My friend Helen just had a trigonometric revelation. She makes comics; she told me that a genuine work of art (poetry, painting, novel, cartoon) should contain, in its finite terms, the infinite. As in the equation governing a parabola–
–a shift of a few terms means something self-containing, elegant but boring, a mere circle. Art, instead, must open out by its delimited terms.
With that in mind, I read a novel. A gold-plated, cherry-on-top classic in France, a brief splash in England, unread in the US, Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur (Her Lover, in Penguin’s English) weighed down my carry-on as I moved back to Seattle over the weekend.
Winner of France’s 1968 Grand Prix du Roman, Belle du Seigneur was a 30-year labor of love of its author, Albert Cohen: a Greek Jew born in 1895, raised in France, and active as a diplomat on behalf of stateless persons before, during and after WWII. Two of Cohen’s wives/amenuenses died, and a third left him, as he wrote (between saving uncounted lives through his international refugee policy) four monster novels.
His literary works slice from the same narrative footlong: Solal (1930) reads straight into Mangeclous (“naileater,” 1938), which reads straight into Belle du Seigneur (1968), from which his final book, Les Valeureux (1969), was excised. His lifetime characters–rendered with eye-popping, Rabelaisian detail and touching vulgarity–are the idealistic, dashing diplomat (and Greek Jew) Solal; his posse of tireless, maniacal, good-humored uncles, the Valiant (embodying “everything which the popular imagination understands by Jewishness,” notes Cohen’s translator, David Coward); the gorgeous, moneyed goofball Solal sets his heart on seducing, Ariane; and Ariane’s bootlicking civil servant husband, Adrien Deume.
Belle du Seigneur is best read for its diversions. In its 1000-page immensity, it’s still, yes, parabolic: its twenty-plus-page unpunctuated interior monologues; its straight chapters of Deume killing time at his League of Nations job (tough before Google Reader, it seems); its unspooling comedy of manners; its first-ideal-then-smothering love affair all lead the reader to still-huger questions: how can we love humans, obsessed as they are with power? How can we reconcile reason and faith?
The details on any page are worth the novel’s weight and cost of admission. Ariane’s henpecked uncle calls himself a “wegular soup-fiend”; Ariane may (to her maid) chatter “nineteen to the dozen so you’d think she’d been inoculated with a grammyphone needle” but she speaks, to Solal’s ear, in “a gold-flecked voice”; adjoining Solal’s Riveria mansion, “the happy neighbors danced to a tinkling piano and allowed themselves a shoal of minor adulteries” over “the lazy, muffled murmur of the sea”; Solal, in a fit, addresses his prophet ancestors as “my towering simple impassioned indefatigable spouters of threats and promises”; and, as the Valient stake out the Deumes’ manion to spirit Ariane to Solal, “in the august silence of the night was heard the sound of munching, while a nightingale complained in vain.”
Anyway, I finished the novel. This (as I swear most Mays) will be my Summer of Fiction. Will it warp my poems? Lengthen them? Feed me up on the novel? For now I’m curious: is the knotted bulk of a novel better suited to weaving opposites–claustrophobia and joy, love and pessimism–than the frame of a poem? Or better suited to enacting hybridity? (Couldn’t help but notice: Solal, as a Greek Jew, is Joyce’s necessary Ulyssean hybrid of the new century, Bloom-and-Dedalus, united, finally, near the end of Ulysses [“Jewgreek is Greekjew”], wanderer and intellectual, scholar and trader, superman, modern man. Try squeezing that in a poem!) Hope it’s sunny where you are.