Claude Lanzmann's Self-Love

“To love oneself,” as Oscar Wilde (who knew more than most about the matter) once quipped, “is the beginning of a life-long romance.” Anyone doubting the truth of this observation need only dip into Claude Lanzmann’s simultaneously compelling and repelling memoir, The Patagonian Hare, to see that, if anything, Wilde was understating the case. Even the most passionate of lifelong romances tend to cool with time. But not only is Lanzmann, 86, still in love with Claude Lanzmann, but the temperature of his self-involvement seems only to have risen with the passing decades. Even the book’s title—a reference to a breed of hares, dozens of which bounded in front of his headlights as he drove through a dark forest in northern Yugoslavia during a trip there in the early 1950s—is an act of primitive appropriation. For Lanzmann, the hare is a pure expression in animal form of the life force, of the will to freedom. And while he doesn’t quite say he is its human incarnation, the reader is left in no doubt that this is precisely what he believes. “If there is any truth to metempsychosis and if I were given the choice,” he writes, “I would unhesitatingly choose to come back as a hare.”