Gérard
Noiret and the Lady with the wisteria
by Jean-Michel
MAULPOIX, La Quinzaine Littéraire, Nr.
788
about
Gérard Noiret's « A polyptych of the Lady
with the wisteria », Actes Sud, 96p.
Translated from
the original French by Catherine Wieder
As a tribute paid
to the memory of a mere working class woman of the old
days as well as to the very subburbs where she had lived,
Gérard Noiret composed a very sober «
polyptych » in which the novel comes close to the
poem and in which the evocation of ordinary life becomes
an offering gesture.
An « elegy
», such could be the subtitle of this volume were
one to remember that in the origins the elegiac genre
mingled both the lyrical and the epic in order to bid the
living to watch over the memory and follow the work of
those dear departed. And yet the epic element is here
reduced to its simplest expression, nay even to what may
seem its reversal, i.e. everyday life. In the Parisian
subburb, at the end of the 90's, close to the Avenue
Jules Ferry or Paul Vaillant Couturier, an old lady is
dying carrying with her in the grave her commonplace and
complicated life history as are most life
histories.
Such a mother
becomes a true riddle for her children who no longer met
but come again close together since she has died : her
death brings all the silences of her life come up again.
With what thread can one link the scattered scenes of the
past, the photos spread on the table, the memories of the
annoyances, tender feelings or injustices ? How, with
only a few landmarks, unvoiced words, kept secrets,
rushes of affection, successive failures, may one build
again something that would look like some kind of
personal fate and gather up the looks of a plain woman
consolidating at last the features of her face and of her
eventful existence ?
To such a
question, Gérard Noiret brings an answer both as
emotionally modest as unusual, literary wise. Taking as a
model one of those polyptyches that used to adorn the
church altars in the old days, he pays the deceased not
just the tribute of a poetic grave, but also the device
of seven different kinds of writings juxtaposing or
intertwining themselves.
Two panels of
prose with the children's narratives, supported by two
columns of poems framing « Marc Jouanot's voiced
heart », the centre of the polyptych in which the
third child (i.e. the author's double at grips with
writing) recalls his mother's last moments in the
hospital. The whole is surrounded by two more panels,
entitled « Chattering Angels », in which a
choir from the subburbs comment.
The whole is
called « a novel » since it hereby delineates
the memory of one's life, scattered between several
characters whose fate is mingled with that of the afore
mentioned figure. But the volume might just as well have
been called a « poem » were we to stress the
shaping of that figure of a working class woman into that
of a highly sublimated lady with the wisteria. But it
could also be labelled as a « melodrama » since
it so well belongs to a mixture of languages, a
distribution of voices and a succession of scenes, all of
them trying to express the difficulty to love, and
attempting to articulate the liturgy of a family history
and its obituary.
Whether it be a
novel, an elegy, a melodrama or a poem, if so many terms
are here used in order to characterize such a most
unusual polyptych with a rigorous symmetry, it is merely
due to its being a true text, as one used to define it
ages ago, i.e. a work of writing, attempting at inventing
its own form according to its internal necessities. The
latter are here those of a lay tribute and offering meant
both for the dead woman and for the world she carries
away with her. In truth, the construction streamline
behind such a polyptych is less that of an altar painting
than of a mere house in the subburbs where a whole
attachment would dwell as both « coils » of
wisteria here evidence framing its central part : the
very same text twice retaken says both the intertwining
and the blossoming, the longed for weightlessness and an
obstination for life at all costs, the surge towards the
sublime of a mere figure of a working class woman, as
well as the faithfulness of the writer to her
memory.
