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In 1953, the Western world witnessed another great literary moment, aside from the publication of Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero. That year, the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to none other than the legendary champion of the Second World War, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The decision to award the Nobel Prize to the renowned cigar smoker was not, however, universally acclaimed. Many felt that the Nobel Prize in literature ought to celebrate the contributions of a fiction writer rather than those of a historical or biographical champion. A number of people were, therefore, less than enthusiastic about the awarding of this prize of literary prizes to Mr. Churchill. Some even felt the members of the Swedish Academy of Letters had bungled badly, mistaking Personality for History itself.
Indeed, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill is as open to multiple interpretations as is Literature or History. His flamboyant personality certainly had something to do with the comment by one critic, in 1923, that he had written “an enormous work on himself” and entitled it The World Crisis. At the time, Churchill was close to fifty years old. He had already straddled two centuries and a world war. The future “driving force” of the Second World War had already demonstrated that he possessed an “artist’s taste for war,” that “he had never been attracted to lost causes,” and that “he had never felt himself unprepared for any task.” When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, in the fall of 1953, he was preparing to celebrate his seventy-ninth birthday. A birthday which, as a matter of fact, happened to fall on the same day as Baby M.’s mother’s.
In his book Winston Churchill and Twentieth-Century England, the French historian Jacques Chastenet speaks of the “Churchillian childhoods” to evoke the complexity of the character, no doubt because a single childhood could not easily have contained the enormous legacy on the paternal side — two centuries of British warriors and statesmen — and, on the maternal side, an American blood-line streaming with New York celebrities and even a few drops of Iroquois. Lady Randolph Churchill, born Jenny Jerome, could trace her American roots back to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Her father, Leonard Jerome, had, in addition, acquired the New York Times. He was a man with a passion for horses, a collector of fine art, and a patron of the theatre. No surprise then to find the grandson Winston, during the lean years of his political and military career, engaged in painting and writing.
The Nobelization of Winston Churchill followed that of François Mauriac in 1952, a French-Catholic novelist who was also a playwright, biographer, poet, and journalist. The Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy of Letters had noted the spiritual depth and artistic intensity of Mauriac’s semi-autobiographical novels, novels which depicted Man torn between the forces of good and evil, between the weakness of the flesh and the lofty aspirations of the spirit. Winston Churchill, for his part, had summed himself up as follows: “I am a very simple man, but the best in the world is not too good for me!” The Nobelization of Churchill was followed, in 1954, by that of the American Ernest Hemingway, hailed for his powerful mastery of narrative, as displayed in The Old Man and the Sea. Although it was at first critical of the brutality and cynicism of his early work, the Swedish Academy was won over by the “heroic pathos” of Hemingway’s writing, along with his “manly love of danger and adventure.” Finally, the jury of the Nobel Prize in literature praised the ex-journalist’s natural admiration for those who battle on the side of good in a universe clouded by violence and death. For Churchill, who loved life, war was a form of life, though he despised the unnecessary spilling of blood.
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The omnipresence of journalism in the careers of Mauriac, Churchill, and Hemingway, to mention only these, should not surprise us. In the chapter “Political Modes of Writing” in Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes explains that “the spreading influence of political and social facts into the literary field of consciousness has produced a new type of scriptor, halfway between the party member and the writer, deriving from the former an ideal image of committed man, and from the latter the notion that a written work is an act.” The grouping of the words new type of scriptor actually brings to mind the French word téléscripteur, “teletyper” in English, that almost-infernal machine which used to spit up a continuous stream of dispatches in every newsroom. It just so happens that Baby M.’s father was one of that new type of scriptor. The act, in his case, consisted in doing his utmost to ensure the daily publication of l’Évangéline, the newspaper that provided Acadians with a link to the nerve centres of the world. His mission was not in vain. Nurse Vautour, for example, read l’Évangéline every morning before setting out for the hospital. After quickly scanning the headlines, she would plunge into the column “Around the World,” a collection of news reports on a smattering of events of varying importance. It was more or less on the basis of this column that Nurse Vautour composed her own overall portrait of humanity. And her opinion of humanity was pretty much settled by the time she took Baby M. in her arms, at the moment of the latter’s birth, in 1953. Nor had her world view changed much by the time Baby M. returned to the hospital for her celiac stay, in 1954. For Nurse Vautour too, the die was cast; all that remained was to digest the results.
Baby M. was thus born at the moment when this digestive work was beginning. Already, her gestation period had been highly active, including a string of grand and noble ceremonies. The month of January set the tone for the entire year. Baby M. who, though not yet conceived, already existed in the form of an inescapable probability, was thus witness to the fulfilment of Pope Pius XII’s dream of completing the Sacred College of Cardinals, something which the sixteen popes who had succeeded Clement XI in the early eighteenth century had failed to accomplish. During the approximately 250 years of the Sacred College’s existence, death had constantly intervened to create vacancies among the seventy seats of the plenum created by Sixtus V in 1585 in memory of the seventy elders gathered by Moses to govern the people of Israel. The consistory was therefore called by Pius XII to promote twenty-four eminencies to the rank of cardinal, thereby filling that same number of empty places. The consistory itself was held behind closed doors for several days, but it concluded with “a ceremony unprecedented throughout the world for its splendour and pomp.” Sixteen of the new cardinals, among them the archbishop of Montréal, Mgr. Paul-Émile Léger, were appointed Princes of the Church before a crowd of forty thousand, who began by watching the sovereign pontiff as he was carried on his gestatorial chair from one end of St. Peter’s Basilica to the other. Later, the new cardinals, “dressed in crimson robes bordered in ermine,” humbly prostrated themselves beneath the dome of the Vatican Basilica, while the papal choir sang “Te es Petrus.” Also on parade were “the noble guards in shining helmets, the Swiss guards carrying their sixteenth century halberds, the Palatine guards in dark blue uniform with gold buttons and the pontifical men-at-arms in their variegated dress.” At various moments during the ceremony, the new cardinals took their oaths, kneeled with heads bowed to the ground, kissed the hand of the pope, and received the pontiff’s accolade (the first bishop of India to wear the crimson was held a moment longer than the others in His Holiness’s embrace). One after the other, the new Princes of the Church approached Pius XII to receive “the third of their three distinct red hats, the large-bordered galéro, adorned with thirty egret feathers,” the red symbolizing the blood they were prepared to shed in defence of their faith.
As sumptuous as were the closing ceremonies of the consistory, they were rapidly surpassed by the swearing-in of Dwight David Eisenhower as president of the United States. The inauguration was televised, for the first time, across the entire United States, which meant that up to seventy million people watched Eisenhower succeed Harry Truman. The new president naturally took advantage of the broadcast’s extraordinary range to clear up a thing or two. In a powerful presidential speech, Eisenhower announced the United States’ determination to confront the Communist threat
“with confidence and conviction,” while extending a hand to all (even Communist) nations that aspired to a relaxation of tensions in the world. Not once during his entire speech did the president utter the words Russia or Communist, managing instead to deliver his message by referring only to the forces of good and evil, a clever stratagem which was widely noted at the time.
Speaking of evil, Stalin died two months after Eisenhower’s inaugural speech. Judging from the grandiose funeral which took place on Red Square, Communist fervour was not about to die with him. As for the funeral of Queen Mary (the late George V of England’s consort, who also died in March of 1953, a few weeks after Stalin), it was relatively modest if one considers the scope of her life, which stretched from the era of lances and sabres to the atomic age. In June, however, the British deployed all their festive skills for the coronation of Elizabeth II. From the start of the year, this event had been gathering daily momentum across the Empire. L’Évangéline also reflected the Anglo fever, just as it had described the reverberations emanating first from Rome, then Washington and Moscow. Baby M., who observed all this from the comfort of the uterus, later incorporated these emanations into her intra- and extrauterine development, particularly at the moment of separation from her mother and initiation into desire (desire for the mother in the first place, then desire for language), as well as at the moment of differentiating between needs and desires, and in a general way, during the entire period of construction of the body as a site of security. As pointed out by the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto in Solitude, this structuring of the child passes necessarily through the awareness of her personal digestive tube.
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Unlike Roland Barthes, Françoise Dolto does not deal specifically with literature when she tackles the question of style, arguing that “each mother, unbeknownst to her . . . gives her child her style.” In fact, she writes of the joy and sadness associated with the realm of existential security, a realm which is closely tied to the mother’s gestural and expressive language, and inseparable from the mother’s reactions to her child’s defecation. Thus, for example, if a mother “cannot bear the smell, if she takes it away too quickly and fails to speak cheerfully of the attention the baby sometimes elicits deliberately, then, because it is rejected by her mother, the child’s own body becomes the enemy,” which has the effect of weakening the fundamental narcissistic structure of the child. Madame Dolto also adds that the peristalsis from the mouth to the anus is synonymous, to the child, with the presence of the mother within. This explains why we human beings know “at all times where the mother’s presence is located within us, in the form of the partial object which comes from her [food] and which we return to her [excrement].” The absence of this “intuitive sensation of existence” at the level of the digestive tube is a source of anxiety.
At the same time, Madame Dolto is careful to point out another essential contribution of the mother: that of inciting the child to actively seek out communication. According to her, the child is capable of hearing and producing “all the phonemes of every language in the world . . . But, very quickly, its mouth will lose this ability . . . because it seeks to perpetuate the presence of the mother.” The child works, therefore, at producing “the lallations and phonemizations that echo, in an acoustic mirror . . . the sounds of the language spoken by its mother.” In other words, the desire to communicate through language is directly linked to the desire for the mother, and the transmission of the mother tongue is an offshoot of this initial experience of desire. In that sense, l’Évangéline, printed daily on an old rotary press (purchased, as a matter of fact, from the New York Times) provided both the evidence and the continuation of the attachment of Acadians to their mother. And, if the paper’s editorial board was not aware of accomplishing a mission dictated by desire, it was fully conscious of the importance of the role of the Acadian mother. This explains the frequency with which she was evoked in the pages of that paper. As evidence, an excerpt from a speech by an American priest, who argued that the true Catholic mother is, at one and the same time, “nurse, prioress, educator, martyr, and queen,” and cannot but be our inspiration, because she “approaches things and people from the point of view of eternity.”
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From Madame Dolto’s work, two essential notions emerge: the idea of continuity (continuity of peristalsis from the mouth to the anus) and the idea of consciousness (the baby’s consciousness of this activity in its digestive tract). So ingrained in the human psyche is the notion of continuity that it would be ridiculous for any human being to attempt to abandon it. Nor is it even certain that we succeed in doing so in death. The deep roots of the notion of continuity become more apparent when one reflects on its opposite: the idea of discontinuity, which immediately evokes a profoundly disagreeable sense of chaos and absurdity. Imagine, for example, your reaction on learning that the production of parts for the car you purchased only a year ago had been discontinued. Humanity lives in the certitude that the present follows the past and leads to the future. All these concepts — the progression of History; the relation between cause and effect, and between our acts and their consequences; the linear movement of time — are only a few of the manifestations of the principle of continuity. Although the principle of continuity provides only a partial explanation of the origin and ultimate meaning of humanity, most people manage to coexist quite comfortably with the remaining mysteries. By compartmentalizing their experiences and identifying a few cycles, people manage to live moderately happy lives without understanding the truth of the matter and without seriously questioning their sense of History.
In the same way, we humans are perfectly capable of conceiving of any number of things without necessarily possessing sufficient knowledge to act on these concepts. For example, one can easily imagine a fish without being able to manufacture one. In fact, simply catching a fish requires considerable cunning. Yet another case of mind over matter. Reality is such that human beings can taste the simple pleasures of life without being burdened by the details of all that lies beneath the surface. Consider, for example, the non-linearity of continuity. The way continuity advances simultaneously on several fronts, in several, and even opposite, directions. Because continuity does not develop in a long gradual wave, born and dying in the ocean of History. It also develops in shocks and sudden jolts, the way, when it rains, a multitude of rings collides on the water’s surface. This chaos of continuity exists in that invisible and indivisible part of History where even History loses consciousness of itself. The chaos of continuity exists at the nuclear level, hence its true mystery and its incomparable strength.
As for consciousness, Françoise Dolto explains that the sensation of existence derived from the child’s peristalsis is a sensation which is not perceived. According to her, we all live with this imperceptible sensation, the exception being those suffering from extreme anxiety, people who, for the most part, are restricted to psychiatric hospitals and claim to have neither stomachs nor intestines. In the words of Madame Dolto, “the fact that there are those that imagine the absence of the body proves that everyone always feels they have a stomach, always feels they have a digestive canal, which is in continuous peristalsis. How it operates, they have no idea. This unconscious sensation . . . is part of the silence of the organs.” Lack of consciousness, in this case, is therefore a healthy sign. Consciousness (that of a novelist reflecting on his or her art, for example) might then be interpreted as an anomaly. Transposing further, one might assume that a silence corresponding to the “silence of the organs” exists in other spheres of life and that, similarly, a relative lack of consciousness is preferable to an over-sharp mind, assuming we accept as a worthwhile human objective to stay as far away as possible from psychiatric institutions. It follows that the silence of con-tinuity which underlies everything (including chaos) could be part of the human condition, that is, of that part of the condition which it would be preferable to forget. Because one
form or another of insanity threatens anyone who is unable to forget that life — which is really nothing more than a long succession of endlessly repeating stories containing neither anything new nor anything we can change — is, in the end, futile.
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Nineteen fifty-three turned out to be a rather emotional year for Winston Churchill, in spite of the fact that, during this post-war period, he was responsible for only a single country’s destiny, which, for him, was not a lot. In fact, during the years following the Second World War, the Great Britain in Churchill’s hands looked more like a trifle in the grip of a giant. Nevertheless, like all Personalities, he always found a way to remain on the cusp of History. In the early days of 1953, even before Pius XII’s consistory and Eisenhower’s swearing-in ceremony, but not prior to the inescapable probability of Baby M.’s existence, Churchill once again made himself known to History, by dealing this time with his own history. At seventy-nine years of age, Mr. Churchill visited for the first time his mother’s birthplace in Brooklyn. Jenny Jerome had been born in a small brownstone, in 1851, a century earlier. This modest pilgrimage, a brief stopover on the way to Jamaica, was enough to stir many hearts in the international community and set Nurse Vautour to dreaming whether she too would one day visit New York and — why not? — Brooklyn.
Unlike Mr. Churchill, Nurse Vautour has no conception of her role in the continuity of History nor, for that matter, in the continuity of Literature. Unaware of the literary instinct hidden away in Baby M.’s celiac trunk, it is with thoughts of the continuity of life, more particularly Baby M.’s, that Nurse Vautour once again takes the baby in her arms to give her a bath. The fact that Baby M. does not really look any better reminds her that humankind in general is not doing very well either; otherwise, the world would not be so full of spies and saboteurs like the Rosenbergs, God forgive them! All those atomic secrets, it’s very unsettling; no wonder the Nevada desert is trembling. Truman and Eisenhower have said so: the hydrogen bomb will certainly destroy Russia and the Reds, but not without wiping out the entire planet as well. All things considered, the world is an uncertain place. The Russians claim they are victims of a vast American anti-Communist propaganda, and Charlie Chaplin, that benevolent clown, agrees. But Nurse Vautour believes one should not underestimate the Reds’ impertinence either. Marshall Tito, for example, has not even taken the trouble to read Pope Pius XII’s letters, which call on him to put an end to the persecution of Catholics in his country. Instead, the Yugoslavian leader returned the letters unopened to the Vatican. Having emerged once more from Baby M.’s celiac cloud, Nurse Vautour hopes something good will come of all this. She thinks of the Japanese scientists who have invented a new cyclotron, which could serve the cause of medicine. Canadians too have reason to be proud. In Chalk River, they’ve constructed a unit in which the body of a cancer patient can be entirely surrounded by radioactive cobalt. Even the Americans have expressed an interest. Nurse Vautour wonders whether some such technique might not work on Baby M., because the banana potions don’t seem to be having much of an effect. She recalls a newsflash in l’Évangéline about how a great number of Czech children, who had never seen a banana in their lives, were each given one for Christmas.
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