because a country, like the soul, survives its conflagerations

[bedlamsbard]

I mean to quote this an age and a half ago, when I was still actually studying it, but I forgot. And I remember now because about three-fourths of my luggage consists of books, and this is one of them, and I marked (most of) the spots I wanted to quote.

These are from Claire Messud's novel The Last Life, which I read for my TIDES class, Reading and Writing Women. (And I actually get to meet Claire Messud; she's the Zale Writer for 2009.)

When I was a little girl, I had believed that if you looked long and hard enough at a picture you might enter into it, leave behind the faded furniture of everyday and walk in oil-bright fragrant glades among eighteenth-century picnickers, or join windblown fishermen along some ageless rocky shore. I didn't muse on how one might get back from within the frame, just stood and willed and waited for another story, another life, to begin around me. When, after failing on numerous occasions to make the leap, I asked my mother whether my belief was misguided, she did not want to disillusion me.

"Perhaps," she said, "perhaps it's possible, if you just look very, very hard."

At ffiteen, I knew which picture I would have chosen: it would have been the watercolor of the Bay of Algiers, that sun-filled, gleaming wonder, painted at a time when everything still seemed possible, when that city might just have become -- the impossible future of that pluperfect past -- in time Augustine's City of God or Camus's City of Man. I would have willed myself into that picture, and made that world different with the knowwledge I brought -- of the loss and hate to be averted. I woudl have altered the course of history. I would have willed Camuss's dream of a paradise on earth, of a Mediterranean culture democratic and polyphonous. I would have sheltered from the sun alongside Moorish fountains and ambled in the casbah greeting Sami's forebears in fluent Arabic; I would have dreamed in the shade of jujube trees in an air drenched by flowering almonds. But at fifteen, I was no longer a child, and I knew it to be impossible.

When we were discussing this passage in class, the guest lecture professor brought up the concept of moving from one world to another through objects -- a looking glass (Alice), a wardrobe (Narnia) -- and I brought up the fact that in VotDT they actually did get to Narnia through a picture.

I am a little horrified by the fact I was the only one in the class that knew that. Granted, it was a class of six people, but still. And then I waxed rhapsodic about Narnia for a while.

The crowd on the shore could see the funeral too, or so my father believed, because they seemed to grow still, and a hush fell over the bay in the brilliant afternoon sun. When the coffin slipped, with a muted splash, into the oily Mediterranean, and was swallowed, the ship's human cargo stood motionless and wide-eyed: mourning this reminder of the dead they left behind, and their own deaths to come, and the glinting white glory of their city, lost to them like Atlantis, wavering there on the hillside, so near, but gone forever.

4.

So I, who then still could, went home.

CAIR PARAVEL OH MY GOD. *weeps* It is actually Algiers, but doesn't that section just scream Cair Paravel?

My father, like his cousin Serge, had been only half salvaged, too late, his only abiding belief in the might-have-been. Which we are always without, as I would always, henceforth, be without my father. He had nothing, in the end, to cling to but fact, of which death was the ultimate affirmation. Stories, the fragments shored up against his ruin, were merely that: fragments, words. And all the telling, which lulled my grandmother and my mother and even me, did not point, for him, to a future; that was a place we were left to seek without him.

I cannot travel to Algiers today. Even if I could, I would not find my father's, my grandfather's, beloved city, even in its traces. It is not merely that the street names have changed, that French statues have been replaced by Algerian ones, the geography altered by construction; it is that I would seek an imaginary city, a paradise conjured of words and partial recollections, a place that never, on the map, existed: just as the Bellevue, today, is not the place it was to my fourteen-year-old eye, although all its landmarks are the same.

Seriously, the overwhelming theme of this book was like a big swan song to Cair Paravel and Golden Age Narnia. (I read this in about...October, for reference? When I was just starting Dust, I think.)

"For me, when I remember home, I can still stand on our terrace in my mind's eye, and feel myself a part of the day beginning, and know that it was bliss, while it was; but that was lost to my boy, because he thought he knew what he wanted, and we let him stay until it was all rubble, until the very death of it.

"I'll tell you, the truth is, I'm lucky: I don't live nostalgically. Every morning, I wake up and look out my window at the Mediterranean sea, vast and creeping, and I smell the pines and the heat on the breeze, rising up the clifftop, and I'm in Algiers again. I live, still, in my heart, in Algeria. And that was burned out of Alex, razed in him forever. And now, still, I ask myself, who knows how it might ahve been different, if he had been spared that death, if we had travelled together?"

I flailed about this at lassiterfics a while ago, so I'll just quote from the e-mail:
I just read an SG-1 fic, and I think I have figured something out. Maybe it's better for the pevensies that they don't return to Narnia (in some ways, I mean, obviously it would have been best if they'd never left at all), because if they don't return then Narnia's still Narnia. It's as they remember it. And so maybe the cruelest thing Aslan could have done to them was return them to Narnia in PC, because if they don't go back, then Narnia's a memory always, perfect and untouched. ...[In The Last Life] there's this major theme about home and leaving home and never being able to come home.
[...]
And I wonder -- can they remember their own Narnia any longer? Can they still remember the white walls of Cair Paravel, whole and entire, or is all they see the shattered ruins? Was their return to Narnia the cruelest thing that could have happened to them, because can they live in the Golden Age anymore, or is that gone too? Is all they remember the ashes and the rubble?

When the aged Augustine breathed his last, papery and feverish in his bed in Hippo, at the end of the summer of the year 430, he had not yet seen his earthly home destroyed. But he knew its destruction was imminent: the Vandals were at the gates. Within the year, Hippo was in flames, all that he had found familiar flattened to oblivion. Its library -- its stories, Augustine's words -- was spared; and in this way, his world, his Roman, Christian Africa, a life's work, would live in the imaginary still.

Camus, too, predeceased his homeland, his French Algeria; but he, too, looked on in horror at its death throes, the murder and torture within, on both sides. And he died, that absurd January afternoon in 1960, twenty-four kilometers out of Sens on the Nationale 5, in that crumpled Facel-Vega, with his words on the pages in his briefcase in the trunk of the car, to be salvaged and passed on.

That they kenw their Algerias were dying mattered no more, in the broad continuum, than that they died themselves, men guilty of harm as well as good, who loved societies guilty of more harm than good. Because a country, like the Phoenix, like the soul, survives its conflagerations. But it mattered, surely, that they spoke.

I think it is perhaps not hard to see why I flailed and flailed hard, because, uh, theme. Theme theme theme, and Narnia and Cair Paravel and how memory is softly golden and blurred around the edges and in the end, just a memory; it cannot be touched. But there's something, god damn it, there's something there -- but it's gone now.

ANYWAY. The book isn't really my thing, but there are some absolutely gorgeous lines in it (the majority of which I just quoted), and it hits a lot of my Narnia kinks pretty hard. Algeria isn't Narnia and Algiers isn't Cair Paravel, but damn if it doesn't read a lot like it, you know?

Comments

[lyamainu.livejournal.com]

I don't see their return to Narnia as necessarily a bad thing - life changes. Things don't stay the same.

There was beauty in the Golden Age, yes, but there was also beauty in Caspian's reign, the feeling of picking up ancient threads and weaving them with new ones, of a people learning to live and laugh and love without fear, of the mix of races and being discovering joy in their similarities, but also in their differences.

Life is about growth. If you stay in stasis, things begin to decay. That's what the White Witch did - froze everything over, keeping the seasons from changing, in essence halting time itself.

Narnians had to learn to be less obsessed with themselves, to look out to the rest of world. Aslan sang the world into being, not just Narnia itself, and the beings of all countries are his children. The beasts may have forgotten how to talk in other lands, but that doesn't mean that they can't learn.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

Well -- not for Narnia, I mean, but for the Pevensies specifically. I mean, I would argue that the Narnians needed the Golden Age to be what it was, that memory, that golden something of onceuponatime, and the Golden Age wasn't perfect, by any means. But our memories make it so, make it more than it is, and that's important too -- having that place that's safe. And it's damned cruel to have to watch that fall apart, or see the wreckage that's left after it has.

It's -- not the real thing, but the concept. The concept of home, of memory, of "this is what is." And post-LWW, they can still cling to that, to the white walls of Cair Paravel standing whole and untouched and timeless, the sheen of light on the ocean, to Narnia green and verdant and prospering. But once they hit PC -- that's gone. Utterly. They can't cling to that anymore, because they know how it ended. (I will also argue that it's probably worse for Peter and Susan, which just have reasons to do more with their personalities.)

Less the actuality of something being caught in stasis, than the concept thereof.

[lyamainu.livejournal.com]

That's what I mean though - it's a lesson they needed to learn. They needed to SEE the changes in Narnia in order to understand something vitally important about life.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

I still feel it was cruel and unusual punishment. *sighs* And then, you know, just to grind it in, I went off and wrote Dust, so who knows how I really think about all this. *flaps hands*

[lassiterfics.livejournal.com]

OMG. this book sounds loads like my thing though. i got shivers reading these quotes, for real. jldkjglsdf the tragic shifting sands of national identity. the "I cannot travel to Algiers today" paragraph hits especially hard. OH NATIONALIST NOSTALGIA.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

The quotes are, um, like the least representative of the book as a whole, except for the "you can't go home again" theme. I just focused really hard on those scenes.

I THOUGHT YOU WOULD LIKE IT.

OH GOLDEN AGE NARNIA.