Context
Reading Lydie Salvayre
Warren Motte
Surging up out of the narcissistic 1990s,
Lydie Salvayre’s writing is like a breath of fresh air. Two aspects of
her work are truly distinctive: her gaze and her voice, that is, the
way she sees and the way she speaks. Looking around her at contemporary
French society, Salvayre is scandalized and appalled by what she sees.
Her glance is a particularly incisive one; she has (to borrow a phrase
from P. G. Wodehouse) an eye that would open an oyster at ten paces.
Cutting through the official Panglossian discourse that trumpets
France’s prosperity and social progress, she sees a culture afflicted
by widespread alienation, inequity, and institutional brutality.
Putting those phenomena squarely on stage in her novels, she forces her
readers to confront aspects of French social organization that they
might have preferred to overlook. That is not to say that Salvayre is
some knee-jerk, doctrinaire social realist. Quite to the contrary, her
work is finely nuanced, comic at times, insistently mordant, and
uncompromisingly ironic. It lacks nothing but tact, and it represents a
kind of littérature engagée that we have not seen for quite
some time because, frankly, our canons of taste have found it
unfashionable—and undoubtedly deeply disturbing, too. Salvayre’s voice is an angry one much of the time. She vents a righteous indignation worthy of Zola’s J’accuse! when describing, for instance, the living conditions of urban squatters
or the conditions of workers in a factory. Her voice is targeted,
moreover, and trenchant in its action. Its incursions into the sordid
heart of living matter are characterized by a satirical touch that is
positively Swiftian in nature (and indeed Salvayre appeals explicitly
to Swift on a number of occasions). Her attacks on a variety of
pernicious contemporary me-isms would do Philip Wylie proud. Her anger
focuses on a broad spectrum of targets, from the political nomenklatura and the moral castrati that guarantee the efficient application of its
programs to the garden-variety abusers, molesters, profiteers, and
self-satisfied mouth-breathers whose paths we cross every day as we
limp across the landscape of our quotidian. It is not an easy voice to
listen to, for it quickly becomes apparent that one of the targets of
her anger is us, and how we come to terms with social reality
complacently, in manners calculated to spare our conscience. Like
her gaze, Salvayre’s voice is one of an outsider, a marginal figure.
She has deliberately adopted an eccentric position in order to
interrogate more lucidly some of the central premises of our social
organization. Born in France to Spanish Republican refugees (her mother
was an anarchist, her father a communist), Salvayre comes by her
political commitment honestly. And perhaps her marginal position, too:
by her own admission, as the child of "foreigners," her early
apprenticeship in French language and culture was a difficult one. She
inaugurated her literary career rather late in life, publishing her
first novel, La Déclaration (The Declaration, 1990), in her
mid-forties. Abandoning her literary studies in favor of psychiatry,
Salvayre has for many years practiced that profession in Seine-Saint
Denis, near Paris. Without a doubt, her work in psychiatry informs her
writing in crucial ways. Many of her books, like La Déclaration, La Vie commune (Ordinary Life, 1991), La Puissance des mouches (The Strength of Flies, 1995), La Compagnie des spectres (The Company of Ghosts, 1997), Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers (Some Useful Advice for Apprentice Process-Servers, 1997), La Conférence de Cintegabelle (The Cintegabelle Lecture, 1999), and, most recently, Contre (Against, 2002), are incessantly monological in nature—obsessional,
unrelenting screeds voiced by a subject strained to the breaking point.
The personal and social roots of that strain may vary (and indeed
certain of Salvayre’s texts insist more closely on the "personal,"
while others focus on the "social"), but each of these narrators is
deeply estranged from his or her surroundings and from officially
consecrated versions of social reality. The anonymous narrator of La Puis-sance des mouches is a fine example of that belabored fraternity. He is a museum guard at
Port-Royal-des-Champs, the abbey that in the seventeenth century
offered a home to a variety of Jansenists, and most notably Blaise
Pascal. The narrator has spent his life reading Pascal and knows him by
heart; yet, curiously enough, he has apparently not read any other
writers (he has never heard of Montaigne, for instance). Like Salvayre,
he is the child of Spanish Republican refugees, and he himself was
conceived in the notorious French internment camp at Argelès. Pascal
brings little consolation to this man in his efforts to come to terms
with the people around him. His father is a brutal figure (a theme that
runs through Salvayre’s work, where the relations of child and father
are always vexed); his boss is capricious and demanding; his wife, fed
up with years of neglect, finally leaves him. He has been incarcerated
for murder—but it is not clear whom he has murdered, among the several
likely candidates. He speaks incessantly throughout the novel—to the
judge who instructs his case, to a male nurse in the prison infirmary,
to a psychiatrist who must evaluate his fitness to stand trial—but
speech brings him paltry solace and less understanding. The question of
the murder will be resolved in an explosion of truth at the very end of
the novel, but a number of other questions will be left in abeyance. Suzanne, the narrator of La Vie commune,
an executive secretary in late middle-age, resembles him closely. Like
him, Suzanne is alienated from those to whom, notionally at least, she
should be closest. Widowed for many years, her relations with her only
daughter are difficult at best. And she holds nothing but disdain for a
neighbor who pays her a courtship that is touching in its sincerity,
mawkish though it may be in its tactics. Most especially, Suzanne
cannot abide the new secretary who has moved into her office.
Everything about her is impossibly vulgar. She smokes cigarettes. When
she’s not smoking, she chews gum, aloud. She favors low-cut dresses and
third-rate novelists. She mocks their employer (whom Suzanne venerates)
savagely behind his back and displays a kittenish charm to his face.
Suzanne’s animus for her new colleague brews throughout this novel and
will gradually consume her. She is barely able to articulate her
feelings, so overpowering are they: "I abhor her. I abhor her. I abhor
her." The obsessional, iterative form of that utterance is nicely
figural of Salvayre’s general strategy in La Vie commune, which
more than anything else deals with the ways in which paltry
tribulations can sometimes shift the very tenuous balance we strive to
maintain as we walk the tightrope of "ordinary life." La Compagnie des spectres moves more frankly into the domain of the social and the political. Set
in a working-class neighborhood in the Parisian suburbs, the novel
tells the story of a woman named Rose and her eighteen-year-old
daughter, Louisiane, and their encounter with a process-server named
Maître Echinard who has come to evict them from their apartment. The
voice we hear is Louisiane’s, and she has the unenviable task of
mediating between her mother’s vituperative logorrhea and Maître
Echinard’s coldly administrative taciturnity. Rose’s grip on reality is
fragile. Or rather, she lives in two realities simultaneously, that of
the "now" and that of the Occupation, during which her brother was
murdered by the collaborationist French militia. Rose is firmly
persuaded that Maître Echinard has been sent by Joseph Darnand, the
head of the militia, who was tried and executed for his crimes shortly
after the Liberation. Clearly, Rose is crazy—but perhaps (as Camus
remarked about the Roman emperor Caligula) she is not crazy enough, for
in her delirium she points toward gestures of institutional oppression
in France that have not changed much in the half-century since the war. Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers, a short but very pungent text, entertains a kind of dialogical relationship with La Compagnie des spectres,
for it is narrated by Maître Echinard himself and affords him the voice
that he lacked in that novel. Addressing a class of apprentice
process-servers, Maître Echinard offers them the benefit of some of the
wisdom he has acquired in the profession to which they aspire. The
pearls that he casts before these swine are lustrous ones. "Poor
people, as you will have occasion to verify, are often excessively
emotional." None more so, of course, than Rose and Louisiane, whose
eviction he uses as a case study for the edification of his
students—though his version of events is quite different from the one
in La Compagnie des spectres. Alas, his students are somewhat
less accomplished than he might have wished; they have never heard of
Darnand, nor do they have any idea what the word "paranoia" means. All
of which merely serves to redouble Maître Echinard’s pedagogical zeal,
of course. He is a curious narrator, and Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers is a curious text. Layering irony upon irony, Salvayre invites us to
read through her narrator, as it were, offering him to us like a
photographic negative, inviting us to develop our own picture of the
events he recounts and the ethical code that he enunciates. She deploys a similar technique in La Conférence de Cintegabelle.
One evening in the town hall of a hamlet in the Pyrenees, the local
blowhard delivers a lengthy—indeed, seemingly interminable—lecture to
his fellow citizens. His subject is the lost art of "conversation,"
once an art preeminently French, but now fallen into sad disuse, along
with the culture that nourished it. His rhetoric is full-blown
neoclassical, pompous and heavily aphoristic. The lecturer peppers his
remarks with studiously chosen—and howlingly inapposite—allusions to
thinkers who have preceded him, figures such as Plato, Baltasar
Gracián, Gandhi, Cervantes, Sterne, Melville, Kant, Epictetus, Seneca,
Saint-Simon, and Swift. Yet despite the seductions of his oratorical
style, he frets about losing his audience. "Do you find my language too
abstract," he asks his listeners at one point, carefully not leaving
them time to answer. For there’s the first irony: this paean to
conversation is exclusively monological, and the lecturer is quick to
hush any voice that is not his own. Little wonder, then, that his
conversations with his wife were uninteresting while she was alive, but
now that she is dead, he converses with her regularly, and with great
satisfaction. Lydie Salvayre plays among the ironies she erects here
with considerable gusto. She intends thereby, I believe, to initiate a
conversation with her readers—but not perhaps of quite the sort that
her lecturer has in mind. In The Award (1993), the only
one of Salvayre’s major texts to have found its way into English
translation thus far, a variety of voices resound. Focusing upon an
end-of-year awards ceremony in a factory, the text shifts rhetorical
gears vertiginously, as the speeches of the executives and
administrators alternate with those of the workers who receive the
awards. But that alternation is significantly unbalanced, for the
bosses always speak longer than the workers; they perorate happily,
while the workers sweat and stutter; their style is conventionally
eloquent, while that of the workers is halting and at times aphasic.
The bosses say the most monstrous things, yet they couch them in the
most seductive language. The Director of Human Resources points out
complaisantly that factory life is not without its small pleasures.
Indeed, the rules of conduct, though admittedly strict in the past, are
slowly being liberalized. Whereas onanism during working hours has long
been frowned upon, for instance, it will henceforth be tolerated, nay,
positively encouraged. This year’s laureates, it becomes clear, have
distinguished themselves in one of several areas. Either they are among
the elite of the utterly passive downtrodden, or they are exemplary
Stakhanovist superheroes, or they are spies and informers. In any case,
they won’t get a chance to say much. On the other hand, with a strike
brewing in the factory, the administration is abundantly aware that
every one of its words must count. Les Belles Ames (Generous Souls, 2000) deals with that most ephemeral fetish of our
contemporary culture, "reality." A travel company called Real Voyages
has organized a special sort of "reality tour," which will enable a
group of liberal, bourgeois tourists to visit the worst slums of
Europe. The company has conceived its itinerary according to two
principles. First, it is intended to present to the tourists "a varied
as well as exhaustive sampling of the different specimens of poor
folk"; second, it will proceed in progressive fashion: "first, the more
presentable poor, then the less presentable, then the last of the last,
and finally those human wrecks the mere sight of whom is sufficient to
disgust you with living." Beginning with a visit to a Parisian housing
project, the tourists come away with their benevolent bonhomie largely
intact. In fact, several of them feel cheated and clamor for more
squalid vistas. As they travel from Brussels to Cologne, Berlin,
Dresden, Milan, and Turin, their wish will be granted. Sooner than one
might expect, moreover, they will have their surfeit of "reality"—and
then some. Each day, they flee the "real" with more relief, into the
welcome unreal of their luxury hotels and their three-star restaurants.
The "real" raises its ugly head even within the tour group upon
occasion, for the fact that the tour guide, the bus driver, the
"Ambiance Agent" Jason, and his girlfriend Olympe don’t belong to the
tourists’ world raises questions of class that are as uncomfortable as
they are misplaced. Despite the nobility of its conception, this
odyssey will end in irresolution and equivocation—as indeed it must. In Contre,
Lydie Salvayre finally speaks in her very own voice, unmediated by that
of a fictional narrator. Moreover, this is quite literally true: Contre was commissioned as a performance piece for voice and two guitars by
the organizers of the Avignon theater festival, and the published
version comes with a compact disc, a recording of Lydie Salvayre
reciting her text. Strangely enough—or perhaps not quite so strangely,
after all—her voice resembles that of certain of her characters.
Haranguing by turns, always ironizing, scathingly cajoling at times,
belaboring, satirizing, castigating, Salvayre voices a broadside
indictment of contemporary France. She points to a society saturated
with commercialism and consumerism, where the only music that really
matters is the music of stock market quotations and where the media’s
fascination with blood and sensationalism has promoted war as the only
"diversion" worthy of interest; where incarceration is generalized and
education is conceived primarily as a system of control through which
model citizens can be constructed. She sketches a bulimic populace
stuffed with alcohol, cheese, and buttered croissants, opiated with
romance novels, and functionally zombified by psychotropic drugs of
every stripe. Household pets are treated better than the women who are
paid to clean those households; women themselves are enslaved in a cult
of the body that worships at the perfect knees of the Barbie doll;
lovers send each other torrid e-mails instead of expressing a sexuality
that might be "unsafe"; people speak constantly, but soundlessly. Just
like in her previous texts, Salvayre chooses in Contre to speak
to us boldly. Yet amid her admonishments to her listeners, she is
surely speaking to herself as well: "Come out of your comas, I tell
them, and come back to your senses, you are not sheep. I was speaking
to myself, actually, and it was myself I was exhorting." Beyond that
ironizing reflexivity, however, Salvayre, like the great Greek Cynic
Diogenes, the Dog, the truth-teller whose example she follows in Contre,
is looking for an honest person, one who will speak in his or her turn,
holding up his or her end of a conversation that is as timely as it is
infinite. But who might that person be? SELECTED WORKS BY LYDIE SALVAYRE IN TRANSLATION The Award. Trans. Jane Davey. Four Walls Eight Windows, $18.00. SELECTED UNTRANSLATED WORKS Les Belles Âmes [Generous Souls]. Seuil, €13.57.
La Compagnie des spectres [The Company of Ghosts]. Seuil, €4.88.
La Conférence de Cintegabelle [The Cintegabelle Lecture]. Verticales, €4.88.
Contre [Against]. Verticales, €8.50.
La Déclaration [The Declaration]. Verticales, €12.20.
Et que les vers mangent le boeuf mort [And that the Worms Eat the Dead Ox]. Verticales, €14.00.
La Puissance des mouches [The Strength of Flies]. Seuil, €14.48.
Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers [Some Useful Advice for Apprentice Process-Servers]. Verticales, €5.34.
La Vie commune [Ordinary Life]. Verticales, €14.48.
Le Vif du vivant: Picasso carnet de 1964 [The Quick of Life]. Cercle d’Art, €22.87.
