David J. Bond, University of Saskatchewan
The most immediately apparent aspect of Frdric Vitouxs fiction is the way in which characters create a protected world apart from the vicissitudes of everyday life and historical events.[1] Giuseppe, in Fin de saison au Palazzo Pedrotti (1983), spends his time dreaming of the amorous adventures of his ancestor, shutting himself up in his palazzo while political struggles and terrorist attacks take place outside. Roger, in Il me semble dsormais que Roger est en Italie (1986), flees to Italy, seeking in its hill towns and works of art an escape from an ugly Americanized world. In La Comdie de Terracina (1994), the young Henri Beyle (not yet writing under the name of Stendhal) also goes to Italy to seek happiness far from the dreary society of France in 1816. Venice, as it is depicted in Charles et Camille (1992), is a society given over to frivolity and memories of its past while resolutely ignoring the approach of Napoleons army. Les Cercles de lorage (1976) describes how various sailors find escape from the world in the isolation of their ships, while their wives on shore deliberately cut out awareness of the dangers of the sea. Even Jean-Louis and Blandine in Deux Femmes (1997), although actively trying to discover who murdered the women with whom Jean-Louis had spent a couple of days, are really trying to live a kind of mystery novel, in which they are the heroes. This cuts them off from the terrorist attacks in Paris and from a modern world (represented mainly by the tourists in Paris) that Jean-Louis finds unbearable.
A closer examination of Vitouxs texts reveals that, in several of them, language plays a privileged role in the attempt to create a separate, isolated world. In Srnissime (1990), for example, four people try to create an independent le Saint-Louis in the heart of Paris at a time when France is in political turmoil and Hitler and Mussolini are preparing for war. The main instrument of this campaign is a newspaper in which they set forth their ideal of splendid isolation. The narrator of La Nartelle (1984) tries to escape his personal problems by inventing a tale of two migr lovers set in France in 1877. (A story in which the two lovers themselves seek isolation in their romantic idyll.) The invention of stories lies at the core of Cartes postales (1973), in which the narrator discovers a collection of old postcards, and creates stories based on messages and images on the cards. Yedda jusqu la fin (1978) has a similar basis, for in it the narrator inherits the library of a neighbor called Yedda, and he then tries to reconstruct her life and personality from the books in that library. Jean-Louis in Deux Femmes is a novelist and writer of film scenarios who sees these activities as a means of travelling through life, armor-plated by a kind of indolence (58). Of course, the very attempt to put himself into a sort of mystery novel is itself an illustration of how the text may be used to escape from reality.
There is a certain mistrust of language in such tales, for words are seen as a way of avoiding harsh reality. Vitoux has written: Speech is a means of flight. It allows the individual, with varying degrees of success, to escape from his condition (Misre et parole 25). He has also said that, for two such different writers as Proust and Cline, writing allows escape from the world, from a reality that they find unbearable (Cline 20). He argues that, for certain of the characters in Clines novels, words become an excuse for forgetting everything that is not part of their speech, in particular awareness of ones wretched state (Misre et parole 25). Much the same could be said of those characters and narrators in Vitouxs own fiction who invent stories. It is also true of Camille in Charles et Camille, who speaks soothing words to the wounded Charles because speech is sometimes like a veil that one pulls across, a light gauze curtain that flatters the sense of propriety and serves as a screen (38). For the Venetians in the same novel who try to ignore Napoleons approach, diplomatic negotiations have as their only goal to distance the all too convulsive and stupefying truth of the world (111).
Words are often a means of distraction, a kind of Pascalian divertissement. For many individuals speech transports them into imaginary, dreamlike spaces and by its power of evocation, it makes them forget their wretched life (Misre et parole 36). In Deux Femmes (Riviera 151-73), Vitoux depicts two old spinsters who strike up an acquaintance with the narrator simply in order to speak to him. They talk incessantly in order to stupefy themselves, to dust off the days, weeks and years of silence in which they were confined (166). Henri Beyle in La Comdie de Terracina speaks in order to blind himself to his own blundering stupidity with women, and because he preferred to speak to fill the silence, to forget his own timidity and awkwardness (16).
Language may also be used quite simply to lie and deceive. Vitoux is fascinated by the story of Clines mother and grandmother, who often tried to persuade clients in their shop to accept imitations as genuine antiques. Any use of words to conceal the true unpleasantness of life is just as much a case of lying as this. Vitoux quotes Clines words: You have to choose, to die or to lie. I have never been able to kill myself (quoted in Cline 59). Cline, faced with the horrors of life that otherwise would have driven him to suicide, chose to conceal them by lies. In other words, he began to write fiction. Vitoux is as aware as Cline that the writer is a liar, and he shares this writers mistrust of language as a synonym for lies (Misre et parole 194).
In the end, language cannot create a barrier to the world of suffering, wars, and politics. In Vitouxs novels, the outside world inevitably enters the private world of his characters: Napoleon invades Venice in Charles et Camille; the idyll between the two migrs in La Nartelle cannot withstand outside pressure; Beyle in La Comdie de Terracina fails to seduce the woman on whom he has set his heart; Giuseppes private world in Fin de saison au Palazzo Pedrotti is invaded by a brash, modern woman; plans for independence have to be abandoned in Srnissime; storms strike the sailors in Les Cercles de lorage; the narrator of Yedda jusqu la fin is unable to bring Yedda to life; the tales woven around the postcards in Cartes postales cannot conceal the personal and collective disasters that afflicted those who sent them.
Vitouxs mistrust of language is conveyed by these failures, but also by the importance that he attaches to silence. He points out that Cline loved animals because they were, for him, those who do not speak, do not lie (La Vie de Cline), and that several of the characters in Clines work fall silent rather than use language. Words serve no purpose, such characters realize, so it is pointless to add to the injustices and lies in society by using them. This is not a passive abdication, but lucid acceptance that nothing can be done to avoid human suffering. It is the true silence of active lucidity (Cline 137).
In Vitouxs own novels, certain characters acquire stature because, realizing the futility of words, they speak little and maintain a silent detachment. Roger, in Il me semble dsormais que Roger est en Italie, is a character of few words who has a silent authority about him (42). Captain MacWheel in Les Cercles de lorage commands instant respect because his silence earned him the consideration of all parties (184). Of the four characters who plan the independence of their island in Srnissime, Yvonne has the most influence because she has that supreme quality of keeping quiet, of guiding by her silences the line of conduct that she wanted her interlocutors to adopt (217). In the story imagined by the narrator of La Nartelle, there is a character whose authority is enhanced because he had measured the inanity of always raising ones voice, shouting, laughing, protesting, distracting oneself by thinking that one can change the course of the world (176). Even Jean-Louis in Deux Femmes, although a writer, is also a man of silence (14) who belongs to the brotherhood of those who realize the vanity of words (15).
Silent individuals such as these become centers of calm and order in a world of chaos. Hence, when the residents of the old peoples home in Les Cercles de lorage are thrown into panic by the prospect of eviction, Captain MacWheel remains a figure of calm authority. In the quiet of her bookshop, Yvonne in Srnissime represents order in a world about to fall into the chaos of war. It is she, as much as the Republic of Venice, who is suggested by the title of this novel. Yeddas memory has a calming effect on the narrator of Yedda jusqu la fin because he remembers her silent patience in her old age as she awaited death.
Obviously, however lucid and admirable such silence may be, it is not an option for the writer, for whom words are the tools of the trade. The only way to abandon the tools would be to abandon the trade, but Vitoux has continued to write. He is like Cline that man of words distrusting words, messages, verbal fantasies used without remorse (La Vie de Cline 160). He therefore has to express the virtues of silence and his mistrust of words without falling silent. This is done through the creation of characters who adopt silent detachment as their attitude to life, but in other ways too.
The first of these is by indirect expression, by suggestion rather than by direct use of language. Things are indicated by not being openly stated, but by being reflected or hinted at in what is actually said. Vitoux refers to the amplifying virtues of suggestion, and he has said: A writer is someone who should not say things directly.[2] An excellent example of this technique may be found in Les deux Paris-Match (Riviera 47-48), in which a young man finds himself among some very affluent friends, and his own milieu and attitudes are suggested by what he sees here. He is defined by what he is not and by what he does not possess. In the same way, we discover the background of Henri in Cartes postales through his realization of the differences between his own home and that of more wealthy relatives. Deux Femmes, by its very form, relies heavily on suggestion of reality rather than on direct description. This is a kind of mystery novel, a genre that suggests what might have happened, speculates on events, and hints at an ugly reality. Hence, the two main characters in this particular novel spend much time guessing at why the woman with whom Jean-Louis had spent a couple of days was murdered and who was responsible. As Blandine puts it: We are quite simply guessing (308).
In some novels, it is the characters themselves who are made present by their absence. Roger, for example, is most vividly in the narrators mind after death. The narrator of the novel concludes: I am sculpting, in short, from emptiness, from his absence (Il me semble 60). Each of the rivals for Camilles affections in Charles et Camille is always aware of the other, even when he is not there. Consequently, the reader too senses the presence of the missing party. Camille herself is constantly in Charless mind when she has disappeared and he is seeking her in Italy. She is also a silent presence between two rivals when they meet in her absence. Both those who sent the cards in Cartes postales and those who received them have long disappeared, but they live on in their postcards. Captain MacWheel in Les Cercles de lorage becomes a presence in the mind of his wife and son when they receive no news of him, which causes them to fear for his safety at sea.
The whole of Yedda jusqu la fin relies on the notion of presence/absence because the narrator tries to reconstruct Yedda and her life from her absence. She is brought alive for him by her books and her furniture. But she is just as much in the books that are not in her library, since the deliberate gaps left there indicate what she did not like to read and, therefore, what her tastes were. She is also present in her empty apartment and by the fact that, when her telephone rings, the narrator, in the apartment below, does not hear her answer it. She is always there, a kind of underlying inscription (188). Even her death can be sensed in the library that she bequeaths to the narrator, providing the image, not of Yedda, but her death (12).
The outside world is present, too, precisely because characters turn their backs on it. The threat of war in Srnissime, the approach of Napoleons army in Charles et Camille, political and social strife in La Nartelle, La Comdie de Terracina, and Fin de saison au Palazzo Pedrotti are always there because characters try to ignore them. Their acts and their lives are governed by something that they try to block from their consciousness. The postcards described in Cartes postales, many of which were sent at the time of the First World War, rarely mention that war, but the battles, death make themselves felt by default, by the silence that hangs around these tragically talkative and futile cards (23). The lack of details provided by a wounded soldier in the same novel likewise makes felt the silent evidence of war (158). The stories that the narrator invents around these postcards are also based as much on what they do not say as on what is explicitly stated. The storms that always threaten the sailors in Les Cercles de lorage are especially evident in periods of calm, and the cyclones often mentioned in these pages force themselves most strikingly on the consciousness of the sailors when they are becalmed at the still centers of these cyclones.
Another way in which Vitoux conveys the virtues of calmness and silence is through his relationship to his texts. He admires especially those artists who, while giving themselves entirely to their creation, can still stand back, maintain their silence, hide their presence, and see the text in a detached way. He particularly likes Rossini, who does not take himself seriously while being absorbed in his work. Rossini at the last moment becomes still, he watches himself at work, he distances himself (Gioacchino Rossini 125). Even Cline, despite his anger and passionate denunciation of injustice and the horrors of life, realizes that no words can affect these things, and he refuses to be taken in by words. Vitoux argues that for great writers, perhaps, writing is precisely the act by which silence is created around them so that, at the very moment of writing, the truth is finally revealed about human relations, the essence of living beings and of things, which would not be understood through the premeditated will to say something (Misre et parole 201).
Vitoux sees the writer as an individual who prizes calm and silent detachment. Describing a writers house in Venice that is striking in its tranquillity, he says: Absence of movementor the taste for withdrawalis propitious for writers houses (LArt de vivre Venise 154). In his own texts, Vitoux always maintains this area of calm and silence. Like so many of his characters, he is an absent presence, for he is there, organizing and creating, yet distant and unobtrusive. He is like the narrator of Yedda jusqu la fin, who is as present as Yedda herself in that it is he who chooses and organizes the elements of Yeddas life that go into his text. But, like that Yedda herself, he is absent in that he does not intervene directly. Vitoux, in his texts, may be compared to the calm center of the cyclones depicted in Les Cercles de lorage. He believes that at the center of the text is a silent space that one must attempt to reach, that writings sole goal is to make felt in its tangible absence (Cartes postales 39).
Vitouxs texts express this tangible absence in their very style, which is one of calm, classical sobriety, and precision. Critics have noted in his works an unadorned style and limpid language, and a spare style that underlines the almost cinematic power of the descriptions.[3] It has been said that the style of this writer is perfect in its exactness, born of a sobriety that all modern writers should adopt.[4] Such a style maintains the detachment of the writer, turning his voice into a silent presence at the heart of the text. Vitoux is like Leonardos mother in Charles et Camille, who knew how to make herself heard while remaining silent (249). By this silence and detachment, by his absent presence, Vitoux conveys in words the pitfalls of language that all writers must confront.
NOTES
[1]
I have used the following editions of Vitoux’s work in this article. The place
of publication is Paris, and all translations are mine: Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Misère et parole (Gallimard, 1973); Cartes postales (Folio, 1973); Les Cercles de l’orage (Grasset, 1976); Fin de saison au Palazzo Pedrotti
(Seuil, 1983); La Nartelle (Seuil,
1984); Il me semble désormais que Roger
est en Italie (Actes Sud, 1986); Gioacchino
Rossini (Seuil, 1986); Riviera
(Seuil, 1987); Céline (Belfond,
1987); La Vie de Céline (Grasset,
1988); Sérénissime (Seuil, 1994); Charles et Camille (Seuil, 1992); La Comédie de Terracina (Seuil, 1994); Yedda jusqu’à la fin (Folio, 1995); Deux Femmes (Seuil, 1997); L’Art de vivre à Venise (Flammarion,
n.d.).
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[2]
Hector Bianciotti, “Frédéric Vitoux: ‘Conrad m’était nécessaire pour parler
d’autre chose’,” La Quinzaine Littéraire
232 (1-15 May 1976): 7.
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[3]
Jacqueline Bruller, “Frédéric Vitoux: Yedda
jusqu’à la fin,” Le Magazine
Littéraire 136-37 (May 1978): 70; Nadine Sautel, “L’Eternité d’une
passion,” Le Magazine Littéraire 219
(May 1985): 85.
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[4]
Eric Deschodt, “Le Visible et l’invisible, “ Le Spectacle du Monde 303 (June 1987): 71.
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