#a love letter to the boundless love that ties these two fools together | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

harlindroth · 6 years

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1918 – 2018 Angèle Laval Paul Nougé ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF ANGÈLE LAVAL (Lyrical impromptu for big daily) Tulle; transparent fabric, network of tight stitches, French town whose color and roundabouts I don’t know, but which tells me everything I need to know about it when I see that very slender, brown haired, musical and light young woman who made it the scene of her pathetic exploits. Angèle Laval was then about thirty-five years old. She would be fifty today. I want to believe that she is still alive. But what is she thinking about? What is she doing at this hour when I write about her? To what humble or magnificent object is her hand, her eyes, her heart fixing themselves at this moment? Which way, which path of light or of crime is tempting her steps at present? Or if she is sitting down with closed eyes, populating the night with memories and dreams. Will she give us a sign one day? I scarcely dare hope. She belongs to those who die with sealed lips, to those people without confessions... I have often regretted not having lived, around 1917, in closeness to Angèle Laval. Perhaps I would have had helped her with all my strength. Better than her mother probably, that mediocre accomplice who at best was fit for panic and who, in the end, threw herself in the blackest water at that spot from where one is certain not to come back again. Angèle, who obeyed motives that were incompatible with her mother's, could simulate suicide excellently; it was after all but a forethought episode in a game that she did not intend to give up. I would thus have helped her. Though less well than I might have pleased. Because the rage, the boundless hope or the harmed love that roused Angèle Laval would have left me behind on the way. (There comes a time, alas!, when one cannot fool oneself too grossly about oneself). At best it is up to me to recognize in myself certain features, certain glimpses, the tension and the movement that combined in the amazing silent preparation of events that she succeeded in bringing forth. I can see her exercising in a thousand ways the qualities of a soul that is passionately dedicated to a great design: calculating coldness, minutious patience and that skillful dissimulation without which nothing great is ever achieved. She tries never to lie to herself. I do not know whether Angèle Laval knew Emma Bovary (*). But I am certain that she could have only felt contempt for her indulgent weakness and her peculiar blindness. That petit bourgeois woman maddened regarding the possible – what mediocre shape she gave to her torment, what weak means, what poor adventure she invented; what perfection in the art of betraying all true grandeur in oneself. Angèle Laval would have refrained from following her. She refuses to counterfeit reality and herself in such a summary way. Possible, impossible; these have no essential contradictory meaning for her. She dreams of the miraculous unknown that surely will emerge some day following a favorable incantation. She accepts to act upon the world as it is given to her; she refrains from vaguely modifying its form according to a formless desire – she knows that she would then compromise the action that she is dreaming of exerting. It is necessary that her actions insert themselves into that reality made of shopkeepers, rentiers, functionaries, of young and old maids, of elementary and frightened excesses behind closed shutters, of mean appetites, obscure, peculiarly base and ardent prides and lusts. If that world were to flee from her, what would be left for her? Angèle Laval does not belong to those who relinquish. She wants to act upon the world, not upon the ghosts that she could all too easily substitute for it. Thus her first step is not to invent the universe, but rather, thanks to a precise inquiry, to evaluate its true weight and fruitful horror. ...The world as it is, admittedly, but what should we do with the world? A question that all those on whom one still may rely must ask themselves. Angèle Laval, who strives for sparkling rigor, does not let herself get caught in any vulgar trap. We do not see her bow before some priest and seek protection in eternal life. We do not see her seclude herself in ordinary excessiveness or love. She neglects confessions, anathemas and the poems she could have written. By far her glance exceeds ordinary designs. And thus she is capable of strange sacrifices. Angèle, who is totally dedicated to her essential distinction, withdraws here, devoting herself to mingling with what most strongly excites feelings of revolt around her. For she strengthens and multiplies the ties that burden her. Every day Angèle makes herself a little more imprisoned within her province. I can hear her take part in stupid and calumnious conversations. I can see her alone behind her thin curtain watching the street. There is, at the window, a “spy” that her eyes do not bother to question. Her greatest courage, for the time being, is not to turn her back on that equivocal thickness, not to shut her eyes, not to cover her ears – but rather to participate in it and to live with it. She is still safe. Her curiosity, the attention that she is paying to everything being said and done around her – who would not be able to give an explanation that is obvious to most women; who would guess her secret motives? She is left to gather the elements of her work of fire in peace. Angèle listens and watches interminably. She lets her own memory become populated by the very images and words she abhors. She knows how to remain silent when necessary, to commiserate, to be indignant, to invent opinions that the circumstances require. When she does not have the opportunity to see or hear, she can suppose, guess and verify through a marvellous organization of cunning and audacity. Her mental traps are multiplied and perfected. Suddenly the fruit of that discipline takes the colors of miracle. The heaviest walls acquire the transparency of glass; there are no secret acts in that diaphanous town of Tulle anymore. Angèle sees all thoughts creeping within all heads. Everything has changed within her too. The system of subtle deductions she had so far had made use of vanishes and lets only the agility of a naked mind subsist which moves through leaps thanks to sudden illuminations. Angèle is here, there, and everywhere, at every street corner in time for conspiracy or for crime, in every recess in time for love, for fornication and for betrayal – the entire town is penetrated by her presence, the town belongs to her at last. But what will she do with what she possesses and by what she is possessed? We know that she expects nothing from contemplation or ecstasy. Complacency is not her strong suit. She knows that there is nothing to be won through soliciting wonders. When their hour comes, they will be able to force it to roll transfigured in their stream. Angèle Laval expects the best of the fires that she feels inclined to set in a world that is the least prepared for explosions and flames. But those insipid faces, those lifeless looks, those gestures measured by dusty habits... Just as she refused any exemplary life, Angèle Laval refuses to proceed through suggestion, through intimidation. “Look at me, – see this, – that is, – take a better look, – that is; truly, that exists”. Prophecies do not keep her attention either, as that kind of abuse of trust seems to her not so much reprehensible as all too precarious. Angèle Laval sets her bewitched town on fire. Her procedures have the simplicity of a naked hand moving towards a highly visible point in the bright light. Of all the means that she has taken into consideration, she retains but one, the most vulgar, the simplest, the most suitable one for her purpose. Day and night she draws the large, obscure and fascinating characters that populate her anonymous letters. It is a plume of fire that strikes the town every morning. She invents a style that corresponds exactly to her aim, in all aspects an admirable style: Madam, Your brother's fiancée is a person of notorious misconduct. In October 1918 she did away with her newborn brat… and when necessary, with an unparalleled detachment, she can call herself a wench and a whore. We know the consequences of that enterprise which she untiringly developed for long months. Incidents full of humor take place such as the one with the scorned priest, tragicomedies carrying those very people in a peculiar movement whom one thought were forever accommodated in a stony torpor, and lastly, on a stormy night, Insanity and Death rising together at the two extremities of the town and starting to wave at each other. Slamming doors and capsized minds – that great mysterious storm passes which turns the world upside down however it pleases. ...At the height of the storm that she had released and which center she occupied, I do not know whether Angèle Laval did herself justice. “I gave them everything that could give their miserable life a chance”, she could have said. “I gave them hatred, fury, hopelessness and insanity, I spread those ferments among them which are more precious than happiness.” But it is too much to imagine such clear-sightedness; the mirror that would reflect our true face never answers our questioning look. We only know that Angèle became silent. We also know how her adversaries managed to fight her, those which our abominable world automatically raises against those who have sworn to subvert its corrupted features. Those first in line, as is almost always the case, we know, turn out to be the physicians armed with their dreadful and laughable court of justice-psychiatry. It is of course a matter of quickly demonstrating that Angèle Laval is subject to illness and insanity. How to succeed with that? From her life whose scope they devote themselves to concealing, they grasp and emphasize only those features which according to them constitute the surest guide to the cursed path that they have chosen. Love, inhibition, transfers – into what mediocre abominations have they not tried to drag Freud and a few others? The point of departure for Angèle Laval's subversive enterprise is of course an amorous vexation and a deficiency that these people reduce to their own sad measure. Angèle the typist was in love with Moury the office manager, who was in love with the typist Solange, who pokes fun at Angèle who swears to take revenge and who extends her vengeance to the universe... Moreover, Angèle had a developing case of tuberculosis and displayed the evident stigma of neurosis, and then during the ten hour long test that she had been subjected to during which she was forced to incessantly write while being watched for the moment she would betray herself and resume her writing of fire, Angèle Laval suffered a nervous breakdown... But Angèle remained silent. Contempt is a sure means of defense. Invincibly she kept silent. She would never have consented to give out her views on love, on life, on death, views that we have to regard as incommensurable when compared with the ones that imperatively one would want to force her to acknowledge – life, love, what she was ready to hand over to them at the price of her own ruin. Thus she let the physicians and the judges accomplish their gloomy business. One could think of subduing her only by substituting a vulgar, hideous image of hers that was capable of rousing all adversity in place of the dangerous, mysterious and fascinating one that she presented to the world. Thus one easily constructed a letter-writing maniac, a sporadically semiconscious sick person. If only she had incidentally married her functionary... Erotic substitution always looks right. The image of Angèle Laval nevertheless escapes the absurd sketch into which they tried to confine her. For a moment she allowed a great surge of anxiety and revolt to sweep over the whole of France. One probably recalls the succession of enterprises that resembled hers, of the cluster of scandals to which she is not unknown. So that it is right the judicial system was deplored for not having been able to purely and simply suppress the whole affair. It now seems that oblivion has settled over Angèle Laval. Oblivion and space were part of her calculation. Shadow envelopes her, a cold and pure shadow that delivers her from dubious contact with journalists, judges and the police. But for attentive minds, the night that she inhabits cannot conceal the exemplary lesson. And yet. At critical moments, who could not let oneself think that Angèle Laval failed, and that the madness, the suicides, the tears and the outbursts of laughter that whirled for a while over her town quickly abated and sadly expired at the feet of the miserable beings that they had agitated? What is there to answer? (Angèle Laval must have often thought of the reserves of the world...) Through this manner of revealing herself to us, she could not provide a more or less satisfactory explanation. But she was, in a common way, only a poor woman delivered to a crowd of enemies. Her misery is maybe the very one that any attempt which finds a point of support and its justification in strictly a personal will is doomed to fail. Would one imagine Angèle Laval participating in the activity of a revolutionary party at the hour of insurrection? That chance has been denied her. Thus one could not talk of victory or defeat with regards to her, but simply of existence. She exists. Her hand is raised sometimes and seems to indicate a point on the horizon or some road. This gesture is enough to reject the weak exercises of the petty litterateurs to the limit of the grotesque and the odious, who really believe themselves to have transgressed literature and to think that they are transforming the world through the innocent game of their mute syllables. (Summer 1928) (*) from the novel of Gustave Flaubert (transl. remark). The case of Angèle Laval, the author of anonymous letters sent to many most petty bourgeois people and officials in the French town of Tulle during a few years starting in 1917 provoked not only scandals and great commotion, including a suicide, but also a significant media craze (transl. note). (transl. Bruno Jacobs / Jason Abdelhadi. From projected anthology of writings by Paul Nougé in English)

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