Something Sweet or Something Sinister? Emmanuelle Pagano and ‘Nouons-nous’
The English version of the title of this book is ‘Trystings’; the literal translation is ‘Let us Intertwine’. The book is an analysis- a somewhat poetic one, with as much melancholy as joy- of how a couple can become intimate. It is a catalogue of intimate coming togethers and intimate falling aparts. The excerpts can range in size from a simple sentence to a page, two pages, three pages at the most.
Love, or romantic and physical love, is that problem which confronts every one of us. Perhaps Pagano is hesitantly attempting a solution, in a helter- skelter, multi- pronged manner. She lifts up to the light the love any two people may have for each other, like a diamond with a thousand facets, and each facet is examined under an eyeglass. Or her book is similar to a vertiginous kaleidoscope, its patterns shifting with every turn and twist of the device.
One is first reminded, as one plunges into this volume, of the prose-poems of Baudelaire, in which he seems to extract profound significance out of simple sentences and situations. Pagano is presenting us with prose- poems in Baudelaire’s manner, the style always seeming straightforward, the meaning underneath maybe being more oblique.
A second potential parallel is with the films of Francois Ozon. He too is concerned with physical and romantic love, all its idiosyncracies and dilemmas, and the erotic (and auto- erotic) content in his eerie if dangerously clever movies can be both happy and sad. For Ozon, the director, sexual intimacy seems a portal through which we examine the deeper psychology of the protagonists. Ozon, in the end, is not trying to be pornographic, but, rather, honest- as with Pagano.
In ‘Nouons- Nous’, there is no overriding plot at all, just a series of diverse incidents and insights. To repeat: the same as Ozon, Pagano uses sex not for titillation, but for the sake of a tender study of the heart- when it unifies with another human being, but also when it separates from the former mate.
Let us examine in Pagano’s work one example of sex as a means to human emotional bonding. It is very short (only seven lines). A man is weeping on his girlfriend’s stomach, does not raise himself to her face, but his eyelids beat above her vagina, into which the ‘tears entered, hot’. This achingly, painfully, sweet image contains all the gentleness- and it can be a fanatical gentleness- of love.
A second example involves separation, expressed in sexual terms, but, here again, sex, a surface phenomenon, is simply a vehicle for something more subterranean, for a principle, whatever it may be, seeming profound, seeming spiritual.
One of Pagano’s stories, then…
A couple still cohabit, even though their relationship has split apart; she cannot bear to have his body near to hers. She can hear him masturbate in the evening in the bathroom- and, to ‘hit back’, as it were, she, in turn, masturbates silently, even as she listens to him. ‘He noticed nothing’- the final, almost nasty, sentence, to demonstrate the force of their separation… but there is an underlying feeling that she still has a sort of affection for her partner, and the emotion is one of regret intermingled with revenge- that paradoxical sensation nearly always being a part of ‘lost love’.
Physical closeness interwoven with spiritual intimacy, physical intimacy as a symbol of spiritual intimacy- Pagano proceeds along a range of paths with a deftness meant to dazzle and maybe bewilder us.
Humour is here, as well as anguish…
Pagano imagines a couple in high Summer, and the woman is too lazy with the starkness of the heat to arise and drink, despite her thirst. The man leaves her for the kitchen, where he takes water in his mouth, his cheeks bulging. He returns to her, and releases the water in the direction of her face. ‘He bends towards me, he lets me drink from mouth to mouth and laugh to laugh’. This is an apparently amusing, an oddly cheerful, angle on intimacy.
Pagano produces a disturbing strange magic around what are in effect prose poems. The setting can be a wind farm or a hotel, the season can be summer or winter, and everywhere we find the weirdness and the wonder of ‘love’. A woman, after a rupture with a man, feels she has aged, looks in the mirror for grey hairs overnight, but finds instead golden ones. A sense of the surreal is conveyed in this excerpt, which perhaps is telling us separation from ‘love’ can actually be a liberating, enriching matter- or, maybe, this miniature story is intended to mean nothing at all, is merely itself.
A boiling, far from gentle, ambience.
The summer of 2017. The Salons of the French Institute in South Kensington.
The heat of June had become like a weight of sweat and discomfort; possibly, summer in the city has much less of the ease that the season can display in the countryside. The hot dust, the dirt, the noise, the concrete, the overweening callousness of London!
I was about half an hour late for the seven o’ clock Reading Group, because I had attended in Ealing a lecture on Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers, two wandering minorities often crushed by the bigotry of the settled population. I walked to Ealing Broadway Station from Ealing Central Library- Ealing is one of the most banal suburbs in London- and the District Line carried me so slowly to South Kensington.
I clambered, with an old man’s unsteady pace, up the stairs, and I entered the salons, where Frederic Jagu was the moderator, a screen behind him and a laptop in front of him.
People in the audience, sometimes murmuring, sometimes louder, commented on how funny Pagano’s novel could seem- as in the ‘saxaphone/sex’ quarrel between two neighbours.
A point that showed an interesting angle concerned social media. The briefness of the very short stories- or, really, prose- poems- is reminiscent of a post on Facebook or Twitter (the latter being restricted, of course, to 140 characters). Pagano might, one could fantasize, consider putting some of her items on Facebook, whether she has invented them or they are from some actual person’s (her own?) existence. They would be definitely- diabolically!- unusual as they came up on somebody’s computer screen or smartphone.
Another question taken up by the Reading Group was: Is there, or is there not, continuity across the arc of this novel. Does any genuinely startling cohesion emerge from the fragments here? The book appears like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, uncoordinated at first sight- but do they or do they not fit together as a whole in the end?
There is the theme, of course, of sexuality-of ‘love’- and how difficult that is to define!- through the route of sexuality.
One leitmotiv to be found is an uneasy emphasis on body parts- the breasts, the crotch.
And noise- sound as a presence- disruptive maybe- is another theme that crops up here and there: the quiet breathing of a woman, a partner, day and night, seems like ‘peace’; in another example, the woman hears her man using a medicinal mouth wash in the bathroom, and goes in to copy him, to laugh with him.
The final section of sections does indeed appear a conclusion appearing to pull the diverse fragments together. It is about an artist who starts sketching by a river. Birds come up to him, from pebble to pebble by the water, birds mount on him- this is a terribly endearing image of man’s intimacy with all life, all nature. And sex- which I myself would hesitate to count as love- could be said for Pagano to be an avenue to some spiritual understanding able to take in the whole cosmos.
I do feel that Pagano seeks, if not quite to sanctify sex, to provide it with a halo of stunning enchantment. Nonetheless, malevolent elements do exist in this book- it is about breaking in addition to bonding. Possibly sex inevitably has a sinister side to it, and, in my alas crabbed opinion as an older man, to celebrate sex so sweetly in Pagano’s manner can never feel true and right. Sex, ultimately, is not as one with love, but is apart from, is inferior to, love. Pagano appears to make a scintillating case on behalf of sex; but I cannot, I am afraid, believe her.
It was the last Reading Group of the 2016- 2017 season. We had struggled all the way from Barthes to Pagano, via Edouard Louis. Edouard Louis stood out for his honesty, though gauche and even treacherous at times, and Pagano’s salience is her repeated longing for truth- a longing that marks or scars any poet. Unfortunately, truth is perpetually evasive, even for Pagano with all her evident tricks and insights.
I moved at an elderly chap’s less than joyful pace down the stairs from the Salons, through the doors, into the intimidating heat of June in South Kensington. Pagano’s book may look as beautifully torrid as high summer- but is there a hint of frost somewhere, hidden by her all- embracing warmth?