“But, in the case of marriage, there is something more. By conceding the privilege of polygamy to the chief, the group exchanges the individual elements of security guaranteed by the rule of monogamy for collective security, which they expect to be ensured by the leader. Each man receives his wife from another man, but the chief receives several wives from the group. In return, he provides a guarantee against want and danger, not for the individuals whose sisters or daughters he marries, nor even for those men who are deprived of women as a consequence of his polygamy, but for the group considered as a whole, since it is the group as a whole which has suspended the common law for his benefit. Such considerations might be of some interest for a theoretical study of polygamy; but their chief importance is as a reminded that the conception of the state as a system of guarantees, which has been revived in recent years by discussions about systems of national insurance (such as the Beveridge Plan and other proposals), is not a purely modern development. It is a return to the fundamental nature of social and political organization.”
(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. Doreen Weightman & John Weightman, p. 315.)
“Every European in India finds himself surrounded, whether he likes it or not, by a fair number of general manservants, called bearers. I cannot say whether their eagerness to serve is to be explained by the caste system, the tradition of social inequality or the demand for service on the part of the colonizers. However, their obsequiousness very quickly has the effect of making the atmosphere intolerable. If necessary, they would lie down on the ground to let you walk over them, and they suggest a bath ten times a day – if you blow your nose, eat fruit or dirty your fingers. Each time, they are there at once, begging for orders. There is something sexual in their anguished submission. And if your behaviour does not correspond to their expectations, if you do not behave on all occasions like their former British masters, their universe collapses: What, no pudding? A bath after dinner and not before? The world must be coming to an end . . . Dismay is written all over their faces. I would have quickly to countermand my original instructions, abandon my usual habits and forgo rare opportunities. I would eat a pear as hard as a stone or swallow slimy custard, since to ask for a pineapple would have caused the moral collapse of a fellow human being.”
(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. Doreen Weightman & John Weightman, p. 138.)
Gérard de Nerval Aurélia & Other Writings
(trans. Geoffrey Wagner, Marc Lowenthal & Robert Duncan)
(Exact Change, 2004)
I first read Nerval about ten years ago in the Richard Sieburth edition from Penguin; I was on my way to reading Proust, and “Sylvie” is a natural stop along that way. I like the Sieburth Nerval; but one wonders what other Nervals might sound like. The Exact Change book is one that I’m constantly picking up in bookstores – one always hopes that by mistake one might discover something new in the Nerval section – but despite its splendid cover and my general love of Exact Change, I’ve always put it back in favor of something else: too many books to read. A few years ago I did find the Kendall Lapin translation of “Aurélia” and “Sylvie”; I didn’t like Lapin’s versions of these as much as I remembered liking Sieburth’s. But finally I actually bought the Exact Change edition.
The Nerval that emerges here isn’t quite the same as Sieburth’s Nerval, even though there’s a fair amount of overlap in what the two books include. Both include “Aurélia,” “Sylvie,” “Octavie,” “Pandora,” and versions of “The Chimeras”. The Exact Change edition adds “Isis” and “Walks & Memories”. Eight pieces in the Sieburth edition aren’t in the Exact Change. There’s a fair amount of Nerval that doesn’t exist in English: a Selected Writings translated by Wagner adds “Emilie” to “Aueélia” and “Sylvia,” and a couple of smaller books have appeared over the years, but the Penguin edition remains the most comprehensive collection of his work in English. That book roughly follows the course of his life, with a little of everything – making me wish for something more comprehensive – concluding with “Aurélia” and a coda of the poetry, presented in French with an English crib. The Exact Change edition starts with “Aurélia” – Nerval’s memoir of his madness, ostensibly his last piece of writing – and then proceeds through the stories and “The Chimeras” (here in facing-page unrhymed translation by Robert Duncan) before finishing with another autobiographical piece from near the end of his life, “Walks & Memories”. The narrative that emerges is an autobiographical one: the names that Nerval uses for the overlapping loves in his life – Aurélia, Sylvie, Adrienne – bounce across pieces that are explicitly fictional and those that are not. Notes suggest how the fictional pieces were based on his life and how the non-fictional play with the verifiable truth.
This Nerval is the Nerval loved by the Surrealists – it feels particularly like a precursor of Michel Leiris’s Aurora. There’s an obvious power in narratives of madness; but somehow I don’t like this Nerval as much as I remember liking the Sieburth Nerval. Maybe it’s that madness no longer seems as romantic as it once did: Aurélia no longer speaks to me as much as it once did. It’s as much, though, that this feels like a conflation of the authorial persona with the person of the author: too much a history of the different facets of one man’s work, unified by madness. It’s useful, perhaps, to know that Aurélia was Jenny Colon, minor star of the stage, but I don’t know what this really tells us about Nerval’s work, save that he was obsessed. From Sieburth’s introduction to his collection:
Catering to a readership increasingly eager to enter into the intimacy of its favorite writers – as Coleridge grumbled, literature had now entered into ‘the age of personality’ – Nerval discovered there was no deeper resource of fiction, no more powerful strategy of illusion than the autobiographical ‘I’. If he therefore adopted the first person in virtually all of his texts, it was paradoxically the better to guarantee his invisibility. Late in life, having come across a lithograph portrait of himself in a recently published biography, he inscribed the frontispiece with the enigmatic phrase ‘Je suis l’autre’ (‘I am the other’). It is perhaps a caveat addressed to any potential reader of his work: beware of mistaking me for myself. (p. ix)
To make Nerval autobiographical seems a misstep: especially as these pieces seem to be profoundly self-contained. When not presented as one stop on a man’s trip to the grave, “Sylvie” still seems perfect to me, prefiguring the wistful pastoral of Le Grand Meaulnes. Proust was glad that Sainte-Beuve hated it, and wished that the dream-logic of the story could remain his own private secret. Proust recognizes himself in the story:
. . . what we have here is one of those rainbow-painted pictures, never to be seen in real life, or even called up by words, but sometimes brought before us in a dream or called up by music. Sometimes in the moment of falling asleep we see them, and try to seize and define them. Then we wake up and they are gone, we give up the pursuit, and before we can be sure of their nature we are asleep again as though the sight of them were forbidden to the waking mind. (pp. 110–111 in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s translation)
There’s a universalism here that still works, but it’s harder to get at this when it immediately follows “Aurélia”; the reader can’t help but notice that Nerval is still talking about Jenny Colon in the first section of “Sylvie,” and the temptation is to continue reading the story in this fashion. We read “Sylvie,” of course, knowing that the one who wrote this would write “Aurélia” and kill himself; but in “Sylvie” this is held at bay, something the reader knows but doesn’t want to apply to the text. We know that the pastoral must end, as does the narrator of the piece; but we want to believe that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Any Nerval is welcome, of course, and I feel like I shouldn’t be so hard on the presentation of this book. Wagner’s translations of “Sylvie” and “Aurélia” don’t seem quite as fluid as Sieburth’s; it’s those that I’ll return to, I suspect. But it’s fitting, perhaps, that one should seek to return to one’s first Nerval.
Jules Verne The Green Ray
(trans. Mary de Hauteville )
(Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1883)
I found Jules Verne’s The Green Ray, as I suspect most of this book’s readers are now found, through Rohmer’s film of the same name. It’s been a long time since I read Verne, if I ever did – possibly the editions of Voyage to the Center of the Earth and so on that I remember reading as a child weren’t actually his work at all. The Green Ray seems to have been mostly forgotten, though there’s no shortage of cheap new editions on Amazon. Google has a copy of an 1883 edition: it’s a short book & not hard to read on a screen.
The first few paragraphs of Chapter I, “The Brothers Sam and Sib,” promisingly seem to prefigure the Hardy Boys:
“Betty!”
“Bess!”
“Betsey!”
One after another these names re-echoed through the hall of Helensburgh; it was the way the brothers Sam and Sib had of summoning their housekeeper.”
“Sib” isn’t quite right as a name, of course: it feels a little too meta, though we soon learn that it’s actually short for “Sebastian”. And the single-sentence paragraph after next sends the reader rushing to the dictionary, suspecting all is not right with Google’s scan: “It was Partridge the factor, who with his hat in his hand, made his appearance at the hall-door.” A factor is, exactly as you might expect, a “doer or agent”, as the OED‘s first definition has it.
Sam and Sib Melville, “Scotchmen of the old school,” are uncles of the eighteen-year-old orphan Helena Campbell, as much the Thompson and Thomson of Tintin as the Hardy Boys:
For her sake they remained celibates, being of that number of estimable persons whose earthly career is one long course of self-denial. And does it not say much for them when the elder brother constituted himself father, and the younger one mother to the child, so that it came quite naturally to Helena to address them with,—
“Good morning, Papa Sam. How are you, Mamma Sib?”
Sam & Sib are trying to marry off Helena, hopefully to someone with the fine name of “Mr. Aristobulus Ursiclos”; with a name like that he is cursed to be a popinjay. But Helena refuses to be married until she has seen the green ray. In Verne’s Scotland, the green ray “has the virtue of making him who has seen it impossible to be deceived in matters of sentiment; at its apparition all deceit and falsehood are done away, and he who has been fortunate enough once to behold it is enabled to see closely into his own heart and read the thoughts of others” (p.33). (This is, more or less, the precis of the book delivered in Rohmer’s film.)
There’s a lack of suspense in this book: really, most of the time is spent maneuvering the characters into such a place where they can see an unobstructed sunset over water, which turns into a general tour of the western coast of Scotland while they try to find a view that is not blocked by other islands, or sailboats, or clouds. There’s a croquet party, which has been fixed to let Sam & Sib win; nonetheless, it drags on and on, eventually providing the pretext for meeting Oliver Sinclair, painter and naval hero, who is clearly a more suitable match than Aristobulus. Helena and Oliver have conversations like this:
“Ah! Mr. Sinclair, I am like you, passionately fond of our archipelago! it is magnificent, especially when lashed by the fury of tempests.”
“It is indeed sublime,” replied Oliver Sinclair. “There is nothing on the way to obstruct the violence of the gales which vent their force here after travelling three thousand miles! The American coast faces Scotland, and though great storms may rise there, it is the western coast of Europe which gets the first benefit of their fury! But what can they do against our Hebrides, which are not like that man of whom Livingstone speaks, who had no fear of lions, but was afraid of the sea? These isles, with their solid granite bases, can laugh to scorn the violence of wind and sea.”
“The sea! A chemical combination of hydrogen and oxygen with two and a half per cent. of chloride of sodium! Indeed, nothing can be more sublime than the violent agitations of chloride of sodium!” (p. 180)
There’s a lot of excitement in this book. It can be hard to tell how to read this: the last speech there is an interjection by the scientifically-minded Aristobulus, who is determined to put an end to Oliver and Helena’s fledgling romance, and possibly is intended to be funny, but it seems of a piece with the previous exclamations on the beauty of everything. When they reach Iona, Aristobulus becomes an iconoclast in the name of geology:
“I am by no means an iconoclast,” he tells the disapproving Helena, “but a geologist, and as such I am anxious to know the nature of this stone.”) Science frequently gets in the way of the sublime. It’s unclear quite why Aristobulus should be so villainous; there’s a profit motive, as Sam and Sib have a fortune that will be passed on, but Aristobulus betrays no interest in this. He is quite simply an enemy of the good, denying, for example, that eyes can smile (no Facial Action Coding System for him), that ghosts and fairies might exist, or the charms of Ossian “whose genius united poetry and music” and who is quoted with loving repetition. “Mr. Ursiclos will spoil my Green Ray with his explanation,” complains Helena. The narrator, however, is more than happy to insert digressions into the geology of caves around the world: a time and a place for everything, perhaps.
A climax is concocted: Oliver saves Helena from tidal misadventure in Fingal’s Cave. One is impressed with how well the illustration of the cave accords with the photographs in Wikipedia from the same perspective:
Helena swoons; she is rescued. The scene is set for the finale: Aristobulus has been left on Iona, Helena and Oliver are in love. Oliver, now a hero, is fine with Sam and Sib. They might finally see the green ray if Helena has recovered from her ordeal. Nothing blocks the view; and finally, the green ray is seen by the brothers and the servants. Helena and Oliver are too busy looking into each other’s eyes to notice.
* * * * *
Verne’s The Green Ray isn’t particularly good: one can see that it would have once had value as a travelogue of Scotland, but as fiction it is sorely disappointing. It’s interesting, then, that it can be used to such good effect in Rohmer’s Le rayon vert: perhaps because it’s the idea of the book, rather than the book itself, which comes into play. Delphine, the heroine, has almost certainly not read The Green Ray when she hears people talking about it. (This clip, with Spanish subtitles, is the book’s complete appearance in the film.) The old people discussing the book admit they thought it boring; but now they find it fascinating as a story of love, the idea of trying to find something almost impossible to actually see. Then an old man, the incarnation of Aristobulus Ursiclos, explains to everyone exactly what the green ray is. (Should you like your Green Ray spoiled with explanation, see Wikipedia, which insists that the phenomenon should be called a “green flash” rather than a “green ray.”)
The idea of The Green Ray is more interesting than the book itself; and when Delphine finally ends her slump by allowing a man to approach her, he does so ostensibly because of what she’s reading, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, which she seems to have nearly finished. Later, she is reminded again of the green ray by a shop with that name; she tells the man what she’s heard about the book, asking him if he’s read it – he hasn’t – but not revealing whether or not she’s read it, though she gives the impression of that. Rohmer rather miraculously manages to capture the green ray on film: perhaps it’s appropriate that it doesn’t show through the graininess of a YouTube clip of the movie’s ending:
“We were then living in a strange period, such as usually succeeds revolutions or the decline of great reigns. It was no longer the gallant heroism of the Fronde, the elegant, dressed-up vice of the Regency, or the scepticism and insane orgies of the Directoire. It was an age in which activity, hesitation, and indolence were mixed up, together with dazzling Utopias, philosophies, and religious aspirations, vague enthusiasms, mild ideas of a Renaissance, weariness with past struggles, insecure optimisms – somewhat like the period of Peruginus and Apuleius. Material man longed for the bouquet of roses which would regenerate him from the hands of the divine Isis; the goddess in her eternal youth and purity appeared to us by night and made us ashamed of our wasted days. We had not reached the age of ambition, and the greedy scramble for honors and positions caused us to stay away from all possible spheres of activity. The only refuge left to us was the poet’s ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob. Led by our masters to those high places we breathed at last the pure air of solitude, we drank oblivion in the legendary golden cup, and we got drunk on poetry and love. Love, however of vague forms, of blue and rosy hues, of metaphysical phantoms! Seen at close quarters, the real woman revolted our ingenuous souls. She had to be a queen or goddess; above all, she had to be unapproachable.”
(Gérard de Nerval, “Sylvie: Recollections of Valois,” trans. Geoffrey Wagner, pp. 74–75 in the Exact Change Aurélia & Other Writings.)
Paradise seems to be Barthelme’s least appreciated novel: Snow White has stayed in print most consistently, The Dead Father seems the most obviously ambitious, and The King is funny historical fiction. Paradise might be my favorite of his novels, the one I’m most tempted to pull off the shelf, though I’ve read Snow White more times, and I think The Dead Father deserves respect. The King, for whatever reason, never really clicked with me. But Paradise is the neglected one. Michiko Kakutani hated it, generally a good sign; there don’t seem to be a lot of other reviews about, and it evidently doesn’t merit its own Wikipedia page.
Like much of Barthelme’s work, Paradise is a novel with a wacky premise: three underwear models move in with a middle-aged architect who is adrift in his own life. This is the reverse of Snow White, written twenty years before, where one woman is living with seven men. But this is not a young author’s wacky premise; rather, this is a wacky premise written by a middle-aged man with a middle-aged man as the protagonist. I’m reminded of the premise that forms the basis for Proust’s The Captive: suppose a young man, well known in society, decides to install his lover, also well known in society, in an apartment in his own house. This causes the considerable displeasure of everyone’s families; but looked at closely, one realizes that this segment is a break from the realism that drives the rest of Proust, and that no one is behaving in a way that anyone would would expect. Proust’s aims here are not autobiographical, though Albertine might be a stand-in for his male chauffeur. Rather, he takes his character, sticks him into a situation, and sees what will happen. That’s what, I think, Barthelme is doing here: taking a character and sticking him into an unlikely character to see how he will react. Barthelme’s women are as nebulous as Proust’s Albertine, understood only through the main character’s consciousness.
Paradise is made up of sixty unnumbered sections, mostly lasting three or four pages. A chronology can be worked out. First, the past: Simon, who has studied architecture at Penn with Louis Kahn, worked in Philadelphia and was married to Carol (“everybody’s with is named Carol” – p. 131); they had a child, Sarah, but the marriage fell apart and Simon moved to New York. New York is the continuous present: Anne, Dore, and Veronica move in with him for eight months; finally, they leave, ostensibly to find jobs. Finally, after their departure Simon stays on in New York, where he seems to be seeing an analyst (or someone who is questioning him on his experiences). These pasts, presents, and futures are interleaved; but it’s unclear, for example, whether the ten sections where Simon is questions appear in the book in chronological order. While the sections set in the present appear to be in chronological order, many are vague with reference to time; and the past is called in as needed. In section 38, for example, Simon meets a poet; section 40, detailing what happens with the poet, takes place after 38, but section 39 could take place any time in the continuous present. The sections with Simon and the poet are hard to match to the rest of the narrative, as only Simon and the poet appear in them; in the intervening sections, Simon may not appear, or Simon may be appearing in the future, talking about his past. The arc of Simon’s affair with the poet continues in section 43; finally, it is resolved into the main narrative in sections 44 and 45 after it has ended off-stage.
Ten of the sections – scattered fairly evenly across the book’s sixty sections – are interviews (by characters given the name “Q:” and “A:”) where it becomes clear that the person answering the questions is Simon, and Q says, at one point “I’m a doctor.” The premise of these interactions seems to be the vivid dreams that Simon is having, dreams that seem to start after the women leave. A different version of these questions and answers appeared as “Basil from Her Garden”. (I assume that the title refers to Keats’s “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” refracted through T. S. Eliot, but I might be wrong.) The modifications are interesting: primarily, the change made is one of tense, which changes the whole character of the exchange. In “Basil from Her Garden,” Q asks “What do you do, after work, in the evenings or on weekends?” while in Paradise Q asks “What did you do, after work, in the evenings or on weekends, in Philadelphia?” The answer, in both, is adultery. In Paradise, this is given as “Well, adultery. I would say that’s how I spent most of my free time. In adultery.” “Basil from Her Garden” differs by a single letter: spend instead of spent. In Paradise, A is referring to the vague past; because of the “in Philadelphia,” Simon seems to be referring to what happened in his marriage (dissolved or in the process of dissolution) before he moved to New York; he’s not talking about the three women at all. In “Basil,” we learn about A’s married lover, Althea, and his wife, Grete; he seems to be talking with Q to resolve the problem of his marriage. What happens in Paradise is more complex: Simon appears to be explaining his life – from the breakdown of his marriage on to the departure of the girls, which seems to have brought on a series of bad dreams – to Q, who seems to be more interested in hearing about his time with the three girls.
The Q & A sections are the clearest structuring device in the book, but others run through the book. Four sections consist of entirely unattributed dialogue between the women about Simon; sections which consist mostly of Simon talking to one of the women also recur, as do sections in which Simon is cooking. Occasionally a section is in detached third-person, relating what happened to Simon from a later vantage point; or a section relates what happened to Simon in Philadelphia before the main events of the book took place. Repetition with differences occasionally happens. Section 27 begins:
What if they all lived happily ever after together? An unlikely prospect. What was there in his brain that forbade such felicity? (p. 100)
At the start of section 55:
And what if we grow old together, just the four of us? The loving quartet? What if we raddle together? (p. 195)
There’s not quite the unidirectional moving inward across the book that this pair suggests, as they move from the third person to the first. Rather, it’s a faceted approach: Simon, a rational man, knows full well before section 27 that the situation is untenable and attempts to work out in his mind what can be done about it. There are hints that a crisis is being resolved: while in New York, Simon seems not to be working, although whether that’s a blockage is never addressed. After the women leaves, he returns to his work, staying on alone in New York. In a retrospective section, there’s this exchange:
Q: Do you hear from them?
A: Postcards.
Q: These women spread out before you like lotus blossoms. . . .
A: Not exactly like lotus blossoms.
Q: Open, blooming. . . .
A: More like anthills. Splendid, stinging anthills.
Q: You fall face down in an anthill.
A: Something like that. (p. 30)
There’s an echo of the story of Job in this: the author has put Simon into a situation (in this case, what is ostensibly paradise) to see what happens. It’s a minor novel, compared to Barthelme’s other work, but I think that is succeeds at what it’s trying to do.
