REVIEW:
The Muse of Exile

 
[Quentin Clewes: Salammbo, Pegaso, Pisa, 1993. Lire 10000.
She, Penanti, Firenze, 1993.
Lapsang Souchong, Pegaso, Pisa, 1996. Lire 15000.
Bilingual editions in English and Italian, translated into Italian by Franca Cancogni.]

Guido Fink in his introduction to Salammbo ("Il velo della principessa") drew attention to the author's use of masks as alter egos. But he left untouched the pseudonym which, too, serves as a mask. If, unlike Professor Fink, I transgress against that convention of reticence, it is because in this instance the pseudonym is less a claim for anonymity than an invitation to discovery, as the pun Clewes/clues indicates.

The Urgrund of the autobiographical "I" and the confessional mode it entails is out of bounds in Annapaola Cancogni's works and yet, since a work does not appear ab nihilo, the nom de plume supplants it. And unavoidably, no matter the autonomy of art, the fictive "I" points to the personal "I" in subtle ways. In She, the author touches on that issue. There, in a quest for unconditioned selfhood, the protagonist recoils from the third person pronoun "she", which confines her to being just a female in someone else's tale. Her suicide is driven by a reflex of grammar as the story ends on the word "nothing", but only after she had declared her preference for being even "it" to pronominal determinism.

In life, Annapaola Cancogni had been a charismatic teacher, a critic with a book on Nabokov, a prolific translator from French and Italian, as well as a novelist and short story writer. Her novel Jet Lag is a tour de force, in which language, evocative, lyrical, plays on a web of literary intertextuality like the wind on an Aeolian harp. But these short stories better delineate her major concerns in relation to her evolving techniques of narration.

Perhaps it is a propos to say at this point that English was Annapaola Cancogni's language of choice. Her "mother tongue" was Italian, which she knew perfectly. But she sought in the language of literary discourse a timeless topos of chosen exile that offered imaginative freedom from all constraints, not only cultural but even natural, such as gender. English, as the protagonist of She explains, only imposes gender determination in the third person, not in the first or second. Her demand for free selfhood was thus best met by the English language. And language is Anna Cancogni's tool in coping with identity. So her choice of a male pseudonym is not fortuitous. It stands as a sign for grammatical self-transformation.

Today, neither tribal affiliations nor national boundaries constrict one's choice of a language for creative work - only talent. From Conrad, Apollinaire, Becket and Nabokov to Rushdie runs a line of authors who have made the question of "second language" moot, by their choice of a language other than what the 19th Century would have called their "mother tongue". And the freedom a Becket, Nabokov or Rushdie displays in playing with dead conventions has infused their chosen languages with new vitality. It is noteworthy that Kundera's last novel is written in French. Anna Cancogni belongs to this tradition.

So it is only an apparent paradx that she has been translated from English into Italian, her language at birth. Indeed, Franca Cancogni's sensitive translation rarely falters in catching the tone and flow of the originals; even if Anna's occasional use of American slang - such as her calling the first-born son "Junior" can create problems in the Italian. "Il primio figlio" can never render the paternal urge for self-replication that "Junior" suggests. On the syntactic level, Anna Cancogni's sometimes complex sentences with subclauses and appositions, as in Salammbo, are easily accommodated by Italian. But her more fractured syntax with hyphens introducing afterthoughts in She, retains a touch of alianness in the translation. In Lapsang Souchong, on the other hand, the use of mutually qualifying short sentences, as if in a series of hesitations, works well in both languages and in characterizing the shy speaker. But her attempt there to reproduce the colloquial American tone is distracting at times. Her language seems most secure on the literary or a neutral plane.

Salammbo, with its complex tonalities, begins with dramatic flair and a playful touch of the grotesque: "On a bright Monday morning he had woken up to find he had forgotten his right leg in Carthage." After the slight shock, one interprets the image of the forgotten leg as a figment of the delirious patient's fantasy in this story of the nursing wife and her sick husband. Even the mysterious and unexpected allusion to Carthage finds validation on the realistic plane: the couple had gone there for their honeymoon some forty years ago. But its symbolic resonance is immediately present in the story's title evoking Flaubert and in the variation on that analogy by the added "m."

As the story proceeds, despite the concrete details - the catheter, the i.v., the obsessive ritual of nursing enacted by the wife over the corpselike body of the husband - the ostensibly "realistic" format of the story soon gives way to other meanings. And the touch of the oneiric in the image of the forgotten leg tinges the details with the quality of a dream. The couple in the claustrophobic space of the sickroom seem like the bifurcated halves of an androgynous self locked in a psychomachia.

Not that there are no external details to anchor them in common reality: they have two sons; other relatives; he has been an archeologist and a general; she has been a housewife and now is his nurse. And they have been to Carthage in real life, where he had photographed her and she had broken out of the frame of his imposed, static definition of herself by moving and ruining the last take.

But Carthage exists in multiple transparencies, between fantasy and life. It is a place to which he, formerly suspected of being le malade imaginaire by her but now turned into the living dead, would want her to voyage and fetch his right leg, even though the town where they live has no port: An impossible voyage to recover what is synechdocal of lost wholeness and potency, as his lost leg, diseased nose and his inability to get "it" up hint at. These form a Gogolian pattern of the grotesque which can make her laugh. But he still remains a source for the masks of identity she assumes, even if they are tainted like the fetid veil he had made her wear on their honeymoon.

He had compared her to Isis grieving for Osiris as he had photographed her. He had also said that she was like Salambð pacing the battlements in Flaubert's story and had bought her the book, which she has not read yet. But such analogies take on a twist. She indeed paces the room like Salambð with an extra "m", on the battlement separating his life from death, in a rite of repetition. And as "Isis" she presides over his dismemberment - of which the lost leg is an emblem. His body's dissolution is paralleled by the collapse of his mind and then speech - his abusive language turns obscene and at last becomes gibberish. And the final subversion of her male counterpart comes when he is described as pregnant and then giving birth to three girls. The two halves of the androgynous self have now become interchangeable in this world of superimposed oneiric images.

Guido Fink writes that at the end of the story she wakes up. Yet in the text "she" falls asleep trying to read Salambð, after taking it down from her father's bookshelf. The story's structure thus mimics a dream in inverting temporal sequence. As Mary Stewart said on the scaffold: 'En ma fin est mon commencement." But, of course, she was invoking the coincidentia oppositorum that is eternity. Here the dream describes its own circle.

I have already touched on She. So I shall just add that if in Salammbo the Other, the male counterpart to the female self, had existed as a presence in the process of reification in the psychomachia, here "she" is the threatening double from which the isolated "I" recoils and escapes by suicide. The outside world exists here only in disembodied voices at the end of the telephone. And the solipsistic quest for the pure "self", since the option of being "it" is illusory despite the English grammar, can only end in "nothing". This final voiding of being into nothingness recurs in Lapsang Souchong as well. And language games seem like gestures of avoidance of that grim equation.

In Lapsang Souchong the narrative technique is quite different. A love story at the crossing of two solitudes, it begins with an address in the second person and is told as a monologue. The rejected "she" in the third person, a female in someone else's tale, appears here precisely as such but invested with symbolic markers which set her apart for the speaker-lover as if she were an icon. The foreign brand of her cigarettes, her ever so slight alien accent, her androgynous looks (she seems a cross between a graceful woman in her thirties and a lost young boy), even her favorite flowers, the fresias that the speaker does not know by name, all make for her uniqueness.

The tea they drink together, the one time when they sit and talk in her house, is Lapsang Souchong; its Chinese name a pointer to her status as an exotic, privileged stranger. And the ritual of that tea drinking is as fragile and formal as their minimalist dialogue which can merely hint at mutual recognition and nothing more.

Unlike the other stories, Lapsang Souchong has a precise location: Nantucket. And the temporal sequence follows the calendar, even though seasonal rhythms dominate. But in this half-lyrical monologue, where the snatches of inset dialogue but suggest the undelved mystery of the "she" who is its focus, the realistic details dissolve into nuances. She remains within a halo of estrangement, whether seen by the speaker in semi-darkness against the ocean at gloaming, or sitting alone before a chess board drinking champagne with another glass set up for an absent playmate. His very idolatry of her image reinforces his diffidence and isolates both. Even in that brief instant, before her suicide, when she falls into his arms, there is no actual communication. Like that letter from England she had received, forwarded from place to place, his imagination follows her symbolic attributes as if in search of a final address.

And so the possibility of mutual love is no more than a leit-motif in flickers of recognition, finally unheeded like the music on the mechanical piano which plays in her drawing room, as she enacts her rites of solitude. We know that her exotic fresias do not belong with the native, unseasonal lilacs he had given her. In the end, at her request, her ashes are strewn by him over the ocean and the flowers he still brings to her grave are to an empty urn buried on alien shores.

Whether in dialectical tension with the Other in Salammbo or in the clutches of grammar in She or reflected in the speaker's eyes in Lapsang Souchong, the Self remains an elusive focus in these stories. It repeatedly verges on being articulated as identity in various ways but ultimately remains elusive and untranslatable, tantalizingly recessive. One feels its dynamic force, in spite of its indeterminacy, because an aura of estrangement provides the background. But that is true particularly in the English originals. The Italian translation with its own linguistic decorum tames that telling incongruity into something less mysterious.