Hugo Claus | De Zwaardvis (The Swordfish) / 1996

searching for the crime

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hugo Claus De Zwaardvis, translated from the Dutch by Ruth Levitt as The Swordfish (London: Peter Owen, 1996)

Eleven years after writing Desire, Claus took on similar issues in his novel The Swordfish, but this time through the lens of a wealthy family, living in a country manor house in a provincial village. Businessman Gerard Ghyselen has married the beautiful Sibylle almost as he might acquire another piece of property to go along with “my soap works, my firm Olympia, my fertilizers, my lethal pesticides.” Sibyelle, however, has a difficult time playing the passive and respectable wife, and he is soon involved in an affair. By the time Claus’s fiction has opened, Gerard has left his wife and son Martin and returned the city and his mistress. 

      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

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (April 2008).