by Douglas Messerli
Hugo Claus De Zwaardvis, translated
from the Dutch by Ruth Levitt as The
Swordfish (London: Peter Owen, 1996)
Highly influenced by but resentful of her
opinionated mother, who drops by for regular visits and advice, Sibyelle is
also an ineffectual mother, unable to properly nurture her beautiful and
intellectually inquisitive son, who unlike either mother or father, has become
accustomed to the country life, and spends more time, perhaps, with the drunken
workman, Richard, than he does with his mother and grandmother.
Richard, who spends most the brief time
in which the novel occurs repairing the roof of the house, has been hired by
Sibyelle despite his time in prison—arrested, we later discover, for giving
illegal abortions to the women of a small town. Similarly, his attentions to
the young Martin are misunderstood by Sibyelle’s mother as attempts to abuse
the young boy. Richard, as it turns out, is perhaps the most misunderstood
character in a cast of figures who feel isolated from one another and unable to
communicate their strengths and love. Certainly, one can presume that Richard’s
and, in turn, his wife Julia’s alcoholism has a great deal to do with society’s
misperceptions and intrusions upon his life.
Martin, an intense young man, living a
meaningless life without proper supervision, has been taken under the wing by a
religiously conservative teacher, Miss Dora, who has secretly encouraged the
young boy to read a book on the life of Christ while she daily reads aloud to
him from the New Testament. The result is that Martin, like many young
religiously-schooled men (Toby Olson’s novel The Life of Jesus immediately springs to mind), from his own sense
of confused separation from his family, plays out the scenes of the last day of
Jesus’s life, struggling across his father’s estate with a cross that Richard
has created for him, while imagining taunts and whippings from his fellow
classmates. The absurdity of Martin’s secret exaltations is revealed when he
reviles the matzo his grandmother has brought as a gift to her daughter and
grandson, as being “the Jews’ bread,” exploding into an anti-Semitic rage. When
questioned by his free-thinking family about the source of his feelings, Martin
blames his headmaster Goossens to protect his beloved Miss Dora.
Goossens, meanwhile, is busy writing an
academic drama titled Cybele—a work
which he knows will be dismissed by the local officials and his fellow faculty
members. In fact, the untalented author has written the work as a secret paean
to his student’s mother, Sibyelle, a woman who represents beauty and grace
combined, and for whom he sexually desires as against his servile wife,
Liliane.
All of these characters and their bizarre
actions would be only somewhat surreal and humorous if it were not for the fact
that, in intermittent chapters, we observe the head of police and his violent
sergeant Lippens interrogating Richard for some new, unnamed crime. What has
happened, we ask throughout this work, to make them suspect him—and of what is
he suspected of doing? Abusing Martin as the grandmother claims? Attacking his
employer Sibyelle? Although we have no evidence for any crime other than his
belligerent drunkenness, we know that something as occurred offstage that will
transform these pathetic longings and desires into a tragedy of sorts.
In a sense, the men around her, Richard
and Goossens have both become initiates into the cult of Cybele, castrated men
who have lost their sexual prowess. Trapped in a home where he is treated
nearly as an infant, Goossens is nearly speechless when he encounters his
Sibylle, hardly able to defend himself against having indoctrinated Martin in
anti-Semiticism. Richard reports throughout the work that he has given up
women—the cause of his imprisonment. The event that finally ends Sibylle’s
relationship with her husband is his drunken acceptance of her dressing him up
like a woman. And while, like the mythical Cybelean cults, the men around her
symbolically wave swords in air—Martin uses a potato peeler as a sword, as a
kind of demeaned “swordfish,” the weapon of his imagination— they are
powerless.
It is only when, by accident, Goossens
discovers Sibylle’s empty car abandoned on a road (she has run of gas) and he
visits her at the manor house, that he is accepted as a lover, a sexual
enactment that the drunken and wandering Richard, again by chance, observes
through the window. His renewed sexual excitement brings him momentarily to
life once more, but he must face the fact that he has no choice but to return
to his drunken Julia, just as Goossens must ultimately return to the empty
meekness of his Liliane.
Richard’s admission that he beat his wife
to death upon his return home is a passionless tale of the inevitable
consequences for a man and woman who have no way out.
What Claus reveals, just as in his
fiction Desire, is that all these
characters are the cause of the death, that the culture itself is enmeshed in
their treacheries. Unless one of them can break free of the chain of repressed
hate, there is no hope for any woman or man entangled in net of societal relationships.
Los Angeles, April 10, 2008
