The narrator of 03, now in his mid-40’s, begins by recalling the moment he spotted a “slightly retarded” girl (“it was harder to guess her age”) waiting at a bus stop in the dispiriting town of Montpérilleux. He was 18. “I was drawn to her precisely for the chance to love a beauty that had no self-awareness,” he says, “and of which, consequently, I alone would be the sole and watchful guardian.”
In one sense, 03 is as circular as a bus route (“03” may be the route’s number). The narrator arrives at the moment of storytelling transfixed by the limits of intelligence and understanding. He paces around the enigma, perhaps closing in. Once a screen onto which he projected his ardor, now the girl’s image animates the hardships of comprehension:
“But if neither sadness nor rage could unite us, I didn’t know what could — the more I wanted to identify with her, the more I identified with myself; and the more I tried to understand her, the less, necessarily, I succeeded: the failure of an intelligent mind to grasp feeblemindedness was deep and dark, no less than the failure of a feeble mind to grasp intelligence, because intelligence got its shape by not understanding the thing it could never be.”
That wonderful final phrase – “intelligence got its shape by not understanding the thing it could never be” – both exemplifies a beguiling lyricism that bursts throughout 03 and underscores the novella’s project as a probing meditation on language and consciousness.
In another sense, 03 zigzags into a harsh, isolate clarity. Something strangely accumulates. The narrative is a tidal rush of converted memory, pressured to explain the momentous but captivated by difficulty. Although the prose progresses without pit stops for new paragraphs, Valtat subtly manages his transitions, modulates his intensities, and swings nimbly from incident to reflection.
The narrator recalls his youth as a time when he became aware that “in dealing with grown-ups you kept coming up against one kind of disability or another.” Childhood instructs in that “sickening awareness that just about everything there is to understand was beyond us, made even worse by the lies and inaccuracies that adults feel entitled to spread around, deliberately, or because they don’t know any better, about themselves or about the nature of reality.”
This is why the “innocence” western culture attributes to childhood, and more, to the “developmentally delayed,” aggravates him. In one lovely section, he riffs on the term “delay, a word that took on a magical aura … like the jittery excitement you might feel when you strayed, even just a little, on your way to school.” This leads him to the notion of “this perpetual delay,” a not-fitting-in. He recalls loving the song “Closer” from Joy Division’s second album:
“Then you understood: it wasn’t that the song tried to mimic mental confusion or some kind of aphasia, but instead, and this was the source of its power, it gave you the boy’s stiff, contorted dignity, his own perspective and his testimony … and this is what I found beautiful, this aborted attempt to release something too strong, too unlikely for others to grasp.”
The memory of the girl’s bottomless gaze suggests “the moment of ravished stupidity that marks the pinnacle of intelligence” and leads him to consider the “unexpected advantages to our thwarted means of communication.” Since she couldn’t respond to him, they were “spared the painful pretense of mutual understanding.”
And so this story isn’t a childhood reminiscence at all. “The only good thing about childhood,” he says, “is that no one really remembers it, or rather, that’s the only thing about it to like: this forgetting.” (This is fine advice for our memoirists who feel no obligation to clarify [nor express anxieties that imply] why telling those stories is so critical to them in the present moment.)
03 ultimately lands on its true topic – the retarded development of everyone (“the immense waste of talent I was forced to observe every day in my closest friends and suffered a little too readily in myself”), and the sound of a language that artfully describes our long delays. The speaker says of the girl, “her gaze came to me as if by catapult.” 03 came to me with the same force.
[Published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux on July 1, 2010. 96 pages, $12.00 paperback.]
Read a brief interview with Jean-Christophe Valtat from The Paris Review blog. Valtat’s Autorama is scheduled to be published in August by Melville House. He is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Fernand and he lives in Paris.
03
Yet again, Ron, I’m drawn to a work you’ve reviewed. Shades of heart and
mind have always intrigued me, and so have the bridges that bear our
weight between levels of intelligence. I seem to recall that, as a kid
growing up in Somerville, all my friends were retarded. I fit right in. And
now, these decades later, I praise intelligence that bites its own tail
lightly, as if to suggest this life’s eternal, poof!
Valtat’s excellent work
This work lets us skip away from the sentimentalized view of disability and its vocabulary and to use words anew. It’s incredible how profoundly new Valtat’s language seems even though he’s not actually “experimental.” His narrator is just so unique even though he says abouthimself that his only disguishing characteristic is his recognition of his own feeble understanding. Maybe I shouldn’t put so much focus on the disability thing since clearly Valtat isn’t specifically trying to undermine the culture’s view of this. He’s got a more profound agenda.
On Delay
“As this is done through endless hypotheses, it is also the beginning of fiction. Most of what happens in one’s head is fiction, after all.”
Thank you for your fine review. (How nice to have a book translated from the French by Mitzi Angel.) And for the link — I liked the comment of Valtat’s from the Paris Review blog interview. “Most of”: that raised a laugh! He suggests that the endless hypothesizing also lands us closer to successful understanding. This is the fruit of fiction — and allegory — or so it seems. Another one of your picks that goes high on my wish-list; that tower just keeps on getting higher and higher. There are many now also looking forward to reading his “Autorama”, written in English.