English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

The Lecture: An Insouciance of Influence

Lydie Salvayre. The Lecture. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2005. 135 pp. $ 12.50. 

By Lou Rowan

            The modern world—which we may define here as the post-colonial vicissitudes following the first “great” war—presents us with 2 out of 6+ billion humans starving, a decline of culture into content, and Augusto Pinochet as a representative statesman. Your assignment: turn these issues into a brief comic novel.

            Well, you need a protagonist crazy enough to think he can solve them (his jug ears and tiny frame will stand in for the quixotic pate-bowl and emaciation; his lectern for a horse and lance). And best to present a protagonist from a country whose rich cultural history fuels its confidence it knows all the answers—even as its declining military and economic power will prevent the world from listening. (Guess which!)

            What is our hero’s solution? Revive the noble art of conversation.

            Conversation=civilization=attention to historic and contemporary particulars.

            —Do you think I exaggerate the thematic scope of this tiny novel? Listen to our lecturer:

And if you feel the onset of uncontrollable laughter [trying to stay still during a reading], think of Augusto Pinochet. It’s foolproof. (40-41)

. . .[We] have no intention of harming a system [the financial economy] that has produced and continues to produce such wonderful results. There are almost two billion starving souls in the world, and almost as many illiterates. (97)

All indications are that by jettisoning their bodies, these young websurfers whose  sole surfboard is a brain of global dimensions, whose sole desire is a vague attraction to the tidal wave of shit that will engulf us all, whose sole passion is to brood before the blue of their screens, these youngsters on life-support sitting peacefully before their monitors while the world around them goes to hell in a handbasket, these young voyagers without hearts, nerves, muscles, without any defenses, without any formative experience of themselves or others, will finally, one of these centuries, disappear. I did say disappear. Just like the dinosaurs. (24-25)

            The Lecture is a comic novel that has gone to school with Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne. It announces, however, its dark, even tragic, side with typical shifty grace:

You think I’m contradicting myself, don’t you! That I’m piously preaching about reaching out to one another, only to claim in the next breath that it’s impossible! And even if it were, should we give up trying? Look at Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Toby and Trim (my little favorites), Ahab and his whale, Lucienne (it’s the word “whale” that brings her back to mind because Lulu, my Lulu, was in several ways rather like a whale, don’t misunderstand me, I’m not being in the slightest bit sarcastic, a whale, my Lulu, who spent most of her time beached on the bed, emitting marine odors I found utterly intoxicating), where was I? Ahab and his whale, Lucienne and I. Sublime couples. Impossible couples. Forever divine. (65-66)

            In French, this novel is la Conférence de Cintegabelle. Cintegabelle is a small town near Toulouse. The lecturer, a self-proclaimed genius, addresses a charmingly unsophisticated audience at the Town Hall. He estimates that 48 of the town’s inhabitants can converse, only six of them effectively. (According to its promotional website, the 2005 population of Cintegabelle is 2215.) He progresses through a clear outline—the advantages of conversation, the conditions favorable to the flowering of conversation, and five examples of conversation—“with a most mathematical rigor” (5,6). But his frustrations with his career, contemporary vulgarities, his in-laws, and certain of his townsmen explode the rigor with hilarious bile. Further, his grief for the loss of his mammoth wife, his conscious and unconscious anger at her, and his blind sadism towards her stimulate digressions that make the lecture a novel. The structure of this book is captured by Tristram Shandy lauding his own:

By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contradictory motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,--and at the same time. (Sterne 73)

Gravity (a pun throughout)  looms over Tristram Shandy like the ineluctable physics governing the wars that are its backdrop. Sterne’s characters are ridden by the characteristic humors he calls “hobby-horses,” and the serious issues with which they joust with weapons of lathe are kept at a comic remove from us by their “inelasticity of character.” (Bergson, 23)  For a purpose of  Tristram Shandy’s wit is to elude gravity—just as Tristram flees England to avoid death in the final volume.

            But our Lecturer rides at least two “hobby-horses” —the art of conversation, his dead wife—each of which can turn flesh and blood, crane its head around, and deliver a tremendous bite, like Sergeant Bowers’s mount in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed” (Twain, 126-127). We must call the lecturer’s hobby-horses obsessions, and we experience him as a full-blooded man delivering, like the captain and officers in Moby-Dick, a soliloquy, rather than as a humor-fueled ranter from Ben Jonson’s comedies. He’s witty, as you can see in the citations, but his emotions sully the polish, as he wrestles his obsessions rather than twitting them like Tristram.

            The novel’s plotting is a function of the lecturer’s conscious and unconscious impulses, its vividness the efficacy with which its supple language captures phrase-by-phrase the dynamic shifts, the acuteness of his passions. The Lecture has indeed been presented as a play.

            Except that this extended soliloquy is delivered to the Cintegabellian public, who with the reader become exposed voyeurs at a ludicrous emotional disrobing. What should the restive children and provincial grownups in the audience make of this:

And although I am well aware of the dangers of cybernetics, I must admit that it will transform the future in the most amazing fashion. By freeing us from the burden of our oh-so-earthly and ravenous and cumbersome bodies, cybernetics will liberate us from what we thought were the inescapable laws of gravity, in an incredible mutation that leads me to ask these concrete questions: will getting a hard-on be possible, and in what sense? Good Lord! And masturbation? And penetration? These, to my mind, are crucial questions that remain unanswered, yet at the same time it (I’m referring to cybernetics) will spare us the fainting spells, convulsions, itching, collusions, annoyances, chafing, secretions, and other disgusting things linked to incarnation. And believe me, I know what I’m talking about!

For my part, and despite the endless difficulties I encounter, endowed as I am with one hundred thirty pounds of exquisitely sensitive flesh plus (I confess) a dreadfully tyrannical penis, I am still not resigned to becoming a pure spirit. Even on the Internet. (26-27)

            To call this public utterance crazy is like placing a label on the window of an undersea laboratory. The mixture of tones and styles, of thematic and personal materials, of full sentences with interjections and phrases—these are events, events in the quest of a talented but limited man to confront most issues plaguing humanity, to confront them in pain at his failures.

            Like Lucienne. One can imagine Ahab  dragged to the depths bound to his whale as a funny action-scene in a cartoon or comic book. Conversely, when the massive Lucienne grapples her 132-pound professor to her, and he must climb all over her, head to head, head to heels, before bracing himself on her knees to perform the primal act, we can feel desperation behind the comedy. For the silence of Lucienne (she knows 100 words, and a typical utterance is “wha”) contains threatening mystery. Why is she so massive? What has driven her to a rut or track between her bed and the fridge, along which she travels, “about ten yards an hour, for Lucienne advanced with legs wide apart so as not to irritate the chafed and inflamed skin of her inner thighs. . . .”(78).  We know Lucienne only through the lecturer whose sadistic treatment of her (I do not wish to give away too much here) has elements of the hunt or the bullfight.

               The hatred between the tiny man of spirit and the vast woman of flesh, their connection through his “tyrannical” sensuality and her amplitude of fleshly accommodation, the tears to which his memories of her bring him—all fill out the comic sketch of a rhetorical picaro and his marooned sidekick, setting loose in our imaginations a love story we will never comprehend, but whose kaleidoscopic frankness is a revelation.

            I’ve touched on theme, influence, plotting, characterization. The lecturer brings up style, of which this book is appropriately a vivacious manual, as he fights himself behind the lectern:

Leave no danger of obscurity in your language. Although God knows we’re drawn to the darkness! Myself most of all. To my misfortune. But I struggle against it, I struggle.

In other words, and to use an expression my Lulu loved, don’t try to pull that one! Fake profundity repels us and is among the two or three frauds we would like to combat with strokes of. . .with strokes of the pen, the only weapon we have, a lightweight arm, I admit, compared to the enemy’s tanks. (54) 

            I believe this novel a classic of our time: a primary delight of the text is the natural aplomb with which it appropriates techniques and characteristics of uncontainable comic classics.  So let’s catalogue, in the spirit of the lecturer, a partial Insouciance of Influences on Lydie Salvayre:      

Rabelais

• Scatology plus wild assertions (sometimes echoing the master): 

From the perspective of both proclivity and circumference, the French, though their fundament, hold a privileged position in the world, which explains why they are champions in the conversational sphere. (30)

• Lists as rhetoric: (please see the quotation with which this essay ends)

• Haphazard jumps from scene to scene, subject to subject

• Extensive learning, recondite vocabulary: e.g. ascesis, eudaemonic

Sterne

• Dr. Slop-ism, i.e., random unfair attacks on coevals sometimes scatologically- named.

• Self-gratulation by the narrator: passim.

Structure and style: please feel free to associate and allude, “Conversation, ladies and gentlemen, is theft, a subject we will address later. Unless something else crops up.” (80, 81)

• Style animated by talk-patterns, breathing, direct address to audience:

Observe the guests. Scientifically. They turn to the left and right. Shake their heads. Gesture repeatedly with their right arms in a manner known as pronation. Devote themselves to mastication, mouths closed, I should add. And between two tiny mouthfuls, I should add, they move their lips constantly. Like this. (1)

            . . . And so on to paper-topics like comparisons of the earthy Dulcinea del Toboso with Lucienne, or even comparisons of this book with Gaddis' Agape Agape. In the resounding company of contemporary particulars and historic echoes we become siblings to Prince Hal, giddy from pulling off not only a prank but a prank on his fellow-pranksters:

I am now of all humours that have showed themselves humors since the old days of Goodman Adam, to the pupil age of this present twelve a clock at midnight. (1 HIV, II, 4, 104-106)

            I have checked Linda Coverdale’s marvelously-supple translation against the original. Despite my imperfect French, it’s clear this Rablaisian, Quenelian encomium wielding The Lecture’s subject-matter is a shining acte pure in both tongues:

Conversation is by turns acid, adorable, African, addicted to shadows, bizarre, bushy, bold, coy as a woman, bantering, cunning, combative, comical, contradictory, devoted to surprises, devil-may-care, digestive, digressive, doesn’t do today what it can do tomorrow, it’s disruptive, eccentric, erotic, explosive, enthusiastic and tickled by its own enthusiasm, feverish, flowing, feminine, frisky, ferrets constantly through the idea shop, is fond of games and gambling, a gourmand, as good-for-nothing as a dream, independent, impetuous, inopportune, jaunty, kinky, languid, lascivious, mocking, mordant, mysterious, nocturnal, never takes anything for granted, is open, piquant, proceeds by leaps and bound, rambles, runs the gamut, is riotous, as staunch and sad as the truth, saucy, sometimes as salty as the sea, swift to set sail for anywhere (how could you catch up?), tender, undulating, vibrant, whispery, and zingy—that’s conversation! (82, 83)

            When I studied in France as a teenager I was amazed (as an antiseptic Californian) by the shopping practices of  women going shop to shop with their net bags bulging with fruits, vegetables and cheeses poking in all directions from their porous container. And I was dumfounded by their thrusting one or two unwrapped baguettes into their moist unshaven armpits. This “salty” image returns frequently as I reread this marvelous French cornucopia. Thanks to Dalkey Archive and to Linda Coverdale for importing it.

Works Consulted

Bergson, Henri. Laughter.  Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999.

Rabelais, Francois. Gargantua and Pantagruel.  London: Penguin, l955.

Shakespeare, William. Henry IV, Part One.  New York: Dell, l968.

Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy.  New York: Odyssey Press, l940.

Twain, Mark. The Portable Mark Twain.  New York: Viking, l946.