Multiple Reading Personalities

Simon, like Proust, is often seen as a difficult writer. His sentences are complex, run-on accumulations of words and tenses, modulated by numerous markers of subjectivity – like, as if, I think, I’d say, perhaps, etc. It’s a sentence that works hard to rid itself of conventional patterns of speech, or more accurately, of usual patterns of writing; things are presented in their immediacy, grammar is simplified, accumulation, association and digression abound.

This attempt at a more instinctive manner of communication is, of course, hard to read. We are used to texts being neatly put together, to rational explanation, to synthesis following analysis (or vice-versa, depending on culture). Used to, in short, a modicum of linearity. It is a well known human prejudice that we over-explain, draw conclusions where there is nothing but correlations, and guess correlations at the drop of a hat. Hence astrology, reading in entrails and people thinking they can predict the stock market based on some Fibonacci, pi or moon cycle-based formula.

But I digress.

Simon has a somewhat paradoxical project with La Route des Flandres (itself only a part of a biographical-related series of books). On the one hand, he is recreating a past experience (the trauma of World War II) in a more manageable form; on the other, he is trying to preserve the immediacy of it. To do this, he presents memories not in chronological order, but by way of associations. Here I must make a few side notes:

1. Cheating #1: Simon mentioned around that time the idea that memories present themselves to use not chronologically, but depending on their importance. That would imply sometimes, it seems to me, that you would jump from one thing to another without so much as the tenuous help of objective association. The sheer force of the affect should be justification enough. Simon never does that, though – there’s always some element linking one memory to the next. That’s a very Proustian way to go about things – a clump of related things, a huge nodes of sensations emerging in an otherwise pretty disjointed perception. Simon does indeed admire Proust and refer to him quite a bit.
2. Cheating #2: the book was in fact carefully reconstructed after a period of unstructured writing: Simon wrote a number of fragments which he then color-coded depending on the characters present in each. He organized the fragments to alternate colors – and that’s how the book was born.

This brings to mind the way I will write a dissertation given a limited amount of time: desperately scramble any idea that comes to mind on a piece of paper, then isolate a few themes, color code all rudimentary ideas, and shove them in each theme. Of course I’m doing the opposite of Simon (trying to bring together similar colors instead of trying to weave them through the course of the text); I’m amused to think that my draft paper might look more like his end product that my final dissertation.

Anyway – cheating or not, what Simon does is in fact remarkably successful. There’s a sort of indulgence, a sort of hypnosis that wants to lull you while you read the book, but every time you try to stop and think – the strands of meaning come undone, and you’re left feeling uncertain of where you are, what happened, and what Big Lessons you should take away. That last sentence would certainly make Simon very happy, but of course I’ll have to struggle with this in the context of academic learning. My plan of attack therefore is to start by focusing on the obsessions, the recurring motives of the book: horses, the mud, sexual desire, friends, suicide, etc. These are not really themes, more ornaments (at least at this stage, and in my mind), but we’ll see where they’ll take me.

“Je veux faire la chose la plus courageuse. Ce soir, je crois que c’est de le porter [l'étoile jaune].
Seulement, où cela peut-il nous mener?”

“I want to do whatever is most courageous. This evening I believe that means wearing the star. But where will it lead?”

It’s been a crazy beginning of a week, with substitute teaching for three days, fighting with Priceline over our Christmas France tickets (let’s just say that I will never use this company again), an assortment of administrative worries, and having friends over last night for the final table of the World Series of Poker (I love poker as a spectator sport). Lost in the minutia of the days, there was little time for reading, and even less for putting down more thoughts on Hélène Berr’s journal. It’s been in my mind on and off, though, and I did wonder if that was close to the way Hélène herself thought about her situation, especially in the early days when her work and her love life would often take over her worries.

In parallel to Hélène’s journal, I had to read the Last Day of a Condemned Man (by Victor Hugo), as I was teaching it. I remembered Stefanie’s review, which is excellent and with which I agree wholeheartedly. The book seemed to be more formally interesting than convincing: the use of slang (19th century slang was not a common thing; it was the private language of robbers, murderers and convicts, and using it did not go without an amount of critical outcry about the “bastardization” of language). As for the condemned man himself, Hugo wants to make him a symbol, a man who could be any man. He doesn’t flesh him out too much, which was counterproductive to me — if I oppose the death penalty, it is in great measure because of the fact that each man is unique, has feelings and a history, not because “it could be me”!

The two reads initially came together because Hélène mentions Hugo, wondering “if it would be like The Last Day of a Condemned man“ – “it” meaning being arrested and deported. I was then interested by the parallel in the reactions of Hélène and that of the unnamed man to the consolations of nature (romantics influences are perceptible for both) and their perplexity at the brutality and indifference of mankind. The difference lies in how they react to their situation: the condemned man cannot stop thinking about his own situation, and goes through alternatives of panic, anger and resignation; Hélène experiences ups and downs too, but she strives to always keep the suffering of others foremost, not to care for herself but to care for others. When early in the war, her father is released from captivity, she rejoices, but her joy is not, cannot be as pure as when others are saved from danger, because of the guilt associated.

This feeling of being a part of something bigger than she is informs the writing: while in the early days, Hélène’s journal is a chronicle of her life and feelings, it slowly becomes a deliberate testimony of what happened. Hélène feels a compulsion to share, to make people understand what is happening, but she fails to make the people around her get it, to illuminate their spirit, because (a last parallel with Hugo?) her reluctance to excite pity prevents her to use her own case (or that of people she knows) to illustrate her message. “Le principal problème qui se pose à moi: celui de la compréhension humaine et de la sympathie” (“the main problem I an facing: human understanding and sympathy”). Hélène struggles with the idea of a humanity split between people who feel for others and people who don’t. In an awful premonition, she sometimes is aware that she is really writing her diary for the people who will come after the war and will not be able to deny what happened. In the meantime, Hélène hurts herself with the insentivity of ordinary people such as a family friend, Mme Agache, who realizes in November 1943 that children are deported, when a friend of hers is deported with her two kids. “Depuis un an que nous vous le disions, vous ne vouliez pas le croire“, bitterly remarks Hélène’s mother (“we have been telling you for a year, you refused to believe“).

The hardest part of this hard document came for me at the end of the diary, when Hélène starts doubting her belief in the possibility of bettering others. Enamored with English writers and proud of her French heritage, there had always been a faint air of underestimating the richness of German culture in her writing (except musically), but she always fundamentally considers “the Germans” as people. On February 1st, 1944 (she was arrested at the end of March), she however notes “lorsque je vois un Allemand ou une Allemande, je me suis aperçue avec stupéfaction qu’une bouffée de rage montais en moi” (“when I see a German man or a German woman, I was astonished to realize that a feeling of rage arises in me”). On February 4th, she calls the Germans “les Boches” for the first time, and equates them to evil and ugliness. On the 15th, she pulls through as generous as ever, and reaffirms her certainty that the root of the problem is with the Nazi regime rather than with the German people, who have been conditioned not to think for themselves or to feel the difference between an order and duty. She asks the question of the potential difficulty in leading them back to their humanity: the temptation to think of a people as an entity instead of considering the myriad of human beings it is made out of is conquered.

It is Hélène’s last victory. A later entry, on the same day, enumerates some details she has just learned about camp’s life, and concludes on three words: “Horror! Horror! Horror!”

On March 8th, Hélène and her parents are arrested. Any other pages she might have written disappear; she is sent to Auschwitz, then to Bergen Belsen, where she dies from a beating administered because she could not get up one morning, weakened by the typhus. A few days later, Bergen Belsen is liberated by American soldiers. Hélène’s journal, entrusted to the family’s cook to be sent to Hélène’s love, shared by him with the rest of her family, remain a family document for over 60 years, before a family member decides to share it with the rest of us.

“For his friend Enkidu Gilgamesh
did bitterly weep as he wandered the wild:
‘I shall die, and shall I not be then as Enkidu?
Sorrow has entered my heart!”

Mask of the demon Humbaba (British Museum)

I first heard of Gilgamesh last March from a literature student I met when volunteering for a PEN Festival event. She mentioned it as the oldest known work of fiction, and I was a little miffed never to have heard of it. I was therefore happy to see it pop up on my reading list when I decided to adopt a more chronological approach to it.

But before I could discover the Epic, I had another lesson to learn, one about public-domain works. I have a Kindle, I thought, and if this is really the oldest piece of fiction known to men, I should be able to download it for free, right?

Right and wrong, of course. It’s pretty ironic that someone who’s been thinking about translation as much as I have been recently would need a refresher course on a reality as basic as this one: when you’re talking about a foreign-language work, you’d better think twice about translation quality before you commit your time to it. Turns out that Gilgamesh is still pretty much a work in progress; the versions I at first downloaded for free were frankly not the most readable. I lost two weeks trying to find my way around the Epic. I finally went with the well-regarded Andrew George’s translation (and yes, I paid for it), which rewarded me by being quite accessible. I concentrated most of my reading on the Assyrian version circa 1200 B.C. (the “standard version”), though I also dabbled in the “Old Babylonian” version – the Pennsylvania and Yale tablets – to fill lacunae in the text. Well, mostly the translator did that for me, but my erratic initial readings also helped.

With this long introduction made – the Epic, unified by the character of Gilgamesh, really seems to be constituted of two main stories. The first is that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu; Gods meddle in it with a heavy hand. The second is concerned with Gilgamesh alone on a quest, and divinities seem to have much less direct influence on the plot. The two sections are unified by the question of mortality.

At the start of the Epic, Gilgamesh is a somewhat paradoxical figure – a son of Gods endowed with all manners of perfection, yet a tyrant resented by his people. The Gods send Enkidu to counterbalance his power. Raised by wild animals, found by a hunter, tamed by a courtesan and brought to town once civilized, Enkidu is so shocked by Gilgamesh’s enthusiastic exercise of his ‘ius primae noctis’ that he decides to fight him. He is bested, but the two become friends and decide to gain glory by going to the Forest of Cedar and defeating its protector Humbaba, a creature who could be a dragon, a demon or a volcano… It’s not very clear that the Gods approve of the adventure, but the two pull it off and return triumphant to Uruk. There, Ishtar tries to seduce Gilgamesh, but he rejects her; furious, she borrows the Bull of Heaven from her father Anu, and sends it to rampage in the city. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the bull – an outrage which, added to their little Humbaba excursion, the God decide to punish. Gilgamesh being their favorite, Enkidu is the one they strike: he dies.

His heart broken, jolted into awareness of his own mortality, Gilgamesh decides to go on a quest for Uta-Napishti, the man who survived the Deluge and has been given eternal life thereafter. It takes him years wandering, but Gilgamesh finally reaches his goal, only to fail the first test given him: to go a week without sleep. As a consolation prize, he gets a rejuvenating plant, but even that gets stolen from him by a serpent on the way back to Uruk. Gilgamesh is left to accept that his legacy, the walls of Uruk, will be his only form of immortality.

While there are some traits of older epics that I do not love (such as heavy repetition), I found the Epic to be surprisingly readable. A lot of the motives (the Deluge, the snake stealing eternal life, the crossing of the river to the Golden Land where Uta-Napishti lives…) recall other mythologies and would be worth exploring further, but I was mainly interested by the relation by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The balance of power between the two seems very original and not totally explained by the current transcription – Enkidu has more importance than the friend who often accompanies the hero in the Greek tradition, but he is as summarily dismissed. He was the character I had most interest in, and his background story (notably, but not only, his relation with the prostitute and his anger at Gilgamesh’s behavior towards virgins) gave him some depths of personality beyond other characters. It was a shame he was the one who had to die.