disaster. In all of that, L’Herbe rouge raises a fundamental question, which the prism of speculative fiction enables to explore more deeply. What happens to an individual who claims to govern his interiority alone, without history, otherness or memory? Through dreamlike colors and descriptions that are sometimes absurd, sometimes lyrical, the text sketches the outlines of an inner utopia that, far from leading to peace, precipitates its character into a form of abyss that we will call intimate anarchy, where self-sovereignty becomes self-destruction.

Our aim is to show how L’Herbe rouge sets up this intimate anarchy, a radical rejection of emotional, social and memory ties, in the name of total autonomy, which ultimately turns into inner tyranny. Far from mere poetic delirium, Vian’s novel formulates an interesting hypothesis: what if absolute freedom came through self-effacement? It is from this tension, between intimate anarchy and the impulse to erase, that I will undertake a political reading of the novel. Articulating an analysis of the text with reflections by Paul Ricœur on memory, Michel Foucault on the technologies of power, Hannah Arendt on the modern condition and many more, we will question the promises and dangers of a freedom without ties and without a past. For perhaps where fiction invites us to imagine a future where people are finally free of themselves, in reality it only reveals the impossible, i.e. an emancipation that no longer has a subject.
For this purpose, we will pose the following key question: How does the project of radical autonomy proposed by Boris Vian in L’Herbe rouge reveal a political critique of the myth of the sovereign individual?
To answer this question, we will begin by examining how the novel constructs a speculative fantasy of self-mastery through the figure of the machine and its scientific logic. We will then analyze how this pursuit of radical autonomy leads Wolf toward the erosion of his own subjectivity. Finally, we will show that beneath its surreal and ironic tone, L’Herbe rouge unfolds as a genuine political critique, where fiction serves as a mirror reflecting the contradictions of a liberal ideal of freedom.
I/ The machine of self and the fantasy of inner mastery
From the very first pages of L’Herbe rouge, Wolf’s machine is central to the novel. Vian opens the second paragraph with a description of the settings: “Across the red grass of the country [...] the machine, a hundred paces away, carved the sky with its grey steel structure, encircling it with inhuman triangles.”[1] An object of pure fiction, what we might also call the novum, it makes no claim to technological realism, since it speaks, questions, judges, listens and, above all, thinks. Designed by Wolf to free him from painful memories, it embodies what we might call a utopia of controlled interiority, in which the individual seeks to neutralize all emotional memories and finally achieve inner peace. But this quest is part of a fantasy of total self-sovereignty, in which the past, perceived as a source of alienation, is entirely purgeable. In this way, the machine functions less as a therapeutic tool than as an instrument of the subject’s domination over himself. Nevertheless, such an undertaking to neutralize the past presupposes that memory is seen as a purely internal and private element. It is precisely this view that Paul Ricœur questions in his analysis of personal and collective memory in La Mémoire, l’Histoire, l’Oubli. He shows that the question is not simply to know who remembers, the “I” or the “we”, but to understand how personal memory is constituted within a network of shared connections, like the weaving of a spider’s web.

He writes:
“The problem of the relationship between individual and collective memory will not be closed for all that. [...] A distinct but mutual and intersecting constitution of individual and collective memory must be considered.”[2]

Yet Wolf’s machine is precisely designed to break this “mutual and intersecting” constitution, since it isolates memory in a self-centered space, disconnecting it from any collective or even family narrative. We might read this as a process of “disinscribing” the subject in human history. By neutralizing all ties linked to the past, Wolf does not liberate himself, but rather cuts himself off from his history and his place in that of humanity. He loses the symbolic link to the other characters, to his family, to his origins. He doesn’t become master of himself, he becomes non-existent to others. In this sense, the machine doesn’t produce a liberating utopia, but rather an inner tyranny, where the subject forces himself into oblivion in the same way as one forces himself into a destructive inner law. It is a speculative trap, in both senses of the word, since it is a device for anticipation, but also a distorting mirror of a desire for inner omnipotence. Thus, far from being a space of reinvention or emancipation, one could say that the memory machine becomes the theater of an intimate politics of resentment. As Muldoon sums up in “The Power of Forgetting: Ressentiment, Guilt, and Transformative Politics”:
“I conclude by suggesting that many of the symptoms critics ascribe to the surfeit of memory- the culture of victimhood, the tyranny of guilt, the displacement of action, and the eclipse of visionary modes of imagining the future- may in actual fact be the product of forgetting.”[3]
But beyond this fantasy of autonomy, the machine also reveals a deeper logic, that of an internalized power that we can define as both technical and normative, which transforms memory into an object of management, and this is what we’re going to see in the next section. The machine in L’Herbe rouge not only erases the past and purges memory, it also embodies a form of existence in which the subject becomes both the operator and the target of an invisible disciplinary process. Wolf voluntarily submits himself to a cold, technological and technicalized procedure, believing himself to be liberated, even as he integrates within himself the mechanisms of judgment, as well as a process of selection and elimination (which memories to keep, which to erase). It is this type of power that Michel Foucault identifies as disciplinary in Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish). Discipline, he writes, refers to a set of power techniques that permeate social structures, school, family, administration, religion, and that shape behavior according to a logic of “normalization.”[4] Thus, this discipline acts as a set of procedures aimed at defining behavior to make it correspond to norms, in order to bring out the figure of the “normal” subject. In this logic, memory is no longer an intimate place, if it ever was, but becomes a target of power as well as an object to be monitored, sorted and thus modified. This is precisely what the machine in L’Herbe rouge represents. Presented by its creator as an instrument of liberation, since its aim is to help Wolf free himself from the weight of the past, it actually engages in a completely normative sorting process. The subject believes he is purifying himself, but according to implicit criteria since he is eliminating what is useless, shameful, painful and irrational. In this way, Boris Vian makes a shift from autonomy to conformity and from supposed individual sovereignty to standardization. What Wolf experiences as emancipation is, in reality, a self-application of the dominant social and psychological norms. In other words, he doesn’t become freer, he becomes governable by himself, he ends up self-disciplining, according to a logic of inner optimization. This mechanism extends to the technical question of memory, as Bernard Stiegler explains that human memory is never merely biological, but is always linked to technical supports (such as writing, images, media, sounds) that enable collective transmission. Foucault had already dealt with a similar idea, itself derived from Platon’s philosophy, when he described these mnemonic objects as “hypomnemata”, which are a sort of registers, reminders, personal notes intended to be reread regularly by their author to remind him or herself of them. It’s interesting to mobilize this concept because Vian’s machine reverses this process. It neither stores nor transmits anything. It works in reverse, imposing oblivion as its operating principle, detaching the subject from its history. Consequently, this kind of forced forgetting constitutes a gesture of de-subjectivation, an anihilation of the very condition of subject, since the latter ceases to construct itself in duration, no longer inhabiting its own time and becoming detached from any narrative or historical continuity. It is precisely in this excessive staging that the novel becomes part of the logic of speculative fiction. As Paul Kirby points out,
“Science fiction and its cousins have always been understood as disruptive and potentially subversive, most obviously when they served as satires on great persons or forewarnings of disaster, but also as summations of the mood of an epoch.”[5]
In this way, science fiction distorts and amplifies the features of the political present, in order to bring out its deeper tensions. In this novel, Wolf’s grotesque machine doesn’t seek to predict technical progress, as is sometimes the case in science fiction, but rather to exaggerate a contemporary gesture, in other words, how to manage one’s memory like a company manages its waste. The machine thus reveals an internal politics of sorting, of permanent self-evaluation and strategic erasure. Wolf himself makes this clear in a revealing confession from one of his sessions, he says:
“I was led to believe, in sixth grade, that getting through seventh grade had to be my only progress... in 11th grade, I had to pass the bachot... and then, a diploma... Yes, I thought I had a goal, Mr. Brul... and I had nothing... I was advancing down a corridor with no beginning, no end, trailing behind fools, preceding other fools.”[6]

This memory, far from being anecdotic, sums up a whole trajectory of biographical normalization that begins with school, then diplomas, then work, all played out like an imposed scenario. But contrary to what Wolf is looking for, the machine, by extracting these normative memories, does not liberate him, it makes him measure the extent of the void. To conclude, this device ties in with the logic of biopower defined by Foucault in La Volonté de savoir.

According to him, modern power is no longer limited to ordering death; it acts on life itself, by organizing behavior and consequently memories[7]. This is the whole point of this machine. It exerts no direct violence, but governs existence from within, transforming subjectivity into an object of management, producing a conforming, smooth self, devoid of past or traumatic experiences. What Vian shows here through this machine, is the erasure of the subject through an excess of control, not a lack of freedom.
II/ Individual utopia as a political dead end, from autonomy to self-annihilation
Wolf is not a tragic hero struggling against the world, nor a rebel conscious of his chains. He is a tired being who seems to want to dissolve rather than transform his surroundings. As the novel progresses, he cuts one by one all the ties that bind him to the world, starting with his close relationships, which he struggles to keep alive. This shift is not spectacular, but insidious, it takes the form of an inner anarchy, a silent rejection of all debt to others and to the past. A dialogue with Lil, his wife, provides a striking illustration. Indeed, when Lil offers herself to him as a possibility for the future after realizing his partner’s distress, Wolf replies:
“Yes, says Wolf. There would be you, but you can’t be someone else. That’s two. You’re complete. The whole you is too much; and everything is worth keeping, so you have to be different.”[8]
This rejection is not violent, but it is bitter. What he rejects is not Lil as a person, but the very fact that there are “two”. Being two is already too much, and the other seems to be an excess, a threat to his desire for closed unity. This moment crystallizes a desire for psychic purity, in which all otherness is perceived as an obstacle. This scene echoes the distinction proposed by Avishai Margalit in The Ethics of Memory, between “thick” and “thin” relations. The former, he argues, are rooted in concrete attachments (lovers, friends, relatives, compatriots), based on proximity, shared memory and loyalty. The latter, more universal, are based on abstract relationships, such as those between non related human beings or between citizens. He notes in his introduction,
“Memory is the cement that holds thick relations together, and communities of memory are the obvious habitat for thick relations and thus for ethics. By playing such a crucial role in cementing thick relations, memory becomes an obvious concern of ethics, which is the enterprise that tells us how we should conduct our thick relations.”[9]
Yet everything Wolf does in the novel consists of breaking these thick relationships. He destroys the bonds of love, starting with his wife and his friends Folavril and Lazuli, then denying the shared history he has built up over the years. He evacuates memories as if they were a burden, blind to the fact that in destroying memory, he also deserts ethics. In the end, memory doesn’t oppress him, but it reminds him that he’s involved somewhere, that he’s part of a social context. And he clearly cannot tolerate that.

Since Wolf is not free, he uses this inner anarchy to enclose himself in a sterile isolation that goes beyond the intimate sphere. By renouncing ties, Wolf also renounces any form of shared action, and so personal withdrawal becomes a political dead end. As we have shown so far, Wolf’s project of radical autonomy initially appears to be an inner quest. But as the character confronts the vertiginous void into which the machine leads him, the novel reveals a deeper truth, for one come to realize that this psychic withdrawal leads to a political paralysis. Of course, we’re not referring here to the partisan sense of the term, but by cutting all ties Wolf also renounces any capacity for action in the common world. Indeed, the desubjectification we’ve been talking about so far is also synonymous with the annihilation of the subject as a political-historical actor. There are two ways of reading this. In In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, David Rieff argues that excessive collective memory can breed resentment and perpetuate conflict, as he writes that perhaps,
“What if, instead of heralding the end of meaning, a decent measure of communal forgetting is actually the sine qua non of a peaceful and decent society, while remembering is the politically, socially, and morally risky pursuit.”[10]
If we follow this reasoning, forgetting would be the condition for peace, or at least a political act of de-escalation. But this total oblivion, taken to the extreme by Wolf, amounts to a form of total extinction, not only of oneself but also of the world. Yet this concept of oblivion is not neutral. As Paul Muldoon points out, in rereading Nietzsche, “a certain kind of cruelty, either against others or towards oneself, is the sine qua non of forgetting.”[11] To function, forgetting presupposes symbolic or real violence, but it also presupposes privilege. Not everyone is in a position to forget what they have been through, especially when it comes to systemic, sexual, racial or economic violence. In Wolf’s case, this cruelty is directed at himself, and he psychically mutilates himself, hoping to find a point of stability in nothingness. Erasure here becomes a form of sacrificial management of individuality, whereas one might suggest that forgiveness (whether turned towards oneself or others) lies neither in obsessive memory nor in outright oblivion, but presupposes a commitment to the other and an exit from oneself. So, in refusing memory, he also refuses the future, and this is Vian’s firm stance, since Wolf dies at the end of the novel, abandoning any possibility of the future. But where it gets interesting is that this refusal of any commitment to a common world, whether through the erasure of memory or the rejection of otherness, produces a radical political effect, i.e. the disappearance of action, as mentioned earlier. As Hannah Arendt points out, plurality as she defines it by the coexistence of distinct beings in a common world, is the factual condition of all political action.[12] Without this plurality, there can be no public space, no shared initiative, no truly human beginning. Thus, by rejecting the link, Wolf renounces the very condition of all politics.
III. L’Herbe rouge as a critical fiction of liberal sovereignty
The end of L’Herbe rouge brings neither resolution nor catharsis. Wolf dies without drama, as if he were fading away rather than disappearing. His death is not a tragic fall, but the logical completion of a process that reduces memory, the ego and thus all relationships. It marks the failure of an individual’s project to live entirely in inner autarky, governed by himself alone. It seems to me that this fantasy corresponds to the myth of the modern liberal man inherited from the Enlightenment, in other words, the idea of a rational, autonomous subject, master of his own decisions and thoughts, for whom social ties are secondary. The novel proposes a radical speculative experiment, and the result is a counter-utopia (not quite a dystopia, but we could imagine one if machines like these were democratized). Once again, the myth of the sovereign individual leads not to freedom, but to nothingness. Far from strengthening the individual, absolute autonomy disintegrates them. However, this myth of the sovereign individual lies at the heart of modern political thought. For Hobbes, the human being is first and foremost an isolated individual, driven by fear, and it is to escape this insecurity that he accepts a social contract.[13] With Wolf, however, there is no longer anyone but himself. He signs an inner contract, without community or without world. The fear he tries to eliminate is no longer that of war or death, but that of memory. Here, Vian anticipates trends that seem very relevant today. In Technofictions, Pierre Cassou-Noguès describes a world where everyone manages themselves like a small system; an application would enable us to converse with the dead, a device would display our moods and those of our loved ones in real time, personalized notifications would guide us continuously to optimize our emotions, we would measure our sleep and so on and so forth.[14] Wolf’s machine already resembles these modern tools for mental self-monitoring. It is the nightmare of a subject who wants to get rid of everything that makes them a living being, i.e. a conflicted being intrinsically linked to the world around them. That is why the novel’s strength lies in its speculative approach. As Paul Kirby explains, by exaggerating certain trends, fiction helps us to see what we accept as normal, and to imagine the consequences.[15]
In conclusion, Boris Vian’s work is not only a novel of singular tone and structure, but also a work that, through speculative fiction, questions some of the foundations of our political modernity. By portraying a man who tries to free himself through oblivion, who rejects the world to withdraw into a governable interiority, Vian constructs a fine, often ironic critique of the modern myth of the sovereign individual. Behind Wolf’s machine lurks the contemporary dream of a self entirely transparent to itself, free from memory, others and the past, but leading to a nightmare. Radical autonomy becomes solitude, self-mastery becomes desubjectification, and the quest for inner unity leads to the impossibility of acting in a shared world. This is where L’Herbe rouge finds all its political force. By deploying an absurd but lucid exemple of speculative fiction, Vian shows that the individual can only construct himself through memory. The liberal subject, when it cuts itself off from all “conflictuality”, ends up losing what makes it alive. Both an imaginary experiment and an exposure of the logic of psychic power, the novel anticipates the excesses of a world where freedom becomes self-management, and memory a burden to be erased. This is why, in this uncertain space between philosophy, politics and fiction, L’Herbe rouge written by Boris Vian 75 years ago acts as a distorting but revealing mirror of our fragile modern sovereignties.

[1] Boris Vian, L’Herbe rouge, Paris : Éditions du Livre Contemporain, 1950, p. 5.
[2] Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris : Seuil, 2000), chap. VI « Mémoire personnelle, mémoire collective », p. 129.
[3] Paul Muldoon, “The Power of Forgetting: Ressentiment, Guilt, and Transformative Politics,” Political Psychology, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2017), pp. 672–673.
[4] Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris : Gallimard, 1975), chap. III, “Panoptisme”.
[5] Paul Kirby, “Political Speech in Fantastical Worlds,” International Studies Review, vol. 19, no. 4 (2017), p. 585.
[6] Boris Vian, L’Herbe rouge, Paris : Éditions du Livre Contemporain, 1950, p. 125.
[7] Michel Foucault, La Volonté de savoir, Paris : Gallimard, 1976, chap. 5 : « Droit de mort et pouvoir sur la vie ».
[8] Boris Vian, L’Herbe rouge, Paris : Éditions du Livre Contemporain, 1950, p. 135.
[9] Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 9.
[10] David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, New Haven : Yale University Press, 2016, p. 147.
[11] Paul Muldoon, “The Power of Forgetting: Ressentiment, Guilt, and Transformative Politics,” Constellations, vol. 24, no. 1, 2017, p. 669.
[12] Hannah Arendt, La Condition de l’homme moderne, trad. G. Fradier, Paris, Gallimard, 1983, chap. V.
[13] Thomas Hobbes, Le Léviathan, trad. G. Mairet, Paris : Gallimard, 2000, chapitres XIII–XIV.
[14] Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Technofictions, Paris : Cerf, 2019.
[15] Paul Kirby, “Political Speech in Fantastical Worlds: Internal Sovereignty and the Self-Overcoming of Memory,” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2017, p. 317.