Homo Irrealis

by André Aciman

  But there was one thing I envied even more. It was the ability of Rohmer’s men to speak to women about things most men are reluctant to disclose to themselves or to other men, much less to a woman. I loved the idea that one could speak so openly and so freely to women about the things that mattered most to me. To feel totally exposed with a woman is like having one’s clothes removed but without passion veiling our avowals. Our candor must be a touch difficult, awkward, embarrassing. Which is why romance in Rohmer is always passion served chilled.

  There is a moment when Jérôme takes the novelist Aurora on his motorboat and lets her visit his family’s property, which he intends to sell. There he explains that, except for Lucinde, he has become indifferent to all other women; in fact, the physical aspect of love no longer moves him. One is tempted not to take him too seriously, but then he goes on to tell the sixteen-year-old Laura, who is Claire’s stepsister, that if he is now resolved to live with Lucinde, it’s because he still hasn’t gotten tired of her. His reason for marrying Lucinde, as he tells Aurora, is quite simple: despite all their efforts to break up, he and Lucinde keep getting back together, and therefore—as though logic governs these matters—they have no choice but to stay together and comply to fate.

  Jérôme’s thinking may itself strike one as a piece of casuistry; it alerts the viewer that, for all his cunning observations into what moves people to seek others, this man who is so good at catching self-deception in others, and who discusses with Aurora how all protagonists in novels wear blindfolds, is himself supremely self-deceived. Aurora greets his argument with forbearance and skepticism, but she doesn’t refute his claims. Part of leading a perfect life, it seems, is to have found all manner of shields to ward off the suspicion that things may not be as perfect as one might wish them to seem.

  Aurora, the novelist who is still struggling to come up with a plotline for her latest novel, encourages Jérôme to flirt with Laura to help her see her way through the novel she is writing. He’ll be her guinea pig. Together, secure in their little world, Jérôme and Aurora begin to concoct a devious plan to test whether Jérôme can indeed seduce the sixteen-year-old Laura or, more accurately, where such a seduction might lead. Their complicity and heartfelt intimacy are just a touch less mischievous than the letters of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont.

  Still, the project is a trifle too raw. And this exposes a dark fault line in Jérôme, which suggests that, despite his elitism, his good standing, his patina and status as a career diplomat, his pithy, wise observations, his privileges, his women, his house on the lake, his boat on the lake, his childhood on the lake—despite all of these here is a man who might be undergoing an acute midlife crisis, the visible signs of which elude him completely.

  And yet on the surface, all is safe and all is well in Jérôme’s lakeshore world.

  Until Claire enters the scene.

  * * *

  There will always come a Claire in Rohmer’s universe. Unlike Laura—Claire’s stepsister, who, for all her discerning observations about her emotions, is still awkward at sixteen—the slightly older Claire is perfect. She is beautiful, poised, blond, smart, graceful, patrician, and ultimately forbidding and unattainable. The Claires of this world always have a boyfriend who is himself so handsome, athletic, and self-possessed that no one can challenge his hold on her. Claire’s attitude toward Jérôme, when she meets him, is neither discourteous nor hostile; her greeting is civil, but only civil, and therefore nonchalant, indifferent, and ultimately a touch dismissive.

  Jérôme is not smitten, but he is, as he says, definitely intrigued. His attempts at the most trivial conversation with her fall flat, and during a Bastille Day dance, when he tries to ask her to dance with him just after she’s finished dancing with Gilles, her beau, she turns him down. He is, perhaps for the first time in a long while, reduced to the role of a middle-aged wallflower.

  But he is experienced enough not to take this amiss. He is, as he’d told Aurora much earlier, “through running after girls.” Still, when he and Aurora speak again, he admits he is troublé by Claire.

  “I think I might have some problem talking to her.”

  “She intimidates you,” says Aurora.

  “She intrigues me,” he replies. “With girls like her I feel completely powerless.”

  “I’m amused that you admit being shy.”

  “But I am very shy,” he repeats emphatically. “I’ve never run after a girl when I didn’t feel she was already favorably disposed.”

  “How about with Claire?” asks the intrigued Aurora.

  “Well, it’s very strange. There’s no doubt she does arouse a very strong desire, one that’s all the stronger in that it has no purpose, no goal. Pure desire, a desire for nothing. I don’t want to do anything about it, but the mere fact of feeling this desire bothers me. I thought I was past feeling desire for any woman except Lucinde. And to make matters more complicated, I don’t want her. If she threw herself at me, I’d turn her down.”

  One can once again hear the wheels of sophistry churning. He is clearly attracted to Claire but is unwilling either to own this or to do anything about it. He would probably not get anywhere with her if he tried and may be scrambling to find a way out with his dignity intact. Still, his ability to parse his perplexities with this strange mix of probing candor and shameless self-delusion puts him on the same level as the other characters in the film, with the exception of Claire herself and her boyfriend. The young Vincent, who clearly has a crush on Laura, alleges she is not his type; Laura herself frequently makes totally high-minded pronouncements about her own feelings; and then there is Aurora, who justifies being single because she finds all men attractive, so why settle on one. (“Fate insists on putting nothing in my path, so I take nothing. Why struggle against fate?”)

  But to call this self-deception or sophistry may be inaccurate. These characters are at once quite guileless yet so unsparingly insightful that they teeter on self-deception without necessarily falling into it. There is a corrective at the end of every Rohmer film, a moment when one character or all of them are summarily disabused of their illusions. Rohmer’s characters are intellectually slippery; one can’t quite tell whether they’re covering up their insecurities or have perfected the art of spying into themselves and have intercepted and then snuffed out every nuance of raw desire. When Jérôme asks Aurora if she has someone, her answer is neither ambiguous nor necessarily self-deceived: “I have no one,” she says, “but I am not in a rush. I prefer to wait. I know how to wait. I like waiting.” Jérôme’s hasty reckoning of his conquests seems similarly straightforward: “Whenever I’ve desired a woman, I’ve never gotten her. All my conquests have come as a surprise. Desire followed possession.” Rohmer is a contrarian. Everyone in his films thinks counterintuitively, perhaps because there is more truth found in the counterfactual vision of things than in the rational understanding of them. Desire is supposed to come before possession, not after. And as for waiting, no one likes to wait. And yet this is how Rohmer’s characters read life: in the key of paradox, which is another way of saying by unsaddling, or at best by questioning, what we think we know. Rohmer’s vision operates by inversion. Apparently nothing is of interest to Rohmer unless seeded in Pascal’s perpetual reversal of the pro and the con (renversement perpétuel du pour au contre).

  And this is precisely what made me love Rohmer. He is constantly deflecting, displacing, and deferring the unavoidably obvious, because at the heart of his aesthetic is an almost perverse resistance—call it a recoil vis-à-vis the alleged hard-and-fast realities of life. Indeed there was something reassuring and comforting in Rohmer’s counterintuitive pronouncements that seemed to go against the idea, so prevalent during my younger years, that only willing an outcome could make things happen, that willing was everything. Rohmer’s characters, on the other hand, put their trust in fate, in the adventitious, the accidental—hasard. If our internal makeup is guided by things that do not make
sense—paradox, contradiction, whimsy, impulse—the external events of life are equally guided by what makes no sense: hap, serendipity, coincidence. But there is an uncanny logic and meaning to the vagaries of emotions, as there is to seemingly nonsensical hap. The serendipitous is never without purpose and, like the subconscious, is a marker of an intention somewhere that knows what we really want from life. To parody Pascal, hap has a logic that the will knows nothing of. Rohmer’s belief in reason is sophisticated enough to distrust reason.

  * * *

  And this is where the knee comes in. Jérôme had watched Claire’s boyfriend place his hand on her knee. It was a lame, mindless, stupid gesture, he thought. He himself had almost grazed his face against her knees when she was standing on a ladder picking cherries from a tree. But from these two observations springs the sudden realization that what he wants from Claire is not her body, not her heart, not her love; what he wants is her knee, nothing else. Call it curbed desire. Jérôme now could tell himself that he would not have given Claire another thought were he not spurred on by Aurora, whose novelistic intrigues urge him to explore the situation first with Laura and then with Claire. If he feels emboldened enough to proceed, the idea that he is playing a game under Aurora’s sponsorship provides the perfect excuse to continue to let himself think of Claire without suspecting he is pining for her.

  In fact, by accepting his role as a guinea pig in Aurora’s experiment, he has banished all his doubts about his own courage and overridden his inhibitions and self-proclaimed shyness. Jérôme is now free to pursue Claire without feeling he is in any way implicating himself. To his mind, he is (a) operating under Aurora’s guidance and (b) asking absolutely nothing of Claire. He just wants her knee. This should exorcize his desire for her altogether.

  By allowing Jérôme to approach seduction as an experiment, what Rohmer has done is remove the sting of insecurity and splenetic self-blame that every man feels each time he goes after someone and fears he’ll fail. Self-hatred was something Rohmer had explored in a much earlier film, The Sign of Leo. Now he’s replaced it with guile, mirth, and mischief. I too was eager to dispel any form of self-blame from my life. If Jérôme fails in his stratagems, he has one last card to play: namely, his repeated admission to Aurora that each time he desired a woman, he never obtained her. All his successes came to him by surprise. Casanova he never claimed to be.

  All he wants is Claire’s knee. The question is not why her knee, but why only her knee?

  The allegation—and that’s all it is, an allegation—is that every woman has a vulnerable spot. It could be her neck, her hand, her waistline, or, in this case, her knee. The idea that the body of a woman can be reduced to a particular “vulnerable” spot or magnetic pole of desire, as Jérôme calls it, is, of course, absurd. No such spot exists. Or maybe it’s just that Claire’s knee caught his attention more than anything else. But the theory of its significance allows him to pinpoint the exact coordinates of the siege he plans on Claire’s body. It also allows him to limit his hopes, since he already knows, given the age disparity between them and her own clear indifference to him as a man, that she will continue to remain off-limits and impregnable.

  What he’s done is to displace the woman and substitute her knee for her body, the part for the whole—pure synecdoche. He has sublimated all desire by singling out the knee and ignoring everything else, thus essentially fetishizing the knee.

  The opportunity to gratify his wish comes in the form of the most contrived, flat-footed gimmick: rain. This is typically Rohmerian. It was snow in My Night at Maud’s that kept Maud and Jean-Louis in the same room; here, rain comes to the rescue. As Jérôme and Claire are traveling in his motorboat on an errand, the fear of a sudden downpour forces them to land and take shelter in a boat hangar. There, as it’s raining, he tells her that he’s just seen her boyfriend with another girl. This makes her cry. He attempts to comfort her as she is weeping, and, finally, having mustered all the will and courage needed, places his palm around her knee and caresses it, again and again. She must have taken it as a gesture of consolation; for him it was nothing but a gesture meant both to satisfy Aurora’s prodding and to quell what could have been a furtive whim passing for desire.

  The explanation and the description of how he placed his hand on her knee and her passive reaction to his touch followed by his own reading of her non-response is filled with subtle turns and counterturns and remains a classic of a genre of French fiction called the roman d’analyse. It could have been written by Madame de La Fayette, Fromentin, Constant, or Proust.

  Anyway, there she was, seated across from me, and there, too, at arm’s length, was her knee, that smooth and shining, delicate, fragile knee. So near and yet so far. So near I could have reached out and touched it; so far because it was so unattainable. So easy, yet so impossible. It’s as though you’re on the edge of a cliff, and you know all it takes is one step and down you go, and even if you want to, you can’t. So I put my hand on her knee; it was a rapid, assertive gesture that gave her no time to react. All she did was look at me—indifferently, I think; in any case, with hardly any hostility. But she said nothing. She didn’t remove my hand; nor did she move her leg. Why, I couldn’t say. I don’t understand. Or maybe I do. You see, if I had tried to caress her hair or forehead, she would certainly have reacted with some classic, instinctive gesture of self-defense. But what I did took her by surprise. She probably assumed it was the initial tactic of an assault that was to follow. And when it didn’t, she was reassured. What do you think of that explanation?

  Although Jérôme’s narrative bears all the marks of a predatory mind-set, he is so blinded by his own intentions that he even manages to justify his behavior to Aurora by congratulating himself for rescuing Claire from a boyfriend he considers unworthy of her. The irony is that he performed no good deed at all. Gilles turns out to be a good boy who was most likely not doing anything unsavory when Jérôme thought he’d caught him betraying Claire. In typical Rohmerian fashion, every sure resolution is right away undercut by the appearance of a new fact that forces new interpretations, which may be subjected to subsequent revisions themselves.

  And so the film ends with Jérôme leaving to marry Lucinde, totally persuaded that he’s done Claire a good turn.

  * * *

  I wrote all this while at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs. Yaddo is a writers’ retreat, and as I sat meditating about all this and looking out at the dazzling greenery all around me, my thoughts went back to Aurora, who is herself spending time in Madame Walter’s house on Lake Annecy to write a novel. Her desk sits on a balcony overlooking the magnificent scenery, and if you look closely enough, you can spot pages and sheets neatly stacked on her table. On looking at her desk and at mine, I was reminded of my days at our old house when the sea was too rough and my mother would decide not to take us to the beach. These for me were heavenly mornings, for all I wanted to do then was sit on our balcony at a tiny square table my mother had placed there just for me and either paint or write. My mother would sometimes drop by to remind me that the weather hadn’t turned out as badly as she feared, so why not think of heading to the beach. But being reclusive by nature, I preferred to stay home. The boys and the girls my age at the beach left me feeling very anxious; I liked home better. Hiding—that’s what it’s called, my father said. Perhaps he was right. I was always slipping away, always belonging elsewhere. The real world with its real people who lived here-and-now lives weren’t really for me. I was like the moody, solitary Laura in Claire’s Knee. I wanted to be like Claire—everyone else was like Claire—just as I know that every man wants a Claire in his life, or, better yet, everyone wants to be like Claire, but no one is, not even Claire. Everyone wants to be Jérôme, and no one is either.

  We knew at the time I painted or wrote on my tiny balcony abutting our dining room that we were never going to summer in that house again. So at school the following autumn, when I spotted the picture by Monet, I was right away taken ba
ck to a house I already felt was as good as lost. Our summer house was not two miles away from where we lived in the city, but I never returned to it. Even back then, it bore the stamp of something lodged forever in the past. Today, I have no picture of the house. Only Monet’s rendition.

  But I returned to it in 1971 while seeing Claire’s Knee. Jérôme, after all, is himself returning to the house where he spent all his summers as a boy, and he too is abandoning it before moving to a better life in Sweden. He feels no nostalgia; he’s simply moving on. So confident, so well spoken, so clever, even when he’s completely wrong, not only about Claire but ultimately about his alleged love for the woman he is to marry.

  Two years after seeing Claire’s Knee I went to see it again when I was in graduate school. It was during the spring, and I was writing a paper on Proust, but I was really drawing on Éric Rohmer to speak about Proust. Each time I lifted my eyes and looked out the bay windows in my dorm’s living room, I was trying to see not the moonlit trees of Oxford Street but the mirage of a nightscape on Lake Annecy. I had a girlfriend at the time, and she would drop in, brew tea in my living room, and, wearing a light blue bathrobe, sit in an old armchair and read the latest draft of my paper. Later, when my roommate at the time would leave to spend the night working in his studio, we would make love. I’d been to see Claire’s Knee with her once. She’d uttered a laconic statement about it but added nothing more.

  Four years later Claire’s Knee was playing somewhere at the university that spring. So a group of us went together. Then we had drinks in a bar and spoke about the film. One of my friends claimed he had just had a Rohmerian encounter. “What’s that?” I asked. Man meets woman on a train. They chat. They’re enjoying the chat. No need to rush things, each thinks. Then they chat about meeting on a train and chatting about not needing to rush things. Are we flirting, one of the two finally asks. I’m not sure, but we might be. Perhaps we really are, says one. Then probably we are indeed, adds the other. That night they don’t sleep together. But he calls her in the middle of the night and says I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep either, she says. Is it because of me? Maybe. Is this really happening? I think so. I think so too.