ENARD - DEATH, GUILT, AND THE SUB- CONSCIOUS
Enard- an exercise in the macabre?
The cruelty of December was assaulting the humdrum streets of South Kensington, the borough’s chilled, dark haunted brick and concrete. How winter is the season of death! I edged out of South Kensington Station with my customary far from athletic pace, and my ageing self, carrying my ageing briefcase, went up some carpeted steps to reach the Salons, where the moderator, Dominique, assisted by Madame Line- Playfair, would invite us to discuss Mathias Enard, an author who seems to specialize in the exotic, particularly the exotic with a Middle Eastern flavour.
The book under discussion was Enard’s ‘la Boussole’ (‘ The Compass’), but I was unable to locate a copy of this on the shelves of the Mediatheque, so I resorted instead to an earlier novel, ‘Remonter l’Orenoque’. In last season’s Reading Group (2016-2017), we had surveyed his ‘Rue Des Voleurs’ (‘Street of Thieves’), and it appeared that I might, through ‘Remonter l’Orenoque’, provide an overall impression, across Enard’s oeuvre, of his style and aims. ‘Remonter l’Orenoque’, which was Enard’s second work, came out in 2005. Its setting is a Paris hospital under night and day strain where the embattled staff are unable to cope always with the flood of patients through the doors. Its theme is an old one- the triangle of love, with the manic middle- aged (and apparently married) surgeon, Ignacio, at the first vertex, the young drunk of a colleague, Youri, at the second vertex, and the nurse, Joana, at the third. The unfortunate Joana is eventually destroyed by this unseemly love tussle. The novel seems both urgent and clever. All the pressure of working in medicine is conveyed. Of course, Enard’s prose, with its long rambling quasi- contemplative sentences, does not always lend itself to a feeling of tension in the here and now. I commented on the strange, disturbing flow of Enard’s style, which does not totally escape a feeling of pretentiousness. One could almost describe it as ‘flowery’ or ‘purple’, even ‘rambling’. There is something affected about the stretched sentences; one might prefer paragraphs that seemed tighter and terser.
The apparent subtlety of this work comes from the interweaving of two themes or plots. The first is a prosaic description of a Paris hospital that is on the verge of dislocation, with Enard producing the cruel metaphor comparing the hospital to a sick body itself. ‘A hospital is an organism, it does not renovate itself, it ages...’(Chapter 19). The second is a description of a trip up the Orinoco by the nurse, Joana. In a way, this Latin American excursion cannot be understood until the novel’s very end, when Joana falls (is she pushed?) in the company of an inebriated Youri, and is brought into hospital in a coma from which she will not ever emerge. Then we realize that this tropical trip up an exotic river is an actual journey- but also stands for the vegetative state in which the beloved and tragic Joana is approaching death. Death- like a fantasy- is the destination of the grimy ship- equivalent in its run- down condition to the Paris hospital- in which Joana is trapped in her brain- annihilated tragic dream. ‘Remonter l’Orenoque’ centres on Enard’s familiar theme- death. The book starts with a discussion on death (in a general philosophical way, as Ignacio muses, with a macabre tone, on how the dead today are as it were hurried away, secreted into coffins with the maximum bureaucratic disdain, their fate being ‘putrefaction in silence’). The novel ends with death (the particular one of Joana). On the first page, Ignacio contemplating as a surgeon how death today has to be hidden, through cremation or burial, we are made aware we do not confront death, we try foolishly to ignore it.
Enard wants to come across as death’s envoy. The odd calmness of the book’s beginning, which looks at death in a rational considered way, contrasts with the terrible passionate conclusion. Ignacio takes out of the body of Joana- the woman he has attempted to love- organs for transplantation, the author’s phrases emotional, fevered, desperate, with a hint that Joana may have been- in early pregnancy... And so death becomes not an abstraction, but a reality tearing into Ignacio’s soul, just as his knife dissects Joana’s ‘mort- vivant’ body. The ending shows a tearful energy that is maybe lacking in the rest of the book, which is almost lackadaisical at times, particularly with regard to the clichés of reverie applied to the Orinoco voyage. As in ‘Rue Des Voleurs’, Enard is preoccupied with death as a probably dubious means of comprehending life. The theme of surgeons and wrenching organs out of a body in a coma reminds one of Kerangal’s ‘Mend the Living’. The danger is of coming across as morbid. The actual debate was on another of Enard’s books, ‘La Boussole’, of course. This was apparently about Orientalism- with which Enard, as a scholar of Arabic and Persian, is always manifestly concerned. The members of the Reading Group saw ‘Compass’ as a critique of Western culture, emphasizing the bigotry and the brutality under the seeming beauty. I commented that it was necessary for a book to be passionate rather than merely clever. The Reading Group dispersed, at whose end I gave Dominique, the moderator, a sketch of her. We all trudged away, back into the December cold, and, as I confronted the hard concrete of South Kensington, I pondered that to be with Enard is not to be warmed, really. But then, the role of fiction is not always to be comforting and comfortable, I suppose. The tube train, formed from uncompromising steel, took me back to the shadowy realm that is ramshackle inner city Shepherd’s Bush.