www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
”You will burn this letter, and I promise to burn your replies.”
I have read up to: “My mother handed me over to the Mother Suoerior, gave me her hand to kiss, and then left.”
This is a most easy, tractable read, delightful as a reading experience, yet it is dark with foreboding. The most interesting factor for me is why on earth the author who was a major part of the Enlightenment with an Encylopaedia and works such as Rameau’s Nephew and Jacques the Fatalist should choose to enter the mind of such a young girl and her backstory.
Read up to: “Remember, my child, that your mother’s fate in the life hereafter depends a lot on how you behave in this life.”
…from the fact that her dying mother’s greatest sin was giving birth to her.
Our nun is nothing if not a closet musician.
One must remember as she is closeted deeper into a dedicated status for God to which she is not suited, and having complex feelings for a Mother Superior who also now dies within these pages, makes me think of the man to whom she is addressing all these thoughts of her life as if she is recounting her own gestalt real-time review of it.
“I stood in the corridors and measured the height of the windows.”
This is attritional to read but I can hardly put it down as if I am the ‘Monsieur’ to whom she wrote it. I make myself fall into her well, only to climb out to breathe again in order to read more. Her account of oppression under a new Mother Superior, the question of the blank confessional papers she uses for other purposes, her naive ally who takes these papers and I am on the brink of knowing the outcome when I finish reading so far at: “It is really a great shame that we never knew the holy people whose images are set before us for veneration….”
I have read up to: “‘Walk over her, she’s just a corpse.’”
Although this is compellingly easy to read, one can hardly bear read it.
Read up to:
“‘It’s chilling. Christians! Nuns! Human beings! It’s chilling.”
It becomes even more unbearable to read, yet even more irresistible to do so.
Yet should we, as readers, have hope? As she writes this monologue and account addressed to a man as if in hindsight and answers in real-time review of her life to another man WITHIN her account, both men as potential rescuers of a woman from women.
Read up to:
“I stayed alone at her bedside. I cannot describe the pain I was in; yet I envied her fate…”
During this section, I began to doubt the ‘voice’, the sophisticated voice of the man representing her and beyond him, Diderot, as filtered by the nun’s own voice as she lost her case, despite being a public cause célèbre, a stylishly orated case against the legal system, but such doubts were subsumed by the affection between our nun and another friendly nun who had looked out for her by, inter alia, picking up the broken glass that had been placed by others where our own nun was due to walk. The friendly nun died of love for our narrator nun, I guess.
Read up to:
“As for the Mother Superior, she had dozed off in her stall.”
Still compelling, but poignancy upon a constant brink, as our nun narrator — through the ‘good’ offices of men, in more ways than the author himself who writes about this nun writing to another man about her life, and those legal and ecclesiastical men who help her — is moved to another convent, where the Mother Superior seems kinder but ‘odd’, increasingly Sapphic or Electral, too, as our musical nun plays the virginal…
Read up to…
“Dare you tell me what you did while you were with her?”
…what DID (erot) she do asks the jealous nun, as our narrator, when alone with the Mother Superior, is importuned quite erotically by her. A moment that is triggered — somehow relevant to Diderot — while the younger one played Rameau on the virginal!
“…a very pleasant head, sunk into deep soft pillows, her arms lying feebly by her sides, with little cushions supporting her elbows.”
Remarkable passages of naive sexuality as a disease, as a pair or en masse. Predatory as subconscious acts, and confused acceptance of such acts by the one being preyed upon. A sad sickness, indeed, but one Diderot somehow makes us empathise with, if not sympathise. Shocking in a quiet way.
Read up to: “…her elbow resting between her thighs,…”
“How many times I visited the deep well at the bottom of the convent garden! The only reason I did not throw myself down it is that I was completely free to do so.”
The description of eventual madness in the Mother Superior — who had caressed our narrator to the point of such a climax — following arrival of a new Father Confessor, is utterly poignant, as is, I suppose, the narrator’s own potential madness as symbolised by her stylish prose becoming aide-memoire notes at the end: like my own here.
This book has deep moments of anxiety and horror, and a suspicion that it is Swiftian from the writing elbow grease of Diderot as he reaches an enlightenment to expunge his own madness? His own doubts…
I deny myself the hairshirt of reading Diderot’s post-preface, yes, a preface to what I deem to be an example of early fiction, fiction in which I have long placed my fearless faith, fiction as a discrete power, yes, a preface, unread by me, one that follows the fiction and does not precede it: like a trap! — using, as my excuse for not reading it, my own long-held, almost religious, faith in the ‘Intentional Fallacy’ as a literary theory, whether it be a heresy or not. We all have our safety valves. I just hope the narrator nun called SUZANNE (left nameless until now) has none of such qualms about reading my prelude printed in CERN ZOO in 2008: