There is a line, a sentence in Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, that evokes for me a certain dynamic in poetry and lyric prose. She wrote, “The facts are sonorous but among the facts there is a murmuring.” The sonorous facts – impressive, declamatory, lofty, or grandiose – lead to and inform a conclusion. In a novel, the facts may be established through a plot-line transporting characters to their various ends. But the murmuring, for both the characters and the reader, suggests something else, non-linear. While the main character’s conflicting impulses spar with each other, never to reach consensus, a strange third thing drifts like a scent through the telling.
First published by Gallimard in 2011 as Les solidarités mystérieuses, Pascal Quignard’s novel Mysterious Solidarities is an exemplar of such effects – and Chris Turner, Quignard’s translator for Anglophones, is acutely attuned to Quignard’s mode. The story begins in 2007 with Claire Methuen, a 46-year old translator, who has returned to the town of Dinard in Brittany where she and her brother Paul spent their childhood. Orphaned by the deaths of their parents, the siblings had been brought up joylessly among nearby relatives. On her return, Claire turns to the elderly Madame Ladon, her former piano teacher, for maternal companionship – and becomes obsessed with Simon Quelen, the town’s mayor and pharmacist, and her former lover. The land rises sharply from the harbor; Claire spends her days walking through and caring for the headlands:
“She loved this place. She loved the air – so clear that everything was closer. She loved the air – so sharp that sounds were clearer. She felt the need to recognize all of what she had lived through. She sensed the need to recognize all of what she had discovered of the world here in the past. And gradually she did indeed remember everything – names, places, farms, streams, woods. She never tired of walking the streets; of observing the frontages, of rediscovering the houses, the gardens, the little thickets with their species so varied, the brambles of all kinds, the hedges, ditches, copses; of climbing on the blocks of granite; of looking at the wildflowers, the seaweed beds, the rocks, the birds. She loved this country. She loved this shore, fiercely steep and black as it was and going straight up to the sky. She loved this sea.”
Quignard thus sets up the novel’s elements – an appointment with the past, a solitary nature with idiosyncratic habits and tastes interacting fitfully with others, the foregrounding of locale its features. Claire and Paul had not been close, but he arrives from Paris to help her move into a farmhouse that Madame Ladon has inherited. It is mentioned at the outset that Claire has two daughters, but they don’t appear. “There was always a very peculiar suddenness and intensity to her life,” the narrator says of Claire. “She didn’t so much take decisions as find herself overrun by bursts of energy; driven along or halted or devastated by them.” Quignard’s past indicative mode, elemental in its noticings and rhythmically alluring, embraces everything as facts – and even as the facts unfold successively in the text, they seem to exist simultaneously, as if everything in us happens at once.
This leads to Quignard’s rendering of alterity – the sense that through our confusions, pleasures, and griefs (Claire’s desires, upsets and obsessions become mine), there is something other resonating through it all. Quignard has written about this cognizance in his lyrical philosophical writings, as in Abysses where he describes the present as “This two-phrase beat comprising the lost and the imminent” and “A coming that doesn’t stop.” Born in 1948, Quignard inherited a world in which “humanity can no longer entrust anything of itself to anything” – he has pointed out that the last word penned by Freud was Kriegspanik or in French une atmosphère de guerre. In The Roving Shadows, Quignard wrote, “Who does not love what he has loved? We must love the lost, and love even the Erstwhile in that which is lost.” One hears this assertion toward the end of his novel, as he refers to Claire: “She said to herself, ‘Living things are always memories. We are all living memories of things that were beautiful. Life is the most touching memory of the time that produced this world.’”
I don’t mean to scant the story within Mysterious Solidarities. There is a speaking role for Paul (who meets and falls in love with a local priest, Jean, who also speaks in his own chapter) and Simon (spied upon by Claire). But this isn’t a novel of character development and its usual epiphanies. One learns a great deal about Claire and Paul especially. But as Quignard wrote in The Roving Shadows, “The person who writes is someone who tries to redeem what has been pawned.” The story, and the nature of the language that tells it, comprise a vector pointing mysteriously towards the Erstwhile that exists within the moment of the telling.
[Published by Seagull Books on November 19, 2021, 256 pages, $24.50 hardcover]
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I’ve been recommending to friends that they take a look at Parul Sehgal’s essay in the January 3, 2022 issue of The New Yorker in which she remarks tartly on the excesses of the “trauma plot” in contemporary fiction. “The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom,” she concludes, “It disregards what we know and asks that we forget it, too – forget about the pleasures of not knowing, about the unscripted dimensions of suffering, about the odd angularities of personality …” I’ve also suggested that they read Nastassja Martin’s memoir In the Eye of the Wild, translated from the French by Sophie R. Lewis, for an example of a trauma-induced narrative that has no patience for facile moralisms.
The hurt begins on page 1. A French anthropologist studying the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula of far eastern Siberia, Martin has a run-in with a bear. It is 2014 and she is 29-years old. Bloodied and maimed, she manages to wound the bear with an ice axe, but the bear has taken a bite out of her jaw. She tells her distressed mother not to travel from France to visit her in the Russian hospital, but family members arrive. She writes, “I am not myself anymore, my head is a ball scored with swollen red claw marks and sutures. I am nothing like myself anymore, and yet I’ve never looked more like my own spirit; it has been imprinted on my body, the marks on my skin reflect both a journey out and a return.”
After initial surgery in Siberia, she is transported to the Salpetrière hospital in Paris for more treatments. When the hospital’s psychotherapist visits her room, we get a taste for Martin’s surliness with everyone – she seems to relish having contretemps with people in positions of authority who don’t acknowledge her mentality. She spurns the therapist’s attempts to get her to express her wounded self and face “because, you know, our face is our identity.” Martin replies, “I ask her if she offers this kind of information to all the patients at Salpetrière’s maxillofacial clinic. She raises her eyebrows, disconcerted. I want to explain that I’ve spent years collecting accounts of the multiple presences that can coexist within a single body, precisely in order to subvert this concept of singular, uniform, unidimensional identity.” Martin has studied and is engrossed by animism, and her near-fatal embrace with the bear has left her to contemplate the collision – integration? — with this other spirit. Furthermore, she feels “my profound mismatch with society.”
More surgeries follow. But her mission now is to “find that point of equilibrium which permits the coexistence of elements from divergent worlds, laid deep inside my body without negotiation. Everything has already happened: my body has become a place of convergence … I must defuse the animosity between and within these fragments of worlds so that I may consider here only their future alchemy.” She acknowledges “my inner darkness” and, when speaking with her own therapist, she believes that “the ‘bear’ event and its sequelae are asking me, once and for all, to let go of the hostility with which I face the world.”
She insists on returning to Kamchatka and her Russian friends and colleagues. She must learn more about “a face-to-face encounter in which a necessarily radical alterity is actually revealed as the greatest proximity – a space in which the one is the reflection of its double in the other world.” Unknowingness, unscripted suffering, oddness of personality – all of these elements found lacking by Sehgal in some trauma narratives are rife with possibility in In the Eye of the Wild. She is unsettled – not by the recalled trauma but by the struggle for significance on her own terms. The violent embrace with the bear becomes a model for the most profound acknowledgement of the Other – “a dazzlement that grips the two wild creatures caught in this ancient encounter – the meeting that cannot be prepared, nor avoided, nor escaped.”
[Published by New York Review Books on November 16, 2021, 128 pages, $14.95 paperback]
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Just before Richard Nixon resigned as President in August, 1974, the poet and ad exec L. E. Sissman eulogized his career in The Atlantic with an essay, “Sick of Dick”: “It was the genius of Richard Nixon to wed the conservative appeal to the modern scare techniques of advertising: to entice the insecure into his camp – and thereby ditch is enemies – to a not-so-subtle application of fear.” Nixon was “a spokesman for the previous generation.” Sissman perceived a “sweet Nixon” and a “sour Nixon,” the latter having surfaced during the 1960 presidential campaign “in the course of which he grew increasingly dark, dour, and brusque as it became apparent that his opponent was outpacing him.” Red-baiter, financial cheater, as racist as any Republican – these were standard charges.
While hardly invested in rehabilitating Nixon, the historian Irwin F. Gellman has spent the past 20 years pointing out where his peers have failed to fully research the elements of Nixon’s record and life. For starters, Gellman concluded his book on Eisenhower and Nixon, The President and the Apprentice (Yale, 2015) by stating, “Many authors have trivialized the linkage between Ike and Dick … But if these minimalist histories are accurate, why did President Eisenhower see Nixon for frequent private breakfasts and lunches, send him private letters of praise, and tell friends how much he respected him? … The answer is that the accepted interpretations are wrong, and by clinging to them historians have left a vital part of the Eisenhower presidency untold.”
Now, with Campaign of the Century: Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960, the Ike/Dick narrative continues and so does Gellman’s contempt for sloppy or incomplete research. In particular, he heaps abuse on Theodore White’s 1961 best-seller The Making of the President 1960 for its burnishing of Kennedy and his campaign, but he also takes heavyweights like Robert Dallek and Robert Caro to task for various errors. Gellman complains that too many chroniclers have conducted research at the JFK library in Boston but have neglected to plumb the files at the other presidential libraries. I had the sense throughout that the several chips on Gellman’s shoulder enliven this narrative and contribute to its urgency.
Most of Gellman’s efforts in Campaign of the Century are aimed at deflating the post-Camelot Kennedy narrative. It is generally agreed that no presidential candidate running today with a health profile like Kennedy’s could be elected – but perhaps his extramarital affairs would be forgiven just as Trump’s are disregarded by his base. Kennedy’s vote-buying and the manipulation of poll results in Chicago are well known and remind us that election chicanery isn’t a new issue in the USA. Gellman also labors to prove that JFK’s record as a legislator was dismal. But the most engaging sections of the book are those that focus on the candidates’ respective actions (or lack thereof) concerning civil rights, and on the religious issue triggered by Kennedy’s Catholicism. Both candidates supported “gradualism” in treating black people as fully established Americans; in 1960 the Democrats still ruled the South and Kennedy’s choice of Lyndon Johnson as his veep allowed a slim electoral victory in Texas. JFK earned almost 59% of the vote in Alabama and more than 62% in Georgia. Gellman suggests that the Kennedy people exploited the religious bias issue even while Nixon refused to bring it up all. Nixon’s Quaker-bred graciousness, affability and collegiality (“sweet Nixon”) emerge in various episodes.
The debates, of course, figure prominently here, since it is commonly believed that they changed the course of the election in JFK’s favor. But Gellman says that post-debate Gallup and other polls contradict this opinion. At the first debate, Nixon was still suffering from an infection contracted while campaigning; he was feverish, had lost weight, and refused to have make-up applied. The candidates were not allowed to use notes; Gellman points out that JFK cheated in at least one debate. Gellman is successful in dispelling the notion that Nixon was an incompetent campaigner.
At the end of his presidency, Eisenhower was remarkably popular – and Gellman gives us several reasons not only to understand why this was so, but to regard Ike as a person deeply concerned about maintaining a middle road through the government, the political parties and the populace. Gellman’s Eisenhower was adamant about reining in the poles in his party (Rockefeller the liberal, Goldwater the conservative) – and he prepared Nixon to sustain his policies into the 60’s. For his part, Nixon kept in close contact with Ike and benefited from his support, especially post-convention.
Campaign of the Century shows that there was very little difference between Nixon and Kennedy. They had been friendly as young Congressmen and barely disagreed on anything of substance. If Republicans disparaged Democrats for advocating more domestic spending, the latter’s proposals now seem extremely modest and narrow. In fact, the candidates’ political uniformity is so striking that it appears utterly exclusionary. Gellman is not an historian who cultivates themes of structural inequity – even if he and the reader may find it everywhere in his narrative. Nevertheless, in describing the nature of Kennedy’s and Nixon’s moves to obtain the black vote (such as JFK’s much promoted phone calls to Coretta King and Governor Vandiver of Georgia after Dr. King was jailed in DeKalb County), it is quite clear that Gellman recognizes the exploitation. The Kennedy people feared the call would be regarded as a “gimmick” — because, one suspects, they knew that it was a gimmick. Some three months after the phone call, Kennedy promised Vandiver that he would not use Federal troops to enforce integration in Georgia.
“Campaign of the century” seems a conclusion reached by those who believe dramatic opposing forces faced off with each other, Kennedy out-performed Nixon, and the Democratic party established a youthful basis for its future. The televised debates were an innovation. But the phrase seems un-Gellmanesque.
[Published by Yale University Press on January 4, 2022, 504 pages, $35.00 hardcover]