The Double Life of Liliane
Page 19
1.Deconstruction allows for the other to speak.
2.Deconstruction opens the text out to an affirmation of the absence of fixed meaning.
3.Deconstruction is opposed to binary thinking where one term is privileged over another i.e., Man/Woman, West/East.
4.Deconstruction involves placing oneself inside the text.
5.Deconstruction questions the legitimacy of any closed system.
6.Deconstruction posits that nothing happens outside of the text.
7.Deconstruction posits that there is nothing but context.
“The premise of the second poem, ‘Autre Éventail’—Another Fan,” Liliane writes, “whose subject is the fan of Mallarmé’s daughter rests on the difference between Mme Mallarmé and Mlle Mallarmé—the one a woman, the other a young girl. The poem begins: O rêveuse, pour que je plonge—Dreamer, that I may plunge—and Mlle Mallarmé is described as a dreamer, living in an imaginary world. Here, again, as in the first ‘Éventail’ poem, the movement of the fan is a wing—signifying the concept of movement, rather than movement itself.”
The subject of the third “Éventail” poem is the fan of Mallarmé’s mistress, Méry Laurent. Only Méry Laurent is dead. “The movement of the fan,” Liliane writes, “is controlled by the poet’s Idea of Méry’s presence, which, since she is no longer alive, is impossible. The paradox inherent in this attempt parallels that of the act of poetic creation, where the attempt to create the poem distinct from language fails by virtue of the language itself on which the poem remains dependent.”
In his next letter to Liliane, sent from Calcutta, Mark—because he may be lonely or the tiger shoot was a disappointment—declares himself more ardently to her: “I love you so much and am so very much in love with you and I want to share everything I know and think and believe with you. But I am a sentimental fool and at the moment I am all drawn up inside with the memory, feel, smell, touch, want, and passion for you and knowing how strongly I feel, I ask this one thing of you, if you have fallen out of love with me let me know.”
The depth of feeling and the passionate tone in the letter takes Liliane by surprise. She misses Mark—his enthusiasms, his physical presence, even the rides in the red MG with the top down—but, absorbed writing her Mallarmé paper, she had neglected to answer his last letter. If only, she thinks, Mark knew what she was thinking:
O rêveuse, pour que je plonge
Au pur délice sans chemin,
Sache, par un subtil mensonge,
Garder mon aile dans ta main.
Dreamer, that I may plunge
In sweet and pathless pleasure,
Understand how, by ingenious deceit,
To keep my wing within your hand.
Then, frowning, she rereads part of Mark’s letter—the part where he writes “if you have fallen out of love with me let me know”—afraid she has misread its meaning.
Although Liliane is in Professor de Man’s thrall, she has had little personal contact with him. A few times, near the end of a seminar, as he is putting his papers back in his briefcase and preparing to leave, she gets up the courage to ask him a question. A question about rhyme in Baudelaire or why Rimbaud stopped writing when he was twenty years old. But most of her questions have to do with an assignment and, later, about when the term paper is due and Professor de Man has always answered her kindly and a bit abstractedly—smiling but not really looking at her. Always, too, he addresses her politely, by her family name. If, by chance, their paths cross in the Yard, as they are pushing their bicycles along, they nod and say hello, but do not stop. Once, in Cambridge, out on a date, Liliane sees Paul de Man having dinner at the French restaurant Henri IV. He is sitting next to a woman with long brown hair—her back is to Liliane—and another couple. Everyone at the table is drinking wine and having a good time. Liliane is not sure whether de Man sees her; he gives no sign that he does.
Paul de Man opened Liliane’s mind and took her seriously; more specifically, he taught her how to read closely, how to intuitively interpret difficult texts, and how to view the authenticity of language. At the time, she, of course, had no idea that years later, and, mercifully, after his death, Professor de Man’s reputation would be badly tarnished by his association to articles he was discovered to have written during World War II for Le Soir, a Belgian collaborationist newspaper; in particular, a single damning one titled “The Jews in Contemporary Literature,” in which he posited that, without Jewish writers, literature would suffer no great loss. This revelation would spawn several more accusations—Paul de Man as a bigamist, as a forger, a liar, a swindler, a thief—all of which Liliane will find hard to believe. Impossible, really.
Professor de Man ends the seminar by repeating that deconstruction is the self-reflexive moment in a text when language both presents a figure of speech or trope and begins to undo or deconstruct it. This deconstruction occurs in all texts, even in autobiographical texts, and he mentions Rousseau’s Confessions, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, and Proust, saying that in À la recherche du temps perdu, which is meant to be autobiographical, it is impossible to tell what is fact and what is fiction. In fact, de Man continues, it is impossible to know whether figuration produces reference in a text or whether reference produces the figure. In any event, de Man says, warming to his subject, “Autobiography occurs when it involves two persons building their identities through reading each other. This requires a form of substitution—exchanging the writing ‘I’ for the written ‘I’—and this also implies that both persons are at least as different as they are the same.” The Memorial Church bell rings the hour, signaling the end of class, and nearly drowns out Professor de Man’s last words: “In this way, I consider autobiography as an act of self-restoration in which the author recovers the fragments of his or her life into a coherent narrative.”
Professor de Man gives Liliane an A on her Mallarmé paper on the three “Éventail” poems. “This is quite remarkable,” he writes and, “I would like to hear what you are working on next!”
The flight to Bangkok takes sixteen hours and since they are flying at night, west, they never catch up with the sun. The whole time it stays dark. Somewhere over the Pacific, Liliane is not sure when exactly—each time the plane lands to refuel, she has to put her watch forward, first two hours, then three, then three more—or where exactly, maybe over the island of Wake or farther south over the island of Guam. When at last the plane lands at Don Mueang Airport, it is bright day. They have crossed the international date line and lost a day entirely. During the flight, Liliane has hardly slept and her feet are so swollen she cannot put her new red shoes back on. She has to walk barefoot across the hot Thai tarmac holding her shoes in one hand. Looking up, she half expects to see the lost day resting on a bank of clouds float slowly away and out of her reach.
Epilogue
Chapter I
Venice of the East is how Claire’s guidebook describes Bangkok and their house is on a canal, a klong. The klong leads to a large outdoor market called Pratoo Nam and Claire can go there by boat. From the terrace of the house, she can hail one like a taxi and pay only a tical that rhymes with nickel—its worth. The taxi boat is a slender hull of teak with an outboard engine and a long propeller shaft that the boatman has to lift out of the water to avoid other boats, refuse, whatever else is floating in the canal. Often a dead dog is floating in the canal. Bloated, brown, pink, black, and terrible, the dog bobs up and down gently, ready to burst.
The other passengers in the taxi boat are slender Siamese women wrapped like parcels in their red, blue, yellow sarongs. They ignore the dead dogs and, unless the boat becomes unusually crowded, avoid sitting next to Claire.
“Falang, falang”—foreigner, foreigner—the women tell one another in their singsong voices—“falang, falang.”
Pratoo Nam market is large and, at first, Claire is afraid of losing herself among the mangoes,
the papayas, the litchis, the pineapples and coconuts, the limes piled almost as high as she, the twenty-six varieties of bananas, the fish, the squid and octopus from the Bay of Siam, the spinach leaves, the bunches of onions, the clumps of garlic, the live poultry and the hundred-year-old black duck eggs soaked in horses’ urine.
Bpai nai?—Where are you going? The vendors call out to her. When they see her, they double their prices.
Twenty-two, tall, blonde, Claire is easy to see.
At home, all their food is prepared in a hot pepper sauce by the cook, Lamum.
“The peppers kill the parasites,” her husband, James, says. He is proud that he eats local food and is not sick from it. The food burns Claire’s mouth, her throat, her stomach, later her ass. With her chopsticks, Claire picks at her meal, shoving aside the peppers, the seeds. “The smaller they are, the hotter,” James warns her. Claire’s plate is a mess.
The kitchen is the home of ugly water rats. Claire has seen Lamum throw a piece of burning charcoal at one. The pots and pans are kept in a screened cupboard; the legs of the cupboard are set in dishes of water so that the ants can’t crawl up. There are no appliances; the stove is two charcoal pits. There is no sink; the cold water from a single spigot runs directly onto the cement floor.
Noi, the maid, has a baby boy. Except for a silver net that he wears over his penis, he is always naked. He is frightened of Claire, of how she looks. Each time he sees her, he starts to cry. At night, to put him to sleep, Noi masturbates him.
The back of the house—where Lamum, Noi, and Prachi, the houseboy, live—is a jungle of banana trees with their large messy leaves and all the garbage Lamum and Noi collect: empty bottles, wire hangers, tin cans. And there is always somebody else, somebody new, somebody Claire has never seen before. A cousin? An aunt? A younger brother? As far as Claire knows, she and James are supporting an entire family, an entire village. And didn’t she once see a horse back there? Or did she dream this? Best not to ask. Best not to get involved, James says.
The front of the house is neat. The mowed green grass, the bougainvillea, the frangipani, the rosebushes that Claire plants. But because of the heat or the bugs, the roses do not bloom.
The swimming pool, too, is in the front of the house.
“We are not naturally immune as they are,” Claire tells James about the water. She and James drink bottled water.
In the morning, as they breakfast on the terrace, they watch a woman bathe in the canal. The woman brushes her teeth, then she soaps her face, her neck, her arms; she soaps underneath her sarong. When she is through, she pulls a clean sarong over the old one without ever exposing any flesh.
“All these months and I still haven’t seen her tits,” James says.
“I don’t understand why they are not all sick,” Claire says. “I don’t understand why they are not all dead. That water is indescribably filthy.”
In the morning, too, Noi washes her baby boy in the canal. First, she rinses out the silver net, then she holds the baby boy over the canal so that he can defecate in it.
“It’s full of shit,” Claire says.
James looks at his watch. “I’ve got to go,” he says.
“Bpai nai?” Claire asks.
In yet another life, I wrote this.
Acknowledgments
For statistics and information about the Italian working class after World War II, I am indebted to A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), by Paul Ginsborg.
Quotations from Moses Mendelssohn are from Michah Gottlieb, ed., Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2011).
For the story about Moses Mendelssohn’s meeting with Fromet Guggenheim, I am indebted to the site www.wisdomportal.com/Romance/Mendelssohn-Gugenheim.html; its source is Herbert Kuferberg; The Mendelssohns: Three Generations of Genius (New York: Scribner, 1972).
The quotation about concentration-camp survivors is by Dr. Yael Danieli, in an article by Gustav Niebuhr, “Painful Nazi Era Legacy: Hidden Personal Histories of Survivors,” The New York Times, February 5, 1997.
For the description of Mary, Queen of Scots’ beheading, I am indebted to Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots (1970; repr., New York Delta/Bantam Dell Doubleday, 1993).
For facts about Josephine Baker’s life, I am indebted to Phyllis Rose’s Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Vintage, 1991). The Josephine Baker “rear end” quote comes from Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker by Marcel Sauvage. Paris: Corréa, 1949.
For Anna Freud’s theories on young girls’ obsession with horses, I am indebted to Deborah Bright’s: “Horse Crazy,” in Horse Tales: American Images and Icons, 1800–2000 (Katonah, N.Y.: Katonah Museum of Art, 2001).
For information about Panagra Airline and flights over the Andes, I am indebted to William A. Krusen, Flying the Andes (Tampa: University of Tampa Press, 1997).
For information to describe Claude’s exploits as a pilot during World War Two, I am indebted to René Mouchotte, The Mouchotte Diaries, ed. André Dezarrois, trans. Philip Joun Stead (Bristol, U.K.: Cerberus, 2005), and to Pierre Clostermann, The Big Show: The Greatest Pilot’s Story of World War II (London: Cassell Military Paperbacks, 2004).
Moravia’s reminiscences are adapted from Alberto Moravia and Alain Elkann, Life of Moravia, trans. William Weaver (Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Italia, 2000).
Frederick Seidel’s poem “The Love Letter” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, June 1960, pp. 142–146.
The quotation about Earnest Hooten’s purpose for the posture photographs is from Ron Rosenbaum, “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal,” The New York Times, January 15, 1995.
For Paul de Man’s Harvard seminar, I have either quoted or paraphrased Martin McQuillan’s definition of allegory, his definition of deconstruction, and his definition of autobiography as de-facement and fiction from Martin McQuillan, Paul de Man (London: Routledge, 2001) and from Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
I have quoted from Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
I also want to acknowledge and thank Katie Raissian and Charles Rue Woods for their attention and work on my behalf.