Andreï Makine's Poetics of Nostalgia
[In the following essay, Knorr assesses Makine's work and its place within contemporary French literature.]
French book prizes get more attention when there is a story attached. The book isn't the thing; the author must have a legend. Thus we had Marguerite Duras boasting that L'Amant was all a true story, or the prize winner who turned out to be a salesman in a newspaper kiosk.
The story was better than usual this time when both the Médicis and Goncourt prizes were won by Andreï Makine, an impecunious Russian living in a one-room apartment in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. He had been rejected by a number of publishing houses until he pretended that he wrote not in French but in Russian and that he was translated. He had applied for French citizenship and been turned down. He spoke with a heavy accent.
The journalists scrambled to deal with this one. Not everything said was kind. He was proud, and reticent about biographical details tying him too closely to his narrator. It was an eye-opener for Makine when he was asked what he was going to do with the royalties, summoning to his horrified mind visions of video cassette recorders or a quick trip to Martinique. The journalists who had actually read the book almost all came back to the same theme: this was another example of the triumph of the French language.
This might have been just another Goncourt with a good story attached, were it not for the fact that Le testament français,1 Makine's fourth novel and one of the best books written in French for many years, shows up the shallowness and self-indulgence of a great deal of French (and not only French) contemporary writing. It also demonstrates that the old opposition that cultural bureaucrats and other pensioners are so fond of—between the “avant-garde” and the rest of us squares—has become quite meaningless.
Here is a novel of great stylistic beauty that is also an unflinching account of seventy years of Communist hell. It resembles no other book about the Soviet Union. It is not properly speaking a dissident's book, in no way a documentary or a tract. It is personal without being confessional; it tackles the greatest subjects—death, the power of evil—while warmly chronicling the lives of a family of Russians who, like so many others, were torn apart by the famines, the purges, and the wars.
Le testament français, published by the Mercure de France, is in the grand tradition of semi-autobiographical works such as Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Ivan Bunin's The Life of Arseniev. Makine, who is thirty-eight and has been living here since the middle 1980s, calls Proust and Bunin his two maîtres à penser, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Bunin, who was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize, in 1933, and is now, quite unfairly, almost unknown.
At the same time, Makine's mixed feelings about France—his familiarity with and admiration for French culture, coupled with perplexity at the reigning idea of culture-as-consumer-goods, and what he sees as a veneration of money—fall into another tradition, one he knows well, that of Russian writers and travelers who were both attracted and repulsed by France.
Writing on the question of France's cultural standing in the February issue of La Nouvelle Revue française, he cites Turgenev lamenting the decline in French letters around the time when Gustave Flaubert was finishing L'Education sentimentale.
Still, things have gotten worse. The artistic success of this book (it is also a popular success, what the French call un bon Goncourt, and Makine is going to get his citizenship) points up the silliness of the avant-garde game, the heavily hyped search for the Next Big Thing.
And so here is Makine, the twentieth-century version of those puzzled travelers, amid the contradictions of the opulent West: a prosperous society with an extraordinary cultural heritage and great personal liberty, where the natives are constantly zeroing in on “oppression” and subsidizing barbarous noise-making in the name of freedom, equality, and “creativity.” He is not unaware of the irony.
Le testament français roughly covers this century, as seen or imagined by the narrator, a boy growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, deeply marked by the stories of his French grandmother and by her few treasures—books of French poetry, articles about the czar's visit to France in 1896 or the great Paris flood of 1910, tales of the actress La Belle Otero or of the death of the French president in the arms of his mistress.
Her stories have the power of fairy tales and their odd relationship to time. Events have become jumbled in the boy's head, and so Paris emerges from the flood waters like Atlantis to the grand music of the imperial visit. The fairy tales end abruptly when the boy finds old newspapers reporting the abdication of the czar. All the rutilant scenes he had imagined—the theater boxes, the jewels, the extraordinary menus—take on a different glow, for when he thinks again of the stuffed game birds and the chandeliers of the Elysée Palace, he knows another ending. “What is the truth?,” he begins to ask himself.
The grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, was born in France but moved as a child to Siberia with her father, Norbert, a French doctor, and her much younger mother, Albertine. When Norbert dies, Albertine goes mad. They will eventually return to France, and Charlotte will witness with a child's eyes the happy family scenes and then the tragedy of 1914—the brides, and then the widows.
After Albertine returns to Russia, Charlotte lives with relatives in the Paris suburb of Neuilly, helps out at a makeshift hospital during the war, then goes back to Russia herself in the early 1920s. What she finds, of course, is hell—violence and hunger, people in movement across that vast, devastated land. Her papers are stolen by some official thug, and she is threatened with death as a spy—there will be no going back to Neuilly.
She will eventually marry a Russian, who will be arrested one Christmas and survive, almost by bureaucratic fluke, long enough to go to war. When he comes back, an eternity later, he is a quiet, broken man, covered with scars. He doesn't last long.
Charlotte's grandson will spend summers with her in Saranza, a fictional town in southern Russia (“So was Saranza, poised on the edge of the steppe, in profound astonishment at the infinity that opened before its doors”). At home, in a very different city, stretching with wide Stalinist avenues on both sides of the Volga, the boy will listen to the late-night stories of his parents' generation, to the horrors that Charlotte has left silent.
After he loses his parents, in quick succession, he will not quite be able to cry for them:
When I did cry, I was not crying for having lost them. It was tears of helplessness in front of a stupefying truth: a whole generation of the dead, the mutilated, people who had lost their youths. Tens of millions of beings simply crossed out of life. … Yes, if I cried, it was in front of their silent resignation. They didn't blame anyone, they asked for no reparations. They lived and tried to make us happy.
With these three generations, Makine takes us back to the czars and forward to perestroika with an extraordinary sharpness of detail. He plays with time, he comes back with poetic insistence on the grandmother's treasures, and on the horror, starvation, cannibalism, the camps, the mass graves. Death is brutal and senseless, and then all is quiet again in the Russian immensity, except for the sound of ice cracking.
Le testament builds on themes from Makine's earlier novels, the great turning points of Soviet life: the war, the Stalin era, the “thaws.”
In La fille d'un héros de l'Union Soviétique (The Daughter of a Hero of the Soviet Union), the “hero,” decorated for courage at Stalingrad, will live his life quietly, rarely protesting, rarely angry at his country, giving an annual lecture to schoolchildren, until his wife's heart, weakened by war wounds, gives up in the crush of a food store queue. The daughter will be strong-armed by the KGB into working as an “interpreter” for foreign businessmen. And so prostitution turns out to be a better life than many, for a while.
In Au temps du fleuve Amour, three boys travel across the Siberian snow, day after day, to see a few Jean-Paul Belmondo movies that have somehow landed in the Red October movie house, situated between the KGB offices and the factory that makes barbed wire for the camps. The boys get older, Belmondo sometimes gets younger. They watch the movies the way they might try to decipher code sent by the West over a crackling transmitter. “We rediscovered the Occident. The world where one could live without worrying about the lugubrious shadows made by the sunny peaks.”
Makine's poetic voice, coupled with the matter-of-fact description of a country overgrown with barbed wire, has a curious resonance in the late twentieth-century West. The warmth, and the almost spiritual use of the past, contrast oddly with “postmodern” intellectual and literary debate, which often seems to oscillate between theoretical argumentation and rather naïve attempts to “intervene” in world events.
Although Makine tells his story straight-forwardly, without flights into philosophy, the sense of the greater questions of life is always there. And, at the risk of oversimplifying the thinking of this erudite man, it might be said that as a novelist he is in search of spirituality in a world where atom bombs have been “perfected” down to suitcase size.
He believes that the direction of contemporary literature must be “messianic,” not religious per se but spiritual. He notes New Age goofiness, the rise of sects, and the vengeful tone of religious revival around the world as painful evidence of a basic human need.
Thus, Makine talks about things that, in our ironic and cynical times, are vaguely embarrassing, certainly old-fashioned. A journalist writing in Le Monde said he was very Russian. Another, who admired the book, told me he was so “honest.” Many modern writers seem to find it embarrassing to discuss any form of higher feelings—neuroses are O.K., or self-pity, or political indignation of all sorts—but awe, fear of some greater power, or just of a great silence? Anomie is as lively as it gets with this crowd.
Although his writing is never raw, some of the feelings are, and Makine himself says he feels out of place in French apartments where everything is varnished with a coat of elegance and culture, or indeed with the notion of culture sold like bread and subsidized by ministries. What he calls Russian “anarchy” is more conducive, he feels, to thought. In French culture, people fall into a kind of intellectual torpor.
Many French intellectuals go on at great length and with imperturbable seriousness about their road from one kind of “militantisme” to another, about what caused them to join the Communist Party or to leave it, as though their voices were part of some important historical record. Most recently, their tortured attempts to be “engaged” on the subject of Bosnia have fallen somewhere between the desperate and the comical.
In contrast, Makine's narrator in Le testament is an old-fashioned boy who becomes entranced by France and spends hours in libraries trying to find out more, who learns poetry by heart and recites it to others; he is in that sense more reminiscent of heroes of nineteenth-century bildungs-romans than of the lunatics coming of age in designer clothes in contemporary literature. But he is emphatically a late twentieth-century man.
Makine is interested in what he calls the poetics of nostalgia—not the sort of nostalgia that clutters AM radio here with the greatest hits of the Summmer of Love, but a re-creation of the past that abolishes time. In that sense, he says, Proust is the avant-garde.
The vanquishing of time through artistic memory is the driving theme behind both Proust's well-known story and The Life of Arseniev, which was the fictionalized account of Ivan Bunin's youth on his aristocratic family's ruined estate, and of his early forays into the Russian literary world.
Makine has told me:
All of Bunin, all of Proust: that is nostalgia, but nostalgia is a term that is so overused that is has become an equivalent for passéisme, an attachment to the past. On the contrary nostalgia refuses the past, it says that the past is always present. The soul has no notion of death, the body tells us about death, and so we reduce ourselves increasingly to our physical aspect. … Some people become matter, others become spirit.
For all his early troubles, Makine is now a star in the business that first scorned him. French publishing is easy to criticize. It is famously insular. Many of the writers who are promoted by the main houses are themselves in the publishing business, and it's difficult not to feel upon looking at some of these books that decision-making was less critical than it might have been.
At the same time, it produces, for its size, an astonishing number of intelligent books of ideas that remain in print and are well distributed. It is also admirably open to the rest of the world. French publishers, like the Germans, publish a large percentage of books in translation (ten or fifteen percent, by my estimate, against about three percent for England or the United States).
American writers are quickly translated and generously reviewed. An example was Paul Auster, who was celebrated in France while hardly known in the United States—but he is an untypical case, as many of his books feel like Nouveau Romans written in English. Less obvious examples are Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon.
There are many good French writers: interesting novelists, such as J. M. G. Le Clezio, Patrick Modiano, Erik Orsenna, sometimes Philippe Sollers and others; brilliant historians and rhetoricians; and there are plenty of belletrists who write books of limited scope with admirable skill. (These are not unlike many French movies, interesting to people who live here but truly untranslatable.)
No one, however, seems able to match the stature of the writers of the first half of the century. This was made particularly clear with the publication in 1994 of Albert Camus's last, unfinished novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man), an autobiographical text that tackled the Algerian question.
Camus was out of fashion for years, a by-product of his quarrel with Sartre. Now that Sartre is out of fashion, Camus is back in the headlines, partly through the astonishing popularity of this short book fragment, and now through the publication of an important new biography by the journalist Olivier Todd.
Unintentionally comic testimony of the poverty of the last few decades came through the recent publication by Flammarion of La Putain du diable (The Devil's Whore), a kind of intellectual autobiography by Catherine Clément, philosophy professor, journalist, and for many years a member of the Communist Party, that inevitably was compared to Simone de Beauvoir's Les Mandarins and Julia Kristeva's Les Samouraïs.
Clement herself compares her book to eighteenth-century philosophical novels, a curious claim since it consists of her fictional conversations on and off the small screen about all the famous people she's known, from Sartre to Lacan. In a flip but self-important tone, she gives us a history of postwar intellectual movements that ignores the best and chatters on glibly about the worst.
Does any of this matter? Artistic creation goes through ice ages, and it is quite conceivable that the second half of the twentieth century will not have much to show off as genius. This is an embarrassing idea for people in the art biz with a vested interest in the idea of the relentless “progress” of art. The art professionals and bureaucrats are famously well established in France—no matter what the government—and they have no intention of giving up what the French call their “fromage.”
Le Monde des livres savagely panned a book by the young music critic Benoît Duteurtre that effectively said the government should stop the enormous subsidies to “recherche musicale,” that is, to Pierre Boulez's various projects and their offshoots. For this, Duteurtre was compared to Robert Faurisson, the former professor who denies that the Holocaust took place. This severe criticism of an interesting book was published by the same people who devoted enormous space to a book on the faddishly left-wing Tel Quel group by Philippe Forest. Amid this kind of dangerous foolishness—and it is by no means uncharacteristic of the intellectual climate here—it seems a small miracle that a book as luminous and unpretentious as Le testament français has been so richly rewarded. Now and then the good guys win.
Note
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Le testament français, by Andreï Makine; Mercure de France, 309 pages, 120 FF.
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