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)
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).
