The Bust of Janus

Lluís Muntada

It might well be that autobiography is an impossible genre, compassionately excused by recognition of one’s own human limitations. Writing about oneself? One cannot see the background and figure at the same time. Although many despotic learned folk engage in it, being defendant and judge in the same trial is not very scrupulous. Actor and spectator in one and the same heartbeat? The autobiographical genre can be a white lie, diverting in its more caricaturesque exculpatory temptations (Benvenuto Cellini), elegant in its more beautiful representations (Josep Maria de Sagarra, Josep Pla, Marià Manent, Gaziel, María Zambrano...), vigorous in its less insincere forms (Wittgenstein, Anne Frank, Varlam Shalamov...), and even partially true in its most factitious materialisations (Borges, Aurora Bertrana...). The problem with some autobiographies is, as always, of the literary kind. Which is to say it’s of the aesthetic ilk. Which is to say it’s a moral problem: not having sufficient imaginative mettle to tone up a life that looks stunted, or resorting to ingenious inflation in an attempt to pad out one’s own deeds artificially, or resorting to unseemly narrative sleight of hand, thus breaking the harmony between voice and credibility. In case all this precautionary reserve isn’t enough to spark off suspicions about autobiography, it happens that fleeing from the autobiographical genre always becomes to some extent inevitable anyway since every fictitious modulation also springs from the writer’s ego. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”, confesses Gustave Flaubert. Sticking with physical time, Una educació francesa (A French Education) resists being annihilated by expository empiricism and neither does it seek to exceed its own scope but, rather, it is lavish in all the powers of a balanced imagination that reveals the strength of a well-ordered mental universe consisting of readings, sensibilities, introspection, reworking together with the phreatic layers of the self.

Against Boundaries Imposing Ignorance

This book has appeared thanks to the judiciousness of a publisher who was capable of identifying the potentialities of a work that, in some sense, was pre-existing in Bezsonoff’s narrative vigour and in the particular course his life has taken. Josep Maria Muñoz discovered the literary vein in an account of the childhood and youth of one of the big names in the present-day Catalan literary scene. The result is this book, a counterpoint breaking with the Spanish horizon while enriching the frieze of our literature and offering an approximation to some ways of living that are unknown to most citizens of the Catalan-language territories. This is a major conquest since ignorance has afforded yet another kind of armour plating for physical borders guarded by gendarmes and police, or by misleadingly uninhabited sentry boxes staging the myth that, in a political Europe re-founded by the great empire-states, frontiers are a thing of the past. Lubricating and extending the circuits of the linguistic and thematic repertoire of our literature has been another of the great achievements of this book. Another step has been taken against nothingness. Being able to link up, for example, among a great number of writers, one’s readings of Bezsonoff, Joan-Lluís Lluís, Caterina Pascual, Jordi Puntí, Josep Maria Fonalleras, Biel Mesquida, Francesc Serés, Jordi Llavina and Salvador Company kindles a bittersweet sensation: confirming, on the one hand, the marvellous pliability of the language and, on the other, a deplorable obturation of intellectual mechanisms.

Some of the chapters contained in this book were published periodically in L’Avenç itself. Indeed, a publishing market affected not only by the economic crisis but also by expressive registers should be more prodigal with this old books-by-instalment tradition in which it becomes possible to modulate a distended dialogue between author and reader, while also imposing a tight regulation of narrative time and facing the challenge of establishing some unity between the autonomy of each piece and its fitting into the general framework.

After Pinyols d’aubercoc (Apricot Stones) by Emili Manzano and Ellis Island by Georges Perec, Una educació francesa is the third title published by the “Literatures de L'Avenç” collection. Oddly enough, all three books have the same main character: time. Flowing, pungent time in Pinyols d'aubercoc. Concentrated, concentration-camp time in Ellis Island. A vehement updating of the past in Una educació francesa. Hence, although we are speaking of only three published titles, a highly sensitive, identifying catalogue of great literary quality is being consolidated. Parallel to this, in an endeavour that is, regrettably, not at all frequent, a periodical publication, L'Avenç, is fostering new literary projects that are capable of fusing the individual gaze with the magma of collective history.

The Subject of Time

In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in one of the ghostly dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, the Mogul emperor asks the Venetian adventurer, “You advance always with your head turned back?” and “Is what you see always behind you?” The narrator continues to observe that, “even if it was a matter of the past, it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey because the traveller’s past changes in keeping with the route he has followed”.

Una educació francesa presents many patterns in relief. However, standing out above everything else is a stylistic (and by this I mean moral) authority which, besides satisfying the conditions imposed by Philippe Lejeune on the autobiographical pact, extols the idea that the past is liquid and extremely sensitive to the movements of the present. This book upholds a Bergsonian, psychological conception of time, always flowing from the consciousness of the narrator. And, with a majestic interplay of ambivalences and sustaining a bidirectional gaze, the present is always modifying and decreeing the past, this time that, for some reason, is the most ductile verbal mood.

It is true that Una educació francesa registers the different places where Joan-Daniel Bezsonoff (Perpignan, 1963) has lived: Briançon, Cannes, Breisach am Rhein, Massy, Nyls, Mers-les-Bain... Yet, if one moves away from a mere enumerative and commemorative list, the book exhales the power conceded by the present, an adult time, a time of reflection on the erratic condition of someone who is the grandson of a White Russian and Catalan farmers, son of an officer in the French army, a writer who adopts a language that is almost-extinct in the territory of North Catalonia and no viva in the rest of the Catalan-language territories, a stranger everywhere (“the superfluous man”, on both sides of the border) and citizen harmed by Jacobinism. Hence, to the objective reality of the places must be added a still-greater power: the (re)elaborations of memory with its (re)creative and (re)interpretive capacity.

It is also true that in Una educació francesa one finds a painstaking chronicle of the 1970s, an evocation of an era in which petrol stations still sold Daudet’s Lettres de mon Moulin (Letters from My Windmill, 1886), when “trains took fifteen hours to get from Perpignan to Paris, gendarmes asked you for proof of identity in the voice of Fernandel, the postman came twice a day, a little mouse left a franc under the pillow of children who’d lost their first milk tooth and all the Catalans spoke Catalan.” However, this attention to detail does not culminate in a description of vanished worlds but, sifted through the permanent state of literature in which the author lives, life is transformed into literary substance and renews the felicitous observation made by Mallarmé: “The world is made to come to reside in a good book”. Now that all the great literary salons have disappeared, now that the totalising fervours of bygone literature are diminished, writing is understood as a refuge of the self and its multitude. And the portentous review of the past taken on by this book splits apart in several directions like a sheaf of very subtle light.

In particular it shreds in terms of precepts. Bezsonoff is aware that he belongs to an epic-less generation, and asks when it is suggested to him that he should write about his sentimental education, “What is the interest of my poor existence? I didn’t go to war like my grandfathers did.” His recognition of this nakedness obliges him to forsake the epic in favour of the lyrical, or to rescue an implosive epic, far from the songs of heroic deeds and nearer to the contained onslaught in parchment: “My life is mingled with the history of my books”. With the coherence of closing a circle, this work will also come to mingle with the history of books written by Bezsonoff himself, since in Una educació francesa one finds the black box of novels such as Les amnèsies de Déu (God’s Amnesias, 2005) and Els taxistes del tsar (The Tsar’s Cabdrivers, 2007), the embryo of themes that are their mainstay: Algeria, Indochina, Occitan, the figures of Petain and de Gaulle, and the Second World War (“the moment when Roussillon ceased to be Catalan”)...

If it is true that the reader –propelled by a conceptual classification of forty-three chapters– sets out on an orderly, moving and profound route through Bezsonoff’s childhood and adolescent schools, while learning of his passion for literature, languages and entering the world of his friends, games and writerly concerns (cinema, politics, religion, music, the tour, theatre, philosophy, landscapes...), it is also true that all this –as I was saying– in this book, also invokes the overwhelming force of everything that does not end up being made explicit. “A writer’s sources are his shameful things and the person who denies them or flees from them is headed for plagiarism or criticism”, Cioran decrees in his marmoreal voice. Here, the autobiographical character is endowed with a seal of authenticity and self-respect. Going beyond the idea of the “I” as an archipelago of manifestations, the book reveals how its suggestiveness has a high degree of narrative functionality. Thus, the divorce of Bezsonoff’s parents, his returns to Massy (his Ithaca), his learning Catalan –in an act of rebellion against his father’s wishes– and his relationship with his stepmother are profound events that are intensified precisely at the expense of not giving all the details. This highly sophisticated technique of summoning the off-field acquires a concentrated accent when Bezsonoff moves through very important personal matters in a syncopated, apparently elusive way that becomes enthrallingly touching on its boomerang rebound. Two examples: “One night of despair I threw out my whole [Spirou] collection... I didn’t even have the excuse of being drunk...” Second: (as he remembers a love of his youth) “I was able to sleep in the same compartment as her. She munched on strawberry-flavoured chewing gum all night. The heating in the compartment wasn’t working. Every winter when I come into Paris in an overheated carriage I think of her.” Subtlety and forcefulness, magic and punch.

In an accumulation of fine lyrical distances, the passage of time finds its own clepsydras: memories of the women Bezsonoff has loved, permanences, prosopopoeia, evocations of childhood that have the reader’s heart thumping backwards (“Life drained away. Placid. Immemorial.”) or his recurrent visits to Massy, like those of the old conquerors coming home, returning wiser from their expeditions... but a lot sadder too. Ferocious and at once delicate, sceptical and yet vital, Una educació francesa is an enduring work.

Published in L’Avenç, n. 349 (September 2009), pp. 63-65.

Copyright text © 2009 Lluís Muntada