THE OPOPONAX, JUST TRANSLATED by Helen Weaver, looks like the result of an accidental discovery in the laboratory of the novel. The young Monique Wittig (she was twenty-nine when the book was published in France) may have been experimenting with the problem of the narrator in a fictional work: what we call or used to call the point of view. The Jamesian problem. Most Western novelists today accept as a matter of course the Jamesian solution. James’s formula (“Dramatize, dramatize!”) has meant the end of auctorial description, including the analysis of motives and behavior—“psychology.” Everything must be mediated, as the French say. In practice, this tends to cut out Beauty and Wit. Nabokov, in many ways an old-fashioned dandy of the novel, has had the daring to keep both, using the device of a garrulous false “I”—Humbert Humbert, Professor Kinbote—and, in Pale Fire, making a pseudo-collage by gluing notes and commentary onto a 999-line poem, the outcome being a novel presented as an objet trouvé. But Nabokov is an eccentric.
The obligation we feel to dramatize or mediate (which seems to bind us like a social obligation and probably has something to do with the spread of democratic notions, no one wanting to claim omniscience) has made the novel a cumbersome affair. It has seemed to impose the ugly flashback, since the past, by present convention, can only exist in someone’s memory—not objectively in history or in the author’s private knowledge. If you want to tell what happened before, you have to have a character “reliving” it. Also, as if to make things harder, novels nowadays never seem to start at the beginning of the story and go on to the end but plunge in medias res (again the drama) and then move backward, through memory, till the character is finally abreast of his starting-point. Or you may have flashbacks within a flashback. These shifts, which we all resort to, present company included, are ugly no doubt because they are false to the nature of prose narrative, which can be pictured as a long string, and false too to the psychology of memory, which does not work the way novelists are pretending it does. Memory does not tell stories; people do.
In France, the nouveau roman is using the flashback too, though in a somewhat more arty way, borrowing from films, the zero point being reached by an amnesiac narrator. But there is one modern French novel that has got rid of the flashback without “regressing” to earlier modes. I am thinking of Nathalie Sarraute’s Les Fruits d’Or, which tells the story of a hero—in this case a book—starting with the beginning and ending with the end. It is pure linear narration, and yet the author is absent; the reader gleans what is happening from a series of, as it were, overheard conversations. Being conversation, it suggests a disembodied theatre, but the fast-moving theatre of comedy—Molière. By perfection of form, concordance of means and ends, the book (in my opinion) became a classic the day it was published. Here the convention of the hidden author and the mystifications surrounding the point of view suddenly make sense. The theme of Les Fruits d’Or is a question of value: are those fruits gold or gilt? Do aesthetic values have a “real” existence or are they only a fluctuating currency, undergoing spirals of inflation and deflation according to the market? Not Was-I-in-Marienbad-last-year-or-did-I-only-think-I-was?—a pseudo-question that could be answered by a hotel register. In Les Fruits d’Or, the eponymous hero—the book—is absent, being only talked about, and the author, therefore, must be absent too, not just hidden, but frankly hiding, since the creator who has imagined the imaginary book is evidently the only person who could know whether it was good or bad or neither. If we could find the author, we would know too, but it is just that certainty that is forbidden by the very terms of the problem.
With Monique Wittig, something similar seems to have happened. A technical experiment, asking an epistemological question about the nature and limits of memory, has led to a genuine finding. At first sight, The Opoponax can be placed in a familiar category: the autobiographical novel of childhood. It starts at the beginning and ends at the end, going from the first day in primary school, where a little boy comes in asking who wants to see his penis, to a cold June day in a convent boarding-school, where the pupils are taken to the burial of a teacher—an Ite missa est to puberty. There are no flashbacks. It is all, you could say, a flashback, since the author is not recounting the story but reliving it sharply in memory. But she is reliving it as if it had happened to somebody else, which in fact is always the case. Catherine Legrand is not a fictional alias or transparent disguise for Monique Wittig: she is a conjecture about an earlier Monique Wittig. It is clear that between “me” remembering and my previous self, there is a separation, as in the Einsteinian field theory, so that if I write “I” for both, I am slurring over an unsettling reality. But how to state that uncertainty in narrative terms?
Monique Wittig’s solution was to desubjectify Catherine Legrand to the limit of possibility, so that she would become a kind of on dit, a generally accepted rumor. If “I” is ruled out as the appropriate pronoun, “she” is not wholly exact either for an indeterminate being who is not the author any more and not, on the other hand, a fictional heroine. The Opoponax meets the difficulty by opening a cleavage in Catherine Legrand, between a “she” and an “on”—an indefinite pronoun.
Unfortunately, this word is not translatable into English, and the translator’s “you” could hardly be more wrong most of the time. “You” is personal and familiar; it is the word you use when talking to yourself. “You ought to do that, Mary.” True, I can write “the word you use,” meaning you-and-I, reader. But I cannot write “You played baseball,” if I mean all of us played baseball that day. On is impersonal, indefinite, abstract, neutral, guarded. It is myself and everybody in a given collective at a given time. “On jouait au baseball.” It is also an unspecified somebody. Here is a real letter from a young boy in classe de neige, which reads exactly like L’Opoponax. “On ne fait pas de ski aujourd’hui. On fait le calcul. On s’ennuie.” “There wasn’t any skiing today. We did our arithmetic. It’s boring here.”
The short French sentences of L’Opoponax often sound like a glum Sunday letter written home to parents. Or like a laborious school essay—a requirement. Monique Wittig uses the present tense throughout (cf. the child’s letter), which again has no English equivalent. The narrative present in English is used for what the manuals call “vividness,” and it is probably more American than English. “I come into the room. I see this guy with a gun. He jumps me.” But we do not use it habitually; the French do, partly because the passé défini is ugly: “Nous affublâmes.” The translator’s second mistake was to keep the narrative present. Her verbs, far from suggesting an unfixed, undated time—a letter headed simply “Sunday”—make events appear wildly jerky and speeded up, as in an early movie. A third peculiarity of the original is the absence of paragraphing or dots or adverbial phrases to denote the end of one time sequence and the beginning of another: these dissolves and juxtapositions without apparent logic correspond (though this may not have been intended) to the lack of punctuation and oddities of punctuation in a child’s letter, where you may find a big round period eyeing you in the middle of a sentence. The reader, obliged to paragraph this almost uninterrupted march of sentences, becomes more aware than he would be normally of lacunae, breaks, shifts of subject, indicating often—though not always—fear, as in a dream. This comes through in the English version, except for the quotations from poetry, which are left in French—perhaps the only recourse—and put into italics.
The discovery made in The Opoponax is a new insight into childhood and the educative process. The indefinite pronoun proves to be a key that unlocks more doors than may have been expected on the first try. The on not only marks a neutral relation between author and material: it marks a neutral relation of the child to herself. Combined with the static present and the monotone of the run-on paragraphs, it reveals that to be a child is not at all a simple, spontaneous thing. To be a child is something one learns, as one learns the names of rivers or the kings of France. Childhood, for a child, is a sort of falseness, woodenness, stoniness, a lesson recited. Many children are aware of this—that is, aware of being children as a special, prosy condition: “We can’t do that! We’re children!” Playing children is a long boring game with occasional exciting moments. It is obvious that children imitate adults and other children: that is known as learning. But the full force of this has not been shown, at least in fiction or autobiography, until The Opoponax. A child is a little robot, and the bad child in a class, like the boy who wants to show his penis to the other children or the girl who pulls a white hair out of the teacher’s bun, is a bad robot, while the others are good robots. The idea of children as little individuals is far from the realities of their experience. They are all copycats, by choice and necessity—witness their singsong voices, their insistence on correcting each other, particularly noticeable in girls.
Everybody’s childhood is the same in its essentials. For a child, it is a story he is memorizing under his breath, beginning with his name. As if I were to write:
My name is Catherine Legrand. I have a little sister, Véronique Legrand. A big girl named Inès comes and takes me to school. Our teacher is Sister. She is Belgian. Belgian means that you say septante-et-un instead of soixante-onze. Untranslatable. Sister is married to God. Her husband is in Heaven. We can’t see him because there are too many clouds.
This rote voice, like a phonograph recording, is the voice of the class: Robert Payen Guy Romain Alain Trévise Pascale Delaroche Françoise Pommier Catherine Legrand. A roll-call, a show of hands. It is the same on the playground at recreation period. Recreation is playing games, and a game is something you learn too. You watch what the others do and repeat it. You count who is there. In summer, the roll-call has different names: Vincent Parme Denise Parme Janine Parme Catherine Legrand Véronique Legrand. Those others are your cousins. Pierre-Marie Fromentin and Pascale Fromentin are your cousins too. Their father is Uncle. In the daytime you see the Evening Star. It is the one called the Shepherd’s Lamp. When you go back to school, the stove in the classroom is different and Sister isn’t there. The teacher is Mademoiselle. She has glasses with metal rims.
Children do not so much observe things as study them, with a view to retention. It is as if their lips were always moving silently as their eyes wander around field or classroom, taking notes. The commonplace that the great outdoors is Nature’s classroom (cf. the école buissonnière) speaks more truth than poetry about the child’s situation, as does the game named Follow-the-Leader.
Catherine Legrand repeats to herself what the teacher says about ghosts in the forest, tells over lists of trees, plants, and cereals and how to recognize them, definitions of streams, rivers, and torrents, the way Sister peels an orange in curls, words like “tangent” and “circumference,” how to make elderberry ink, which Mademoiselle says is poison. In an interior exercise-book—“Catherine Legrand, Class 2b”—there are the colors she sees on her eyelids when she shuts her eyes in the sun, the little hairs the nib of her pen catches from the paper that make her letters whiskery, the smell of her teacher bending over her, the untied shoelace of a choirboy in church, the big girls making the little girls undress and play doctor with them, being sick. She puts in important things, like Robert Payen dying or the river flooding or finding a snake, and unimportant things, like Reine Dieu’s beige socks, and she does not know how to show the difference, just as, when she draws a house, she does not know how to make it look deep or put people in the windows. She has guessed that there is a difference chiefly from the way grownups act—when she brings the snake to the table, for instance—but even by observing them carefully she is not yet able to copy grownups. She needs “perspective.”
A child is troubled by the feebleness of his means, i.e., by his state of inexpressiveness. He may not know how to draw a house, but he knows that the house he draws is not what he sees (when Teacher says it is “very good,” she is not telling the truth). In the same way, even polite children get restless if they are forced to listen to one of them make up a fairy story: they can recognize that it is not the genuine article.
Anne Marie Losserand’s story was very long. Mademoiselle smiled and nodded her head as she listened...Mademoiselle told Anne Marie Losserand that she could finish her story in class tomorrow that they must leave right away or they would not be home before dark.
Some readers have objected that The Opoponax is not true to their childhood, because it contains only discrete sensations—no thoughts or emotions. But first of all, these discrete sensations are the universal data of childhood. Second, it is doubtful that children think: they reason. Third, the emotions of early years are either indistinguishable from sensation (Proust’s madeleine) or they are attached to an individual psychology whose character, beyond a crude outline, cannot be verified by a later self. Whether Catherine Legrand “loves” her parents is beside the point: it may be supposed that she does because “on aime ses parents.” The study of her parents as individuals would produce portraits—a quite different genre and outside the powers of a child.
On the first day of school, Sister tells Catherine Legrand’s mother that she should leave now and Catherine Legrand is glad because parents, she sees, do not belong in a classroom. The parents of Catherine Legrand file out of the book and are scarcely heard of again. Mothers and fathers have no place in a socialized unit ruled by an on; they are an embarrassment. Similarly, a “Catherine” would be a gross familiarity in the context: it is always “Catherine Legrand”—the name she answers to in roll-call and that will designate her when she marries, seeks employment, receives social security, dies. The primary-school child accepts this civil alias with the desk assigned to him; he learns by imitation not to be a “baby,” i.e., his parents’ child. And the lesson is ingested: what most of us remember of our school years is not the feelings we mastered or hid but the behavior of pens, crayons, inkwells, putting on our overshoes.
Yet in adolescence, at secondary school, this begins to change, and a still sharper division takes place in the child. When Catherine Legrand goes as a day pupil to a convent boarding-school, emotion of an intense kind does figure, and its symbol is the opoponax, a magical plant yielding a fetid gum thought to cure infection: it is the same word as panacea. The name is also applied to a sweet-smelling plant used in perfume. In the novel, the opoponax is a creature, bird or animal, invoked as a powerful agent by Catherine Legrand, who loves the boarding-pupil Valerie Borge. The opoponax is of a proud and surly disposition, dangerous when crossed. He writes threatening letters in vermilion ink to Valerie Borge to make her pay attention to Catherine Legrand; he will be seen at dawn, he warns, sitting on the window-sill of the dormitory and he can cause fires and snarls in the hair. Everyone begins to speculate about who the opoponax can be. Valerie Borge guesses and puts an apologetic answer to his letters in the study-hall piano. She tells Catherine Legrand she loves her too, and their passion becomes a legend (though no one knows about it), like the odoriferous gum, fetid and sweet-smelling, like a cruel fabled bird, like the poetry in old French and Latin they have been studying in class—lento me torquet amore.
The opoponax is an incantation. His source is probably the herbarium Catherine Legrand is making, but from being a medicine he turns into a pain—the pain of love, for which a balm is sought. The identity of the opoponax is the reverse of a civil identity: in the first place, it is a secret. The opoponax is power and defiance. He may also be the love that dares not speak its name—a creature found in convent boarding-schools sitting on the window-sill at dawn. When Valerie Borge consents to love Catherine Legrand, who is now a boarder too, the opoponax, soothed, is no longer heard from: the panacea has been applied.
In the convent, the magical rote of poetry has been replacing the lists memorized in geography drill and nature study in primary school. Individualities among the girls are becoming more distinct, and yet sensation is becoming more blurred and dreamlike. Faces, figures, are beginning to “stand out.” In primary school, the chief distinction for a classmate was to die or to have a little brother or sister die—a mysterious important thing that usually only grownups are allowed to do. First you were marked “Absent,” then your mother or aunt came and said you were sick, then the class tiptoed in to look at you, laid out under a white net with a rosary and a crown of white roses on your head. In the kitchen, your mother would be stringing beans and crying.
Death, for a child, is a pure on dit, even when studied at close range, and the emotion of grief—one of the least contagious of human emotions—is embarrassing to watch. It is more interesting to think about dead people being put into holes in the ground—children are interested in holes. There are a great many funerals and viewings of corpses in The Opoponax; adults for some reason act as if death ought to be a lesson to children. Yet in the presence of death children are unable to “school” their features or to feel the required emotion; they look for a distraction.
The Opoponax ends as they (“on”) are putting old Mlle. Caylus into a hole in a village cemetery. The pupils, who have already been taken to view the body, have now been conveyed, by bus, to the remote mountain graveyard. Catherine Legrand notes that there are no names on the mounds in this cemetery and that the wooden crosses are awry and neglected. To her and Valerie Borge, death is still unreal. It is cold in the graveyard. Catherine Legrand is saying poetry to herself. The last words of the book, a valedictory, are a verse of Maurice Scève, the sixteenth-century erudite poet of the school of Lyons. The reader shivers, for Catherine Legrand is not thinking of Mlle. Caylus: she is thinking (though she may not yet know it) of Valerie Borge. “Tant je l’aimais qu’en elle encore je vis.” “So much I loved her that still in her I live.” The past tense (in French it is the imperfect) is spoken for the first time, among the derelict grave mounds and wet field poppies, together with the pronoun “I.”
July, 1966