The Humor of Destiny
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS & WRITING The Humor of Destiny By Raymond Rosenthal At the age of 25, with two books of poetry and four novels behind her, Marie-Claire Blais has published a new novel, A Season in...
...The rest of the family fulfils the destinies which their poet has imagined for them...
...Monsieur le Curé and I had a preference for warm climates and for even numbers...
...One of the advantages of their poverty, at least as Mlle...
...Blais' scheme of the universe...
...He called out to his grandmother...
...Blais' truly individual and distinguished voice...
...One never feels, as one so often does with Catholic writers, that she is indulgent or sentimental about the effects of poverty...
...from the very first, his wit and fancy embellish the fact of his death and invest it with a mocking grandeur that is perhaps the core of Mlle...
...But now, at last, with Wilson's prestigious help, Mlle...
...That last touch, with its evocation of a peasant on a sly holiday, so startling and exact, gives some notion of the supple range of Mlle...
...Blais bears the indelible imprint of her Catholic upbringing, and her novel is both a paean to Catholicism's form-giving ceremony, seen from the angle of a Claudelian vision of rigorous fate and ceaseless struggle, and an incitement to the heedless upsurge of a life that breaks all forms when it cannot turn them to its ardent exigencies...
...Wilson is entirely correct when he says in his preface to this novel that Mlle...
...she simply sees it as an element, a kind of boundless sea of intensity and squalor, in which her characters thrash and strive and have their being...
...For Héloïse, always inclined to compassion, saw the man now trampling on her youth with no regard for the misery he was inflicting on her body or the loneliness of her desire-saw him as a child, a big baby with primal appetites, suspended from her nipple, exploiting in all kinds of gestures and transports-none of which seemed in any way more ignoble than any other, once a certain stage of frenzy had been reached -the thirst, the huge thirst of that first day, unfortunately unassuaged, that now had the effect of making the man who had come to enjoy the embraces of a mistress desire at the same time the caresses of a mother capable of corrupting him...
...And everyone talks about Jean's coming "tragic early death"-his father to taunt him with it, his grandmother to imagine him peaceful at last in heaven, and his brother, Number Seven, to remind him that he better get down to work and write his "posthumous works" in a hurry...
...Her first two novels, which were issued some years ago by Little-Brown, were also of unusual quality...
...In fact, she has done what every first-rate artist does when confronted by the novel-she has bent and molded it to suit her imaginative purposes...
...In the Noviciat, to which he has been sent to fatten up, he sleeps with all the boys in his dormitory, submits to the caresses of an obsessed priest, and furiously continues to write out the prophetic poems of his family's fate, "pen in hand, spreading a rainbow of ink around him, on the wall, on the bedclothes...
...The sick, shivering boy warms himself "with a course of instruction on Morocco...
...Blais imagines them, is the fact that everything decisive and weighty, from birth to sex to death, can be handled, fondled, discussed, just as they discuss the lack of food and the bitterness of the cold...
...Number Seven continues to drink and steal, Héloïse, the failed nun, enters a brothel where she mutely exists, "floating from a happy body into a sad body," while another brother, Pomme, has his fingers cut off by a machine in the factory in which he is incarcerated...
...Blaise acknowledges the influence of writers like Cocteau and Breton, Claudel and Mauriac...
...Jean-Le Maigre apostrophizes his death like a tragic poet who has been rendered strangely detached by a surrealist sense of frivolity...
...From the day I was born, I have worn a crown of lice on my head...
...Blais is receiving something of the sort of critical attention she so unquestionably deserves...
...I want to go out to the latrines...
...My gaze glowed already with a dark and tormented fire...
...I yawned in vanity, and with good reason...
...An iron, implacable, unappeasable round of improvident births and premature deaths-that is the harsh lyricism of poverty which this incomplete Rimbaud tries to fathom and express...
...Emmanuel, whose birth opens the book and whose name gives it its title, is merely a dimly seen bundle of hunger and thirst, connected by his future fate-early death-with that of his brother, Jean-Le Maigre, the wild, tender, Rimbaud-like poet, whose death from tuberculosis provides the novel with its essential structure and theme...
...We can thank that energetic and receptive "cross-fertilizer" of cultures, Edmund Wilson, for having brought this young French-Canadian writer to public notice...
...Caught in the muddy bog of the second-rate, the critic of novels can quite easily forget the swift, pleasurable and bewildering shock that a real act of art can produce in him...
...yet, so far as I recall, they went almost completely unremarked...
...What is more, she displays the true ease of the artist in words, since she has found the way to say everything that is in her mind and still remain succinct, passionate, pointed and marvelously interesting...
...Blais is commenting not only on Emmanuel, as seen in the first pages of the book, and Jean-Le Maigre, as seen throughout it, but also on the tender cruelty of passion itself, which is perhaps her most intense concern and the true subject of her book...
...Octavie with the "dignity of the great wildcats, clad from head to foot in a yellow dress as dazzling as the sun," is the place of unbridled lust and coldness, a kind of hell in Mlle...
...It is also a poem to poverty, which curses the ruin it inflicts on human beings and blesses the heightened awareness its "savage purity" frequently arouses in its victims...
...The "timid voices" of his brothers calling him out to play are suddenly changed into "a long line of Jesuits coming across the crackling ice to judge him, their files tucked underneath their arms...
...And it is a shock, often disorienting and even slightly annoying...
...Mlle...
...She has invented her own form, as unique and recalcitrant and unexpected as the form Gogol concocted for Dead Souls or Sterne thought up for Tristram Shandy...
...Monsieur le Curé understands his confusion...
...Blais' style, which has been wonderfully rendered in Derek Coltman's remarkable and fluent translation...
...Undoubtedly Claudel's idea of a pitiless destiny in human affairs is predominant in her thinking, though she has almost unrecognizably transmuted it by combining it with the irreverent, darting humor of the surrealists...
...for art is not smoothly available and authentic originality is full of sudden by-ways, dead ends, traps and surprises...
...It is the Director of the reform school, with a "lustful smile" on his pallid face, who brings him "the good news...
...Blais, sexuality without tenderness is bound to be corrupt and perverted, and the priest who preys on the little boys is the devil, "wearing his black robe, his fur hat down over his forehead, his muddy shoes held in his hand...
...It is also a waste of time to try to fit Mlle...
...The whore house, presided over by Mme...
...There's no hurry," he explains, "one always gets there in the end...
...In all of modern literature, no one, except for Oleysha, the little known Russian short story writer, in his masterpiece, "Liompa," has written more movingly of death...
...WRITERS & WRITING The Humor of Destiny By Raymond Rosenthal At the age of 25, with two books of poetry and four novels behind her, Marie-Claire Blais has published a new novel, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 145 pp., $4.50), which exhibits the inspired pace and control of a master...
...And when it finally comes, Jean's death represents a high point in the novel, at once an enticement, a punishment and a promise of peace...
...Yet he can never get his bearings: "I never knew where the East was, North even less, and I always felt that the West was wandering around the house with its head down, like someone who is bored...
...But he is condemned and, like a good boy at last, he lowers his head, kneels down in the snow and waits...
...The law is inflexible: Every word of praise for mediocrity robs vital space from the gifted and original...
...Blais' sensibility...
...Indeed, if so-and-so and such-and-such are novelists of originality and poetic vision-the reader can fill in the blanks with any of the second-raters currently being puffed-what words are left to describe Mlle...
...Mlle...
...The tragedy of Jean-Le Maigre's death is made almost unbearably poignant by the humor with which it is observed and commented on...
...Oh, sad world...
...A brow crowned with lice and surrounded by garbage...
...Unable to find his place on earth, the poet wanders lovingly through his own past and his family's future...
...Jean begs to be excused "for a minute or two...
...She did not reply...
...He also does not spare himself...
...Returning from the fields through the kitchen door, the fat-cheeked Muses cut off the sight of the sky from me with their sun-blackened backs.' He had been born to take the place of his recently dead brother, Pivoine, who "returned to the earth without complaint," and his coming death in turn foreshadows Emmanuel's...
...Blais' "clairvoyant's crystal ball that revealed the diminished, remote and somewhat mysterious visions englobed in the early novels has been suddenly darkened and filled with the turbid and swirling sediment of the actual French Canadian world -with the squalor and squirming life that swarms in the steep-roofed cement-covered houses of the little Canadian towns.' An unquenchable sense of fact and milieu underlies all the fantastic soliloquies out of which this novel is constructed...
...Blais' work into some acceptable genre or form...
...In this passage, Mlle...
...For Mlle...
...The poor are also impolite, uncautious, cruel and enormously articulate...
Vol. 49 • July 1966 • No. 14
