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The 1930s produced a
lot of drifters in modern fiction... you see them in the short stories of Liam
O'Flaherty (Ireland) and famously in James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings
Twice (1934), to which Georges Simenon's The Widow (1940) bears some
resemblance... in the way, say, that an ugly sister can be seen in the face of
the beautiful one. A French film version of Postman called Le Dernier
tournant (The Last Turning) was released in 1939, so Simenon might have
been stimulated by this to write his own grotesque, somewhat surreal, version.
Certainly the widow Tati is no Cora; as a femme fatale, Tati is the ugly
sister, a paranoid control freak whose sexual appetite is more Roman than
Catholic, although both women share the same greedy business ambition. And Jean
Passerat-Monnoyeur is no Frank Chambers, although both men play the roles Fate
has set them up for.
Many people have noted
the passivity of Simenon's Jean character, the desensitized Oedipus Rex type
who can only take orders from a woman. He seems to be an inter-war cultural
phenom, a man who carries a vague internal trauma, as if the 10 Commandments
have been ripped from his soul, so that he goes through the motions of life
like a machine. He doesn't care. He doesn't care for any bourgeois dream or
appearance... which is why, after being released from five years incarceration
for manslaughter, he drifts into the arms of a peasant widow, a 45 year old
vixen who is the mistress of her drooling, cretinous father-in-law. A laughable
Freudian nightmare? Certainly. Set by a canal deep in rural France, the bizarre
politics of The Widow are both pagan and modern, animal, vegetable and mineral
in no particular order. Welcome to Eden (sur-le-Cher... mes amis).
In a way the widow
Tati is inhuman, more like a mythological creature who lives in a cave and
accepts sacrifices as a natural right. Her son René, a petty criminal,
is in the Foreign Legion, yet is still pathetically dependant, always writing
for more money to be sent. Her father-in-law, Couderç, the old deaf
'tomcat' who really owns the house and garden, and a field near the brickyard,
dependant... booze, food, sex. And now Jean, to become a surrogate son and
lover, a catalytic part of this (un)holy ménage à trois.
Thus the religious patina of this strange story sets it apart from similar
works, delivered in such a matter-of-fact manner that the broken taboos slip
past in the soft surrealism of it all.
Theroux draws
attention to the similarity in attitude between Jean and Meursault, Albert
Camus' celebrated existential killer in L'Etranger, which was published in
1942, a couple years after The Widow. Others have also noted the similarities,
wondered if Camus was influenced by Simenon, and if so, what an injustice as
Camus won the Nobel and Simenon never did. The thing is, if you look at any of
the protagonists in Simenon's romans durs -- before and after The Widow
-- you see the same uncaring mummy's boys doing their antisocial, unchristian
acts. In a godless universe, murder or any other antisocial act is merely
political, and as such has no meaning. This dead wire attitude is especially
noticeable in fiction following the carnage of WW 1, an incubator for nihilism
if ever there was one. Institutional discipline and logic fails, and the
anti-romantic criminal triumphs.
Does a man feel guilty
every time he ejaculates? Only if he leaves a mess. There's a helplessness in
the action, a manipulation by the Unknown. Like the rabbits in Tati's garden,
the multiplication is mechanical.
'his face was
reminiscent of an image of Christ'
Certainly Jean has a
more immediate motive for murder than Meursault, and both by no means commit
motiveless murders. It's the lack of remorse that fascinates scholars of the
genre and the period. Tati is a nagging mind-reader with a choke-harness on her
pawn, so why shouldn't something bad happen? Simenon also provides a lot of
history for Jean -- too much perhaps. Dead mother, playboy father, greedy
girlfriend ("she lied as she breathed"), gambling problem... knuckle dusters in
his pocket, what the hell. Body in the river? Book 'im, Maigret. Another bad
case of Oedipus Rex.
His inevitable love
affair with Tati's niece Féliciè -- the teenage slut with the
mysterious child -- turns out to be another part of the Freudian politics. The
patriarch is taken hostage -- old Couderç, the grandfather, possibly the
father of Félicie's child -- by his eldest daughter Françoise and
the slut is sent across the canal to entrap Tati's muscle, the hopeless Jean.
It's an old story -- a family civil war for possession of an estate (in this
case, a house with no electricity, a garden, a field with two cows) -- lit in
Greek macabre. It has a modern absurdist feel due to the anthropomorphic
imagery ('hills like breasts' etc) and the continuous flow of natural
symbolism. There's so much symbolism, it's like hunting for faces in the
foliage of the trees. One of the most important is Tati's incubator, central to
her dream of farming chickens on an industrial scale. One hundred and two
degrees for twenty one days... something has to give.
The hanging gourd of
dripping cheese... the dressmaker's dummy torso... the taciturn lock-keeper
with the wooden leg who fathers children seasonally... the canal that separates
Tati from her sister-in-law... the shackled cattle... and so on. "The dung was
warm beneath his feet" sums up the situation. The narrative is therefore modal,
shifting easily between text and subtext.
Article 12 of the
Penal Code: "Every person condemned to death shall be decapitated"
recurs in Jean's consciousness like a flash frame when he sleeps, does chores,
listens to the bullying, the pleading, the monologuing, the endless verbal
noise that propels the widow Tati, on her feet or lying down... or watching
through her window, her paranoid vision penetrating walls, shadow and bone and
even Time itself, it seems. Article 15: "Men condemned to forced labour
shall be set to the hardest possible work; they shall wear an iron ball at
their ankles and shall be joined in pairs by a chain." He's left prison,
but what, really, has changed? The faces, the game... yet behind these things,
the imagery remains the same.
Many writers aspire to
write in code and Simenon did it without even thinking. Not every action is a
symbolism, but the important ones are. Thus there are many ways to read this
novel, which puts it in compliance with most religious texts, yet the message
certainly isn't religious. Bizarrely, the widow attends church on Sundays, yet
this is just a gesture towards her bourgeois dream, just as Jean is, as he is
the son of a wealthy distiller, and a possible source of money. The pornography
of her actions -- this pagan stitching of sex, politics, murder and light
industry -- is secular.
A strange and powerful
novel that captures a modern culture in the shadow of its pagan peasant past.
When Jean's sister Billie comes to visit to find out what's going on, why
hasn't he returned home, he says, "I'm saying I like living with Tati. She's my
mistress. Besides me, there's the old goat, as she calls him. He's her
father-in-law. From time to time she takes him to bed with her, like giving
sweets to a child to keep it quiet. It's the only way of retaining the
house...."
© LR
2015
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