Tag Archives: Maurice Blanchot

Alina Stefanescu’s Year in Reading, 2022

Posted on by under book review, Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Today’s reflection on a year in reading, her second for the blog, is by the inimitable Alina Stefanescu (@aliner). Alina was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

Hervé Guibert, Self-portrait, in front of the Christ mirror

Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside and Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him by Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman (Zone Books, 1987)

Imagine Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot sitting down to portrait the silences in each other’s texts. [Ed. – Lowly editor finds “portrait” an… odd verb here; writer prefers to be a “terrible poet” and keep it. Editor concedes that she’s the artist. P.S. terrible poet as in poete terrible…] Imagine Foucault smoothing his plaid pants and typing:

In ancient times, this simple assertion was enough to shake the foundations of Greek truth: “I lie.” “I speak,” on the other hand, puts the whole of modern fiction to the test.

Speech about speech, or speaking, leads us to what Foucault calls “the outside in which the speaking subject disappears.” In trying to explain why Blanchot’s fiction is indiscernible from his essays and reviews, Foucault also probes what exactly it is that fiction does differently. He locates the “peril” of fiction’s vocabulary in its reliance on familiarity, or its evocation of meanings that “stitch the old fabric of interiority back together in the form of an imagined outside.”

The window is the problem here. Like his description of Blanchot, it is language that speaks around its frame. Although Monoskop gives us Foucault’s part of the book, Blanchot’s is hidden. One could mine this for metaphors or resort to buying the print version, as I did. Either way, this book gives us both thinkers at their best—at their most exposed, visceral, and dangerous.

Kate Colby’s Reverse Engineer  (Ornithopeter Press, 2022)

This poetry collection felt like riding an abandoned rollercoaster in a desert haunted by Edmond Jabes’s silences and Rosmarie Waldrop’s close attention to language. I lingered over it, and marked how it circles the question of silence as in the Foucault-Blanchot book, where Foucault wrote: “Literature is not language approaching itself until it reaches the point of its fiery manifestation; it is rather language getting as far away from itself as possible.”

To “reverse engineer” is to study by deconstructing, or to take apart a finished object in order to build it back and understand how it is made. Is the book the reverse engineer – or is it the poet?

The title poem, “Reverse Engineer,” rubs the definition, or the act of defining, in order to draw closer to meaning and language. Borrowing apophatic strategies from mystical theology, Kate Colby approaches the real by negation, by speaking only of what cannot be said. Each word is a mystery, and attempting to speak of the human condition leads to this sort of repetitive negation. The mode of defining by undoing is visible in “Integer,” for example, where an asterisk in the poem (“*a thing complete in itself “) doesn’t designate a note at the bottom of the page. Here, the asterisk is the thing complete in itself, rather than serving its usual referential role. The asterisk signals something, but gives us nothing. I still can’t get over it.

“I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole”: An Elias Canetti Reader by Elias Canetti, as edited by Joshua Cohen (Macmillan, 2022)

Joshua Cohen’s acuity finally gives us a compilation of Elias Canetti’s extensive opus in small form. His introduction to Canetti’s work is wickedly well-written and engaging. To quote, to note, to invoke:

I might take counsel from Canetti’s wife Veza, herself a novelist of high accomplishment, who once wrote in a letter to Canetti’s brother Georg: “No document that gives access to Canetti’s inmost being must be allowed to survive.”

Or I might take counsel from Georg, who, when Veza asked him to destroy that letter—to destroy all her letters—did not.

And that, I’m realizing, is the best approach: to address myself to the destructions that did happen, to address myself to the burnings.

Included are various excerpts from Canetti’s memoirs, his meditations on family, friends and frenemies—Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus (“a master of accusing people with their own words”), Thomas Mann, Robert Musil—as well as his previously untranslated aphorisms addressed to death.

At one point, Canetti describes his growing awareness of what he called the “acoustic masks” of each person’s voice and way of seeing, particularly their repetitions, intonation, relationship to language. He sits in a bar with his face to a wall and listened as voices moved around him, as they withdrew and returned and misunderstood each other. [Ed. – Sounds like Henry Green, who might have been in the same pub. They were in London at the same time, right?] The solipsism of subjectivity surrounds us at high volume. “It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves,” Canetti whispers.

It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova, trans. Elina Alter(Deep Vellum, 2023)

“The world cannot be captured by a net,” Alla Gorbunova told Alexandra Tkacheva in an interview in Punctured Lines. Like the world, Gorbunova’s recent book and its surreal St. Petersburg, refuses to be classified or captured. Haunted by folklore, baba-energy, apparatchiks, nomenbratura [ed. – Had to look that one up!], and freshly-minted billionaires, the speakers lose the thread of their thoughts only to find them in the mouth of another. Humor, malice, and agony are indistinguishably betrothed in these linked tales. One senses the chaos of the postsocialist period in Russia in the sheer opportunism and magical thinking of the female speakers. There is no distance between the past and present, Gorbunova seems to insist, the costumes have changed but the lies are the same, as in “Treasures in Heaven: A Tale of God and the Billionaire,” where God drops by to ask the billionaire for a loan. “A story unfolds, often retold,” Gorbunova writes:

“Like this,” said the billionaire, “in my heart there is a needle, it has an eye, in the eye is the gate to heaven.” As soon as the billionaire’s wife heard this, she decided that she wanted to live in heaven, thinking that everything is expensive there, they have all kinds of things, and she climbed into the billionaire’s heart, found the needle, and tried to pass through, but she couldn’t.

Narrative tension builds from the impossible hope to escape the past. One is struck by the eternal pageant of misogyny, and the extent to which no ideology has managed to improve life for Russian women. Elina Alter’s translation brings these defamiliarized scenes to life.

I could see Daniil Kharms grinning at what Gorbunova has wrought, for, as it is written in the final paragraph of “Lord of the Hurricane”:

We don’t know what goes on in the apartment upstairs. We’ve never known. We walk around our apartment in little tin-foil hats. There’s a tornado in Moscow. Our neighbor is a bastard.

Nothing is clarified or explained. We paint our bodies blue to protect ourselves from the curse of whatever comes next in the ashes of failed religion and ideologies. We are all mad, somehow. What does it mean to survive or thrive under such circumstances? What sort of human can be successful as the world ends?

Michel Foucault, with a bullhorn

Foucault in Warsaw  by Remigiusz Ryziński, trans. Sean Gasper Bye (Open Letter Books, 2021)

Obsession authors extraordinary literature. In 1959, French theorist Michel Foucault was mysteriously expelled from Poland. The archival silence, the absence of documents explaining Foucault’s Polish chapter, so obsessed Remigiusz Ryziński that he wrote a book about it. Foucault in Warsaw is driven by this search for what, if anything, the Polish government had on Foucault. [Eed. – He was ordered to leave Poland in 1958 after possibly having been entrapped by a Polish secret agent; homosexuality was technically legal in Poland at the time, but much condemned.] Shifting between intellectual history and descriptions of his search on the ground, Ryziński chases the mystery of Foucault’s secrecy regarding the Warsaw chapter, when he wrote most of his doctoral dissertation (though it was published in France in 1961). In the preface to the first French edition of The History of Madness, Foucault described the dissertation as beginning on a “a Swedish night” and being “finished in the stubborn bright sun of Polish liberty.” Like Ryziński, Foucault was doing archival research for this book which developed into his first poststructuralist work. To know, for Foucault, is to study, to subject to rigorous, microscopic examination. “Madness is the lack of knowledge,” writes Ryziński, which he takes as central to understanding why Foucault’s dissertation doesn’t provide a history of madness or knowledge—since neither really exists—but focuses instead on “the archaeology of silence,” the articulation of the unspeakable. Gaining knowledge of that which defies knowledge (or unreason) exposes the tension between reason and madness, which is to say, the “normal” cannot “know madness, and so madness remains unthinkable, and light shed on it cannot dispel ignorance.” [Ed. – He had a big fight about Derrida over what the latter took as Foucault’s romantic idea of madness. Anyway, this book sounds great!]

Ryziński knows that Foucault was gay. And he knows that homosexuality was not welcomed by the Polish communist state. Although he suspects that this is the reason for Foucault’s disgrace, he wants evidence—the sort of knowledge that enables the past to become part of what we call history. He finds that homosexuality wasn’t technically a criminal offense, but sex work and prostitution were crimes punishable by law. The writer’s education transpires in this intellectual kinship which leads a reader to hide the archives for a missing history (I don’t want to give away the ending). Foucault’s attention to “conspicuous silences” troubled the balance between binaries—madness or sanity, female or male, heterosexual or gay—and the ontology of freedom, I think, which can only exist alongside prisons, slavery, and repression. The theorist deconstructs and builds nothing to replace what has been ruined, but there is no prescriptive menu, the normative states as the handmaiden of power.

“Knowledge about madness is the illusion of knowledge about anything,” Ryziński argues. This reflects on Foucault’s amoral and limited idea of freedom. At some point, Foucault went to Gdańsk and Krakow to lecture on Apollinaire. The handwritten draft of this lecture, currently housed in Foucault’s archives, is one of the few things he brought back from Poland. It has never been published. Ryziński’s relentless fascination becomes one’s own.

Jósef Czapski, Self-portrait with Lightbulb, 1958

Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942 by Jozef Czapski, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (NYRB Classics, 2018)

Only the sky can save us, I thought after reading Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942 byJozef Czapski, a Polish painter, committed pacifist, and involuntary witness who survived incarceration in a Soviet prison camp and lived long enough to look back on a life between prisons, borders, and 20th century horrors. With Proust in one hand and Gide in another, Czapski details the kindness of strangers, the friendships that bloomed in carceral spaces, the devastation of war. While fighting to defend Poland, Czapski was captured by the Soviets. He was one of the few officers to survive the Katyn massacre of 1940. To forget would be a crime against those whose mouths had been frozen shut by death.

The Inhuman Land was translated into English in 1951 because, to quote the dread wiki, this “first-hand account of contemporaneous negotiations with the Soviets over the missing Polish officers . . . became an important document until Russian guilt for the massacres was acknowledged.” Czapski also testified before the US Congress on what Soviet troops had done. This documentary record traces his journey through Soviet Russia trying to find out what happened to the officers of his former regiment. The faces of the living and dead torment Czapski. He remembers; he looks for documents; he takes notes; he gets sick. There is a part where his recollections pause near the hospital window, in the room where he almost died, roiled by fevers and excruciating pain—there, in that room, lacking a metaphysic, he longs for nothing except to exist at less agonized pitch. How is it, Czapski wondered, that respected humans are capable of egotism and self-protection? What does it mean to exist without feeling for others?

One can teach oneself self protective egoism by being standoffish for years on end, and if not egoism, then perhaps to be more detached toward fragile personal affections, more abstract. But what use is that, if I have never been able to see things other than through people. Even Poland has always been embodied for me by a few faces of the living and the dead.

As Czapski convalesced in that hospital room, “the cream white window frame against a pure blue, almost always cloudless sky, very bright in the mornings, then gradually darker, then brightening again, taking on a greenish hue.” [Ed. – I’m reminded of Sebald’s description of the sky outside his hospital window at the beginning of The Rings of Saturn.] This “evocation of a pure blue sky with objects set against it” segues to a recollection of Matisse’s paintings of southern Morocco, and then Gordi’s Piazza San Marco, a sort of mental gallery exhibit provoked by memories of colors and hues. There is a gallery in his mind. Czapski thought about “how a painter could pick out the “sound of that perfect blue, the shout of the white window frame against the azure sky.” From there, in that hospital bed, the remembered world appeared “totally unattainable,” yet it is these moments, gathered into vignettes and vistas, that form the material of the writer’s mind. It was the painter’s eye that saved him, the words on the brush, and the window with a view of the sky. [Ed. – OMG you put this so well; I gotta move this up Mount TBR.]

Although Czapski was intensely Catholic, his commitment to living in conscience was complicated by his religious affiliation. He doesn’t mention, for example, his love affair with Vladimir Nabokov’s younger brother, the poet Sergey Nabokov, from 1924 to 1926, which ended when Czapski went to London seeking medical assistance with his typhoid fever. (One wonders how hospital windows coincide in reverie, in silence, in commemoration.) [Ed. – Sergey died in Neuengammen in 1945, murdered by the Nazis.] When World War II began, Czapski was living in Józefów with the writer Ludwik Hering. The war separated them, and then Czapski moved to Paris, but their love affair continued by correspondence, and one wishes that this epistolary existence would be translated as well.

The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irene Nemirovsky By Her Daughter by Elisabeth Gille, trans. Marina Harss (NYRB Classics, 2011)

Irene Nemirovsky’s novel, David Golder, came out in 1929. She had left Russia to live in France with her husband. While living in France, Nemirovsky was arrested by the Gestapo when her daughter was five. She was deported to her death at Auschwitz in July 1942. (Her husband, Michael Epstein, died on the same Nazi transit in November of that year.) 

The orphaned daughter, Elisabeth Gille, published The Mirador: Dreamed Memoirs of Irene Nemirovsky By Her Daughter as a biography of her mother, narrated by the mother in first-person, as dreamt or imagined by Gille. In recording her mother’s memoirs as she imagined them, the daughter creates the child, Irene, raised in Kyiv who becomes a writer that refuses to identify as Jewish. There is a direct correspondence between Nemirovsky’s own letters and writings and the character “created” by Gille’s assiduous study of her mother. 

Central to these imaginings is the tension between Nemirovsky’s literary dreams and her own mother’s lavish lifestyle-hunger. Nemirovsky’s mother (who is technically Gille’s grandmother) pouted when she wasn’t gifted jewels. [Ed. — I mean, same…] In her daughter’s imagined memoirs, the young Nemirovsky scorns the Russian exiles of 1924 who gather in Paris like nihilistic, pleasure-seeking teenagers living for the moment, refusing to imagine the future. The Whites don’t believe the worst can happen—reality hovers, over-aerated, somewhere in the motion between floating and fleeting. The exiles ignore “the monuments, columns, steles, cenotaphs, each more pompous than the last, that were being erected everywhere, even in the smallest village.” Her glamorous mother, the status-seeking socialite, represents the world of the exiled elite to her; whose extravagant displays of luxury could not read the room. Nostrodamus prophesied that the end of the diaspora’s troubles would come in 1944, but the troubles continue. 

World War I taught the young that their elders had died for nothing: “There was nothing left of them but the path of extremism,” according to Gille’s Nemirovsky. The bourgeoisie had nothing to believe in apart from war, domination, and fear. One hears the auspices of Canetti’s later work on crowds when Gille writes that the schoolboy “prefers to be oppressed by a single bully rather than have complete freedom” and be abandoned to the unclear hierarchy of “the crowd.” The dreams written from the author’s longing to know her mother have not aged; the syntax skips across space and time seamlessly. One senses a “lever of love” (Vladimir Nabokov’s neologism for “the diabolical method of tying a rebel to his wretched country by his own twisted heartstrings”) wrestling within the portrayal of Nemirovsky. The heart aches for—and admires—the portrait a daughter creates of her defiant mother, in dialogue with her mother’s rejection of 19th-century high-status femininity which we consume in the present via Hollywood’s latest glam. 

The Mirador was published in French in 1992, several years before Irene Nemirovsky’s own Suite Française (which existed in manuscript form) was finally published posthumously in 2004. Unfortunately, Gille did not live to see her mother’s literary reputation secured. But she left a portrait that testifies to love’s studious imaginings and faithfulness.

Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature by Charles Baxter (Graywolf Press, 2022)

Baxter’s Wonderlands is a craft book that doesn’t read like a craft book. The range is profound and immediate, as in the section where Baxter discusses how the lies of politicians affect us when they become narratives which guide lives. The concept of deniability is political but also functions to normalize ignorance or subterfuge. (Gertrude Stein’s references to the thrill of unsubstantiated generalities apply.)

Baxter takes the absence of accountability in fiction as a contribution to conspiracy theory (I’d bracket this with an insistence on religion’s role in privileging belief as a form of knowledge that eschews evidence). Defining the “dysfunctional narrative” as a sort of key to the psyche in the novel where everything is caused by past trauma, Baxter observes that the story isn’t about the story but about the therapy that didn’t happen. The “political culture of disavowals” leads to the “fiction of finger-pointing.” Thus, the responsibility for therapy becomes part of the narrative task, and some of us feel this is too much to ask.

Why is the character unhappy? This matters to us because today happiness is an expectation. Since we can’t blame the abstract corporation, we blame the family who lived and labored under the myth of consumerism. We laugh at them as we consume ourselves. To Baxter, fictions which lack an antagonist “tend to formally mirror the protagonist’s unhappiness and confusion.” Daytime television, particularly talk-shows, make it seem as if family can carry the burden of individual unhappiness, Baxter observes. In their “therapeutic narration… no verdict ever comes in “and no one has the right to judge.” But what about the “poetry of a mistake,” the action’s meaning in time, “its sordid origin, its obscenity,” Baxter wonders. Not for him the glib shrug of Shit happens. Not for him the evasive structural gesture or the “moralizing” which has replaced ethics and self-reflexivity. The therapeutic narrative (or the “already moralized story”) steps in to relieve us from thinking while simultaneously depriving the characters’ actions of meaning. “The injury takes for itself all the meaning”; the injury claims the centerfold. Are we interested in victimization because we are ambivalent about our own desires for power and unequipped to acknowledge them? Error. Baxter suggests, is as true as success.

I relished Baxter’s discussion of performance anxiety in modern life, and how the pressure to perform an appropriate grief, joy, gratitude, etc., corrugates the scene of family reunions, weddings, funerals, etc. Is everyone at the reunion taking notes for their therapist? How do we navigate the extraordinary anxiety of being alive at a time when so much media and language purports to deliver variations on the correct script, the right thing to say when someone dies, the best, the ideal? Is one playing a role on a stage rather than living—is one waiting for the clap or the thunderous clap-back? Nothing anyone says can kill my mother more, but it’s easier for me to be furious at you for saying the wrong thing than to rage against the anonymity and haphazard injustice of loss. What Romanian writer Norman Manaea called “compulsory happiness” is similar to what Charles Baxter calls “compulsory sincerity,” the requirement that one feel a certain way and display it physically and verbally. Maybe even the interpreters are exhausted. Certainly, the literature could use a cold shower and a refresh.

Czapski’s lecture notes on Proust

In conclusion, a few books I found to be profoundly intriguing— and which I feel compelled to mention because critical attention often leapfrogs the intriguing in order to focus on the historically significant, the aesthetically attractive, or the well-marketed.

My Manservant and Me by Hervé Guibert, trans. by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Nightboat Books, 2022) for Zuckerman’s splendid translation of Guibert’s controversial book, and for the controversy that Guibert made of writing, personhood, and literary genre.

Disembodied by Christina Tudor-Sideri (Sublunary Editions, 2022) for the unique forests of Tudor-Sideri’s language, and the radical, interstitial resonances of her disembodied writing at a time when embodiment seems to be trending.

Chimeras by Daniella Cascella (Sublunary Editions, 2022) for reasons I’ve given elsewhere. [Ed. – I dunno, google it.]

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere (Catapult, 2021) for its Bernhardian self-implication and provocations, and for its thorough dethroning of the poet’s heroic self-mythos. “A fever of commemoration activity ensued,” the protagonist says— and the poets posed for selfies. For who is more commemorated in contemporary poetics than the poets, themselves? I appreciate being dragged through the mud by Riviere.

Death by Landscape: Essays by Elvia Elk (Soft Skull Press, 2019) for its rigorous interrogation of trauma and self-help bootstraps in the contemporary landscape.

Suicide by Édouard Levé, trans. by Jan Steyn (Dalkey Archive, 2011) because I cannot stop thinking about how epistolarity tangles with fiction, or how the last book we write before dying may be our suicide note. Levé is formidable, heart-breaking, and deeply beloved by this human.

Paradiso by Gillian Rose (Shearsman, 2015) for its vigorous beauty and painstaking attention to mortality, or what it means to live a thinking life.

Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czapski, trans. by Eric Karpeles (NYRB Classics, 2018) for the tenderness of encountering Proust in a carceral environment, and for the reminder that carceral systems remain spaces in which literature has the potential to save lives.

Falling Hour by Geoffrey Morrison (Coach House, 2023) [Ed. — Imma let a 2023 title on a 2022 year in review because it’s Alina and because this book is Canadian.] This was one of the most luscious, immersive, and mind-blowing literary journeys of my adult life. Morrison begins with poetry and wanders through globalization’s alienations in this lyrical, disembodied novel to which I return often, in a somewhat futile though diligent effort to uncover its multiple mysteries.

“The Old, Wild Blood”: Henri Bosco’s Malicroix

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A while back I suggested a group reading of Henri Bosco’s 1948 novel Malicroix, admirably translated by Joyce Zonana and published by NYRB Classics. Quite a few readers took me up on the suggestion, and some of them wrote about their experiences, either on their blogs or on Twitter (#Malicroix2020). It was great to see so much interest. Here I’ll highlight some of their observations, and then add some of my own.

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At the centre of Malicroix is its narrator, Martial de Mégremut, a young man who comes into a mysterious inheritance from a great-uncle on his mother’s side, the last full-fledged member of the Malicroix line. As the man’s only heir, Martial now owns “some marshland, a few livestock, a tumbled down house” on an island in the Rhone, that is, he will if he manages to live there for three months without setting foot on the mainland. He’s not alone, as he has the company of old Malicroix’s servant Balandran, as competent as he is silent, and the latter’s Briard, Bréquillet. (Everyone loves that dog; NYRB should make t-shirts.) From time to time, Malicroix’s lawyer, the sinister Dromiols, and the lawyer’s dogsbody, the oddly named Uncle Rat, drop in to make ominous noises. The lawyer turns out to have a personal interest/vendetta in the matter, and wants Martial to leave; by contrast, Rat turns out to be a mole, helping instead of harming the young man. The first half of the book details Martial’s first months on the island, through autumn fogs and winter storms, but Malicroix is not really a tale of survival—Balandran sees to Martial’s modest needs. It’s more a tale of psychological endurance, in which doing must be replaced by being. After the initial three months, however, Martial learns of a codicil that requires him to perform one more task, to exorcise a past wrong, and the last half of the book describes how he manages it.

Our little band of readers liked Malicroix a lot. (Though people who didn’t might not have felt compelled to write about it, so my sample might be skewed.) My comrades repeatedly described themselves as captivated by the novel’s depiction of isolation. But this atmosphere also made them uneasy. A novel that at first seems to be a primer on mindfulness eventually reveals itself as ominous, even threatening. For Karen, it was “immersive,” “hypnotic,” and “hallucinogenic.” That immersion also resonated with Meredith, who described herself as “living with” the book, not just reading it. Trevor found it “enriching,” but also “inquisitive” (a nice distinction—as if it’s not just readers who are curious about what’s going to happen, but also the text itself). Guy similarly found the novel “mysterious” and “cryptic.” Grant said the book put him on “high-alert”; he admired its “foreboding” and “threat.”

I too was drawn to this solitude. Given the circumstances in which we read it—sheltered in our homes around the world—the topic appealed to me even more strongly than usual. (I’m a sucker for books about people who jump the tracks of their lives to spend time alone—something I always fantasize about but am too frightened and/or constitutionally disinclined to do.) To live alone in a little house on a little island in a great river, with a small but doughty fire to keep off the chill and simple meals of lentils and rough wine to keep one’s spirits up—this minimalist, faux-peasant fantasy appealed to me. (Though I was frankly horrified that Martial has no books with him. None at all! Books, however, would distract from the matter of existing. The Mégremuts might have recourse to books. Books are not for the Malicroix!) The novel even sometimes plays up this minimalist element, as when Martial describes the house as one in which “everything was so clearly reduced to the soberest utility.”

Reading late at night, during a semester unlike any other, I was calmed by this aspect of the novel. I wasn’t the only one to think about it as a nighttime book. Meredith notes how many of its important actions—even if those “actions” are rain, wind, storms—happen at night. As befits this attention to surroundings, Malicroix is a great book of weather. It is atmospheric in the literal sense. The daily changes of Martial’s immediate environment matter a lot. No wonder the philosopher Gaston Bachelard cited it at length in his The Poetics of Space (which is where translator Zonana first encountered it). Bruce—whose erudite thoughts you can read in a comment on my original post—thought of this darkness in both literal and figurative senses. Comparing Malicroix to Bosco’s other work (which, with luck, non-French readers will be able to read before too long), he concluded that Bosco’s primary concern is:

the symbolic power of a lamp or candelabra surrounded by vast darkness; the sanctity and shelter of a building that envelops and protects a human, and which has a spirit of its own; the presence of full-blooded animation in nature all around; and the inner conflicts of blood and family history.

(Note that Bruce has used the term “blood” twice—fittingly, as it is Bosco’s central term; I’ll return to this in a moment.) Like Meredith and Bruce, Trevor also picked up on the novel’s captivating physicality. He writes:

This is a book to read in the late hours, which is also when much of it takes place. There are winter wind storms that will make you pull up the covers no matter what the temperature is in your room. The fire place in Martial’s room will also bring you comfort. Bosco — and his skillful translator Joyce Zonana — helped me to feel the physical and mental strains and comforts with our poor protagonist. I was particularly swept up in Martial’s lonesome Christmas Eve. Normally, surrounded by the Mégremuts who pray and feel the presence of angels, Martial, no matter how skeptical the rest of the year, is lifted by angels himself; not so on this Christmas in the Camargue.

Nighttime can be comforting, if one is inside, by a small fire, especially after coming inside from the elements. Even better if you’ve a dog “sigh[ing] with well-being” by the fire, “long tremors [running] along his spine as he closed his eyes to savor the pleasures of a warm hearth.” But nighttime is also, as Meredith notes, a time of obscurity, and this obscurity can be unsettling, to character and reader alike. For me, the vivid descriptions of night are inversely related to the confusing references to what happens at night: the more I thrilled to those scenes, the less I knew what happened during them. What is the task that Martial is asked to take up on July 16th, the anniversary of a terrible event in the old man’s life? Who is the woman who appears one night to tend to him? Is she real? Is she a figment? How does Martial respond to Malicroix’s final demand? (I mean this literally: what the hell actually happens at the end?)

What I’m saying is that the longer I read, the more confusing I found the book. I was wrongfooted by the turn from plotlessness to plot, and then wrongfooted once again by my inability to comprehend that plot. I was as adrift as the book’s few characters risk becoming any time they venture near the river. But then I read Tom’s series of excellent posts, which helped me see that reading Malicroix as a hymn to the simple life misses the point:

My impression is that readers have been enjoying reading about solitude, watching the fire, and the weather, the wind and rain that keeps Martial from even going for a walk. This is certainly part of the novel. But the mysticism is central to what I take the novel to be, as is the quest story, which I am not seeing anybody mention.

Pulling together otherwise disconnected bits of the text (references to east and west, the appearance of a blind ferryman, the role of a white bull), Tom reads the novel through the lens of Mithraism, the Roman mystery religion. Not only is Tom’s reading textually convincing (he explained stuff in the novel that made no sense to me), it’s also psychologically consoling, at least for me. The reason I was so confused is that the novel is about confusion! Or, more accurately, about the esoteric. Its questions are: who is an initiate—and what is the secret knowledge into which they are being initiated? Its plot forms a quest, undertaken by a hero who completes it in his own spirit, in Tom’s words, “for redemption and rebirth, rather than revenge.”

In making his claim, Tom referenced Frazier’s The Golden Bough, that late 19th century study of comparative religion and mythology that exercised such outsized influence in modernist Europe. That was the clincher for me—it made total sense, and also explained why I liked the book less as it went along. I’ve always been allergic to that sort of key-to-all-mythologies mystical revelation stuff (The Frazier-inspired parts of “The Waste Land” are my least favourite, for example.) But Tom’s reading, as always attuned to the big literary historical picture, allows us to characterize Malicroix as a (late) modernist syncretic text.

Emphasizing Mithraism in particular also brings out the Mediterranean elements of the novel, which fits with Bosco’s own life experiences (he spent decades in Italy and North Africa, as well as southern France). To me, it makes a lot more sense to call Malicroix Mediterranean than French—its Frenchness is evident primarily in the repeated term “wild,” Zonana’s translation of sauvage, which I can’t help hearing as a reference to Rousseau (no idea if that’s accurate).

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But the cultural-mystical-philosophical sweep of the novel interested me less than the psychology of the narrator. Tom’s point, I think, is that the latter always leads in this novel to the former. But I was interested in a strange push-pull in Martial’s character. Sometimes he seems passive (he never quite decides to stay on the island; he just doesn’t leave; he is depicted as a child, as exemplified by his first night in the little house, when he awakes to find that someone—Balandran, of course, though he doesn’t know it yet—has pulled a blanket over him). But other times he is active, deliberate, as in his “solution” to the task imposed by the codicil. In this regard, I was drawn to a passage cited by Chris. When Martial stays on after initial difficult days, he tells us:

To stay was becoming my function. It was useless to try to explain my conduct: my arguments seemed laughable. You do not debate your hunger.

“Hunger” is such a fitting word here—in English, at least, it can be used as a synonym for “drive.” But it also refers to a sensation that merely arises, under the right conditions. You don’t say “I think I’ll have hunger now.” The word is both active and passive. It speaks of something that acts upon one. Fittingly, Chris interprets this quote by referring to blood:

[Martial’s] change of heart is related to the centrality of the metonymy of blood for breeding, lineage, and citizenship.

If Malicroix has a politics—as opposed to a mythology—it is centered on the idea of blood. And this is where the novel made me nervous. Even the merest amount of Malicroix blood, we learn, is enough to make Martial not just a satisfactory but in fact a fully-fledged member of the line. (Cue 19th/20th century discourses on race.) The novel believes in blood so insistently, as shown in the way all of its characters speak of it more or less constantly. Old Malicroix, Martial reflects, was “besotted with his blood.” But despite the implied criticism of that “besotted,” Martial is similarly obsessed. Even though he is superficially almost all Mégremut, when it counts he is pure Malicroix. The latter, he explains at the beginning of the book, is “hidden within the darkest part of myself,” but “seemed more alive than all the Mégremuts who inhabited me with such ease.”

Martial and his great-uncle aren’t the only ones taken with blood. The lawyer Dromiols—old Malicroix’s perhaps illegitimate son, the possessor of “a deep, spiteful spirit”—complains about the harshness of the region’s “untamable wildness,” despite having been “shaped by this blood and this land.” Dromiols’ subordinate, the surprising Uncle Rat, has a “passion for secret knowledge” in his blood. Dromiols later thunders on about “the blood that has transmitted the strength, the will, the courage.” Explaining how the mysterious Anne-Madeline (the woman I mentioned earlier, who at first seems imaginary, but then isn’t), Rat tells Martial in a “muted but passionate tone,” “she has the blood.” When Martial asks what blood, Rat replies, “There is only one blood.” Martial himself adds, “the true blood always speaks.” (These italics are all mine.) Maybe the apotheosis of the idea of blood as a force that only slumbers, never dies appears in old Malicroix’s codicil to his will:

For it is through this [the completion of the task Malicroix has set Martial] that you will enter into possession of the blood that is in you, but which most likely still slumbers. Have no fear, my child, it is a blood that always awakens.

Malicroix is steeped in blood. But not in gore. This blood isn’t corporeal; it’s essential, a synonym for value and meaning. Such references litter the novel’s pages. Just a few examples:

[F]or the first time in my life, [I] sensed a darker blood flowing into my peaceful heart, a bitter blood that warmed me.

And [Balandran] had seen in it the strong blood of that old, wild lineage. From that moment on, he was my man, for this is a blood that binds and commands, even in me, who usually would not know how to insist on anything nor how to give an order, so much am I a Mégremut. Yet, through my innate gentleness, Balandran had scented the old, wild blood.

And I have a great deal of Mégremut within me. At every moment their blood speaks to me; at the least emotion, it quickens and throbs. I can hear its gentle murmur at the very tips of my smallest veins. Never has good-natured, stay-at-home tenderness and nonchalance—the legacy of a blood opposed to action—shown such deep-rooted vigor, such overpowering strength. … I bathe in and breathe a Mégremut air. It is as a Mégremut that I drink, eat, sleep, love, think, act, dream. I would be them and not myself were it not for that tiny, entrenched, irreducible something—three drops of Malicroix blood. I had always felt them present, gliding through the Mégremut blood without mingling with it.

Even when we might expect another term, the novel prefers blood. Martial girds himself “to face—without any aid—the five enemies of my name and of my blood” (instead of, say, “my family” or “my people”). He worries, for the nth time, about whether “the gentle blood… would from now on be replaced by the dark, bitter blood I had also inherited” (instead of, say, “my gentleness would be replaced by bitterness”).

The metaphoricity is relentless. The only reference to physiological blood comes when Martial describes his body relaxing after the tension incited by a terrible storm:

My heart was unclenching, regaining a more natural rhythm—the slow, gentle pulse of my peaceful, easily dilated blood. My lungs swelled, and air entered in steady breaths without disturbing the thousands of sensitive veins through which my blood was patiently flowing.

Even here, Martial’s description shades into metaphor—his “peaceful” blood flows “patiently.” These terms have been used earlier to describe the Mégremuts. A later example uses blood as a synonym for body or vitality:

My convalescent blood, sweet with youth, rose from my life’s depths toward my soul, whose outline, taken up again by my body’s flesh, grew firmer.

I’d like readers who know more about Bosco to weigh in on the topic of blood. Because the more I read Bosco’s essentialism—the Mégremuts’ and Malicroix’ respective ways of being: these aren’t just habits and manners, or choices about how to live, or contingent differences based on a tangle of history and happenstance, but fixed essences—the more I thought about fascism. (It seemed fitting that the novel reminded Karen of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs.)

I was especially troubled by these repeated references to blood in a book published just three years after the end of WWII. What, I wondered, had Bosco been up to during the war? Was he a pétainiste? A fascist? An apologist? There doesn’t seem to be much about Bosco in English, but I did learn he was in Morocco from 1931 – 1955, where he taught classics and ran the Alliance Francaise. Born in 1888, Bosco was in his fifties during the war years, too old to fight. (He did serve in WWI, at the front in the former Yugoslavia.) The novel’s set in the early 19th century, well, probably anyway—a teasing prefatory note explains, “A reader who wanted to date this tale could set it during the first three decades of the nineteenth century”—and nothing in it lends itself to being read as an allegory of the French Occupation. In France, Bosco seems to be known as a writer of adventure, of nature (inasmuch as the French go in for that sort of thing, which, I gather, they don’t really), and of the region of the Camargue. All of this information suggests Bosco wasn’t fascist, maybe not even political. Of course, adventure stories can absolutely be political (think Haggard or, more interestingly, Kipling). So I’d love to hear from readers who know more.

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Grant noted that the title poses the question of inheritance. Is Martial “deserving” of his great-uncle’s name? (It could be called Malicroix?) What is a Malicroix, and is Martial himself one? Again, I can’t help but read this insistence on inheritance, especially when it is insistently figured in terms of blood, as reminiscent of fascist rhetoric of authenticity and nativism. By the end of the book, when we see how the protagonist answers the demand of the codicil in his own particular way, we can see that the answers to these questions are complicated: Yes, he is a Malicroix, but in his own way. What the novel doesn’t answer satisfactorily, for me, is why he might want to be.

One answer comes fromNat, who suggests the novel refuses the oppositions it sets up. (Which is why the end, he writes, intimates “a new order.”) There’s Malicroix in every Mégremut. Extrapolating from those family essences, as they are given to us in the novel, Nat concludes that the novel shows how the rational is always troubled by the irrational. It might be worth adding that the novel inserts gender into this binary: conventionally, it is men who are associated with reason, but here the Mégremuts are the reasonable ones and they are associated with stereotypically female qualities of domesticity. Interesting, too, that Martial’s link to the Malicroix comes through his mother. (When I say “interesting” I mean I don’t know what that means.)

Nat refers to Levinas and Blanchot’s contemporaneous ideas of the power of radical weakness or passivity. Both thinkers are reacting to Heidegger in particular and the ideals, if I can put it that way, of fascism in general. This is a brilliant reading, but I’m left wondering: how abstract is the novel’s investigation of the power of the irrational? And why does it have to be figured in blood? Again, I find the novel’s Gnosticism—its fascination with secret truth that is available only to a selected few—uncomfortably close to the mysticism of fascism.

For me, Malicroix’s ending was unsatisfactory because I was unconvinced by its suggestion of what Grant describes as inheritance, Nat calls a new order, and Tom calls redemption. Ostensibly, the ending is triumphant, a liberal rejection of the atavism of grudges and vengeance. But in practice it feels like a let-down, because, deep down, that unrepentant, old, wild Malicroix blood continues to boil. Martial’s actions might calm the ferment, but I didn’t believe the novel wanted that calm. Who wants calm when you can have a storm, it seems to say—and not one to hide out from, one to exult in.

 

 

“Hidden Within the Darkest Part of Myself”: Malicroix, the Gothic, and the Experience of the Unknown by Nat Leach

Posted on by under Guest post, readalong, review, Uncategorized

As always, I’m delighted to post writing by my friend Nat Leach. Here Nat contextualizes Henri Bosco’s Malicroix (1948) twice over: by thinking about its uneasy relation to Gothic literature, and by comparing it to contemporary works by the theorists Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. The resulting essay made sense of much of the novel for me. Enjoy!

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Literature can create an experience that, illusory or not, appears as a means of discovery and an effort not to express what one knows but to experience what one does not know.

—Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 1949, trans. Charlotte Mandell.

Reading Henri Bosco’s Malicroix (originally published in 1948, and recently re-published by NYRB in a new translation by Joyce Zonana) put me in mind of the work of some of his contemporary French writers of the late 40’s, such as Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, and the above passage from Blanchot resonated very much with my experience of reading the book. Not only does the protagonist, alone on a strange island, reflect on his own strange experience, but readers are confronted with an unknown world that does not entirely correspond either with their sense of the real world or with their expectations of fiction. While Bosco employs conventions from genres such as the adventure novel and the Gothic novel, he takes them in unfamiliar directions.

The plot itself appears straightforward: the protagonist, Martial de Mégremut, inherits his uncle’s property on the condition that he not leave the remote island on which his house is located for a period of three months, and that he accomplish an as yet unspecified action after that period has expired. The inheritance is not particularly lucrative, but Martial’s determination (which surprises even himself) to remain on the island creates conflict with his uncle’s notary, Dromiols, who tries to induce him to leave. While this is the stuff of adventure novels, it’s also significant that the most dramatic encounter with this antagonist takes place about 2/3 of the way through the book. This underscores that the book is much more about Martial’s internal struggles, of which he himself is sometimes only dimly aware.

Bosco establishes the dominant conflict within his protagonist in the first few pages of the book. Martial belongs to the “gentle and patient” Mégremut family, which is characterized by its amiable sociability, but his uncle Cornélius, from whom he inherits, was, conversely, the last of the line of the Malicroix, a passionate and prideful lineage. Cornélius himself was a wild and anti-social being, and we soon learn that these characteristics were the product of an unhappy past linked to these negative qualities of his line.

Many of the characters, Martial himself included, question whether he is a “true” Malicroix, possessing as he does the “blood” but not the “name” of Malicroix. From the beginning, Martial acknowledges the presence of the Malicroix blood “hidden within the darkest part of myself” and this hidden force often seems to dictate his actions throughout the book, as when his conscious mind decides to leave the island even as he unconsciously determines to stay. The structure of the book suggests that Martial’s journey is a progression from Mégremut (the title of the book’s first section) to Malicroix (the title of its final section), but the ending actually complicates this opposition, showing the Mégremuts to have an unexpected toughness, while Cornélius’ final request has an unexpectedly redemptive quality to it. One significant question raised by the ending, then, is whether Martial’s actions succeed in harmonizing these two dimensions of his character, or whether he remains fundamentally split between them.

Another way of framing this opposition is that the Mégremuts represent sociability and communicability, or the beautiful as opposed to the obscurity and secrecy of the Malicroix sublime. Martial notes of his family: “We are not given to unvoiced sorrow or silent reproach. Faces and gestures speak; voices confirm. In this gentle family we love each other too much not to confess everything, especially the reproaches, the sorrow, the deep roots of tenderness.” Martial moves from the family hearth where everything is expressed directly on the surface to the mysterious island where nothing is clear. His solitude and the force of the elements (powerful winds and blinding snow) produce insomniac reveries and, eventually, feverish dreams as he falls ill after collapsing in the snow. At the height of his solitary anxiety, he observes that “I suspected that because my situation was not reasonable, it concerned my whole self, not just my reason. It was up to my soul to speak, but my soul was silent.” This sums up much about the book; it takes us beyond a merely rational apprehension of events towards their deeper, hidden meanings, which nevertheless remain mysterious. In other words, it reveals the Malicroix at the heart of every Mégremut.

This lesson is also suggestive of the book’s associations with the Gothic genre. On the surface, it is a very Gothic book indeed, with its solitary, foreboding house, mysterious will, passionate, anti-social ancestor with a traumatic past and even a woman with a strange ghost-like quality. The troubling of the distinction between Mégremut and Malicroix is also typical of the Gothic’s tendency to blur boundaries between the rational and the irrational, the human and the inhuman, communal order and individual desire. Categories that, on the surface, appear to be opposites are shown in fact to be intricately implicated with one another at a deeper, unconscious or secret level.

The book also Gothically hints at the possibility of supernatural agency, but these hints are neither confirmed nor rationalized away, leaving it in the category designated by Tzvetan Todorov as “the fantastic,” which constitutes a “hesitation” between the real and the imaginary. The action of the book thus takes on a dreamlike quality, resistant to the faculty of reason and consequently to the limiting logic of genre. For example, when Martial is rescued by a mysterious woman (who later gives her name as Anne-Madeleine, while insisting that this is just her “name of this earth”), we are made to wonder whether she is a supernatural figure come to nurse him back to health, a femme fatale come to deceive him, or just an ordinary woman who lives nearby. She functions in the narrative, variously, as all of these things, but in the end, there is no definitive answer, and only the rational mind would insist on one; it is Martial’s often indistinct perceptions of her that are most significant in this book.

In fact, this is a book full of ambiguous and shifting characters, which seem to correspond to some dimension of Martial’s psyche rather than following their own internal logic. Like Anne-Madeleine, Dromiols’ clerk, “Uncle Rat,” and the old shepherd Balandran veer abruptly between appearing as threats or helpers; for example, Balandran’s initial surliness, coupled with the fact that he stands to inherit if Martial defaults on the conditions of the will, lead us to expect him to become a significant obstacle in the narrative. Instead, he quite suddenly transfers his loyalty to Martial. Only Bréquillet, Balandran’s dog, is consistent in his character, one of steadfast canine loyalty.

Even Bosco’s brief “Notice” to the reader at the beginning of the book frames it as a Gothic text, explaining that some 40 pages that “form a separate, private account” have been removed and that “only someone truly qualified for such revelations might one day break the seal”. This minor detail already suggests the major themes of the book: its secrecy and the notion that there is a single “proper” reader of the secret, just as Martial is the single proper reader of the codicil to Cornelius’ will.

But this centrality of Martial—which is undeniable, as everything is focalized through him—is troubled the fact that his own sense of identity is uncertain and shifting. For example, before his final confrontation with Dromiols, he observes the face of his adversary, unperceived:

Into this mask had flowed a massive thought whose immobility revealed savagery, stubbornness. It fascinated me. For this thought was me, and most likely Dromiols was actually seeing me, inside himself. Troubling impression of presence. I was there. I was solely there. Did I have a life, a will, outside that savage head whose slow meditation revolved around my weak figure? I obsessed him; I was his anxiety, what haunted him.

Bosco goes beyond the convention of the Gothic double in which the antagonist mirrors the protagonist and represents his darker impulses; rather, the distinction between the two characters seems to collapse completely as Martial describes Dromiols by describing his perception of himself within Dromiols, while simultaneously demonstrating Dromiols’ power over him, as they mutually “obsess” and “fascinate” one another.

The “troubling impression of presence” described here characterizes much of the book, and suggests a more troubling experience of the unknown than is typically conveyed in the Gothic. Martial speaks of himself as inhabiting some level of being that goes beyond his experience of his own identity. It is in this respect that the book particularly made me think of Levinas and Blanchot, whose works of the late ‘40s (and beyond) articulate a sense of a self that is not an autonomous master of the world, but is inescapably chained to it. Levinas, for example, writes about what he calls the “there is,” the inescapable fact of being that eludes the rational mind’s attempt to reduce all phenomena to objects of knowledge. Martial is plagued by this kind of anxiety-inducing awareness of the world around him. Compare, for example, Martial’s reflections:

The sharpness of these sensations soon grew so strong I began to suffer from a kind of pure insomnia. Not a normal state of wakefulness, in which confusion alternates with mental effort and is prolonged. I felt as if I had fallen prey to a dry lucidity. A hypervigilance refused to surrender any shadow to self-forgetfulness, and I remained painfully aware of everything.

to Levinas’s:

Insomnia is constituted by the consciousness that it will never finish—that is, that there is no longer any way of withdrawing from the vigilance to which one is held. Vigilance without end (Time and the Other, 1948, Trans. Richard A. Cohen)

This experience of the anonymous, unshakeable awareness of “being” seems to be something more than the anti-social “blood” of the Malicroix talking, a more profound experience of the unknown than that associated with the Gothic.

This contrasts with the book’s ending, which is active as opposed to passive, and describes an action that can only be completed by one person: Martial. One might therefore be tempted to read this as a progression from Martial’s initial state of undifferentiated being on the island to his specialized status as the last of the Malicroix, but again, this seems too simple; the final action is less a resolution than a gesture in the direction of some kind of new order. The book ends without dispelling its profoundly unsettling apprehension of something not just unknown, but perhaps unknowable, because, as Martial says, it is not simply rational but concerns the “whole” silent, irrational “self”.