Marie NDiaye’s novel Un temps de saison is, let’s admit, baffling. There is a temptation to untangle whether NDiaye is making some sort of statement about contemporary society, and if so, what it might be. Is this a book “about” the individual vs. society? insiders vs. outsiders? interior life vs. exterior life? the big city as opposed to the provincial town? community as opposed to solitude? For some reason I am left uneasy when I try to formulate any precise message that the author wishes us to garner from her text. As Pierre Lepape comments in his review for Le Monde, “Le récit acquiert un statut indécis. . . Un temps de saison est une fable à moralité variable.”
I will call Lepape as my witness then, in deciding that this is a book which first of all illustrates the necessity of calling into question what we think we know. I think the text offers the suggestion that we live our lives by a certain set of convictions, habits and prejudices, which, under the right circumstances, can come to be overturned. Yet as we forget our original convictions, and new ones become our reality, we would do well to keep in mind that they may not necessarily be any more valid or appropriate. For example, Herman moves from one world, the Parisian one, with its own set of faulty self-aggrandizing certainties, to another hermetic universe, that of the village, whose inhabitants have an equally skewed, self-serving approach to life. One possible moral of this story, therefore, is that no one has a monopoly on the truth, and a world in which people think they do has the potential to be as bleak, claustrophobic and somewhat ridiculous, as the life in the village depicted in this novel.
I also sense a second and related warning in Un temps de saison, which doubtless speaks to the experience of any displaced person, living in a new society to which they must conform in order to succeed, regardless of whether this is desirable or possible. The book portrays what can go wrong when someone wishes to, or is forced to, change identity. Herman is told that his only chance to see his family again is to “devenir villageois vous-même, invisible, insignificant, et faire oublier que vous êtes Parisien.” In the end, Herman has successfully abandoned his Parisian life and to some extent his Parisian self, and is a villager in so much as he finds the village terrifying to leave, but it’s clear he will never live happily among these people, or really be one of them—even if comes to affect their mores, even if he dyes his dark hair blond like the mayor and the “Président.” The suggestion that he could—or should—truly become someone else is a dangerous one.
If we start at the very beginning, we notice that the very first taste we have of Herman is of his arrogance. The Herman who sets off at nightfall on September 1st to search for his wife and son is still the Parisian Herman, who thinks he must know best, who makes the assumption that the villager at the farm is confused, in telling him she hasn’t seen Rose and the boy. He condescendingly compares her to one of his “élèves à la tête dure,” whose “première assertion ne tenait pas debout.” It is this arrogance and energy which will gradually be sapped out of Herman, until at the end we’d almost be heartened to see him have the vigor and the confidence to wag his finger under the chin of some farmer’s wife, demanding she see sense, as he does in the beginning. Herman starts out as someone who “avait l’habitude de diriger et d’ordonner,” yet who is very swiftly dredged of all will and self-determination. He is drawn into a torpor of indifference that the villagers encourage.
And somewhat parenthetically I’ll add that the reader needs to ask: why does the village want Herman to stay? There are two obvious reasons: first, they can try to profit from his status as a Parisian for their own self-advancement, as Gilbert attempts to do. Secondly, he brings money into the town, spending, for example, an extravagant sum on his lodgings at the Relais. But I think there are other reasons lingering behind why Herman becomes trapped in this town. In previous summers, he never had to think very hard, or at all, about the real meaning of the place. For him, as for every other vacationer from the métropole, it was a pleasant, sunny place to relax; in other words, not a real place, not a place one need take seriously. It did not exist outside his own narrow conception of what it offered to him as the antidote to his “real” life. So not only does Herman get his comeuppance by being forced to abandon this very same previous life with all its habits and certainties, but he also can’t be allowed to leave because he might spread the word to other members of “cette race détesté” (Parisians) that there is a more sinister aspect to their favorite vacation spot. (And here I’ll close the parentheses.)
Let us now look more closely at the town. The reader is astonished right from the start at how unreal—from the reader’s perspective unrealistic—this village seems, from its relentless pluviosity to its arcane customs (such as the women’s “corsages” whose ribbons indicate—“quand on [est] au fait de ces coutumes”—in what year the women have married). Trapped in the village, Herman is caught in a system that functions on different terms than his own. Yet he is slowly led to forget his old terms. He is trapped in a system that to him (and to the reader) makes no sense, yet the fact that it makes no sense, over time, ceases to matter to him. He gradually loses his points of reference that would enable him to, in a sense, “snap out of it.” For example, when after several weeks in the village he speaks on the phone with the “proviseur” at the high school where he teaches, he finds that “il avait du mal à parler sur le ton d’autrefois.”
The other obviously eerie thing about the village, a thing that signals quite distinctly that it functions by a different set of rules, is that no one seems to take Herman’s “affaire” of his missing family all that seriously. At the police station he is met with an “Ah, c’est interessant,” accompanied by “un sourire bienséant et formel,” and while dining at the hotel with the employees of the town hall he is astonished that no one bothers to “avance[er] la moindre hypothèse, rien qui pourrait m’aider.” But most disturbing of all is that Herman himself starts to lose touch with his initial instincts, finding that “la pensée de Rose devenait fort abstraite.” We are told: “Bien qu’il s’efforçât de penser à Rose, à l’enfant, avec toute la compassion que méritaient les événements, son esprit vaguait, désorienté, et, lorsqu’il s’arrêtait sur quelque considération, celle-ci se rapportait plus souvent aux personnes du président, de Charlotte ou de l’hôtesse, qu’à celles de Rose et du petit il ne savait que se dire, sinon, un peu sèchement : Quelle affreuse histoire!”
We must note as well that Herman finds himself entirely powerless to fight against the changes brought about in himself. This is made most visible by the fact that he is vanquished first and foremost by the weather. The very first night when he is running around town searching for his family, his own physical discomfort distracts him from, and takes precedence over, everything else he has to think about. When the farmer’s wife fails to offer him shelter from the cold, “Ne voit-elle pas que je suis trempé? se dit Herman, à la fois tout ébahi et [this is the important part] pris d’une sorte d’engourdissement qui anéantissait sa colère” (italics added). The power of the village over him is manifested in this very physical way. Indeed, the village is not just a place, but a state of body which brings about a state of mind. Furthermore, the inability of Herman, like that of the mayor, to “résiste bien. . . à la mauvaise saison” is an emblem of the fact that he could never truly become a villager, no matter how hard he tried. All this to say that he is forced to change in negative ways, and not allowed to change in ways that would help him. In the end, he is denied both identities—the Parisian one and that of the “villageois.”
(But denied by whom? The fates mostly, it would seem, as the ceaseless rain cannot explicitly be the fault of the villagers. This is one mysterious element NDiaye seems to have thrown in to thwart our attempts to read the work as pure social critique.)
But let’s not just concentrate on Herman, however, as there are others in the book who also move, with little success, from one world to another. For example, there are the spouses who leave their husband or wife to stay on in the village into the rainy season, because, as the mayor of village explains, “un des conjoints avait éprouvé, au moment de regagner Paris le trente et un août, une insurmountable repulsion.” But they’ve only exchanged their old troubles for new ones; their smiles “dissimulaient une inconsolable affliction,” an inconsolable affliction that a change of scenery can allow them to never have to look at head on, but can never come close to truly dissipating. As Herman muses, “Rose a voulu rester. . . passer l’éternité au village, mais, si elle s’est trompée,”? And he continues: “elle n’en reviendra pas pour autant, ni moi non plus.” When the “Président” tells Herman, in their first meeting : “Rien n’est semblable ici à ce que vous connaissez de Paris, on n’y parle pas de la même façon, on y a d’autres lois et d’autres mœurs. Je ne regrette rien. Quelle bonne vie je me suis faite ici!” it is not so much reassuring as chilling. We sense there is something sinister in his ability to find such complete happiness in this place, even before we know the disquieting details of his situation vis-à-vis his wife.
At the end the very end of the book, Herman’s in-laws arrive in the town of “L,” bringing with them their certainties and convictions (many of which may seem reasonable to the reader) and a certain degree of arrogance. Rose’s mothers exclaims, in reference to “L,” its unfortunate climate, and the events that lead them there : “Ah, quel ennui!”; “on commençait à se tracasser, c’était d’un pénible!”; “Oui, oui, quittons cette ville!” The strident self-assurance in this breezy dismissal of the village, whose dismal weather signifies to the mother primarily a personal inconvenience, is the mirror image Herman’s in the opening of the book, in speaking with the woman at the farm: “C’est impossible!” ; “c’est incohérent!” ; “Ah, je ne comprends rien à ces gens-là!” (Note the profusion of exclamation points in both these passages.) Herman’s mother-in-law stands in sharp contrast to the weak diminished man Herman has become, and furthermore, we see the beginning of how Rose’s parents will become powerless and trapped as well. There is a twinge of superiority in the way Rose’s father, in the back seat of the taxi, “fit mine de se tordre le nez pour signifier que l’autre était saoul,” but he won’t be laughing for long, as they are all in the next instant thrown at the mercy of this drunken cab driver, whose car breaks down, on a forgotten stretch of a country road, in a driving rain.
It’s a bleak ending to a bleak story. If NDiaye is making a statement about our world, or the various worlds we inhabit throughout our lives, we sense it isn’t a positive or a hopeful one. But then again, maybe there is no message. To return to the words of Lepape, “Il [le roman] continue à imposer une lecture métaphorique, mais sans que l’objet de la métaphore puisse être doté d’une identité fixe. . . Un cauchemar pour tous ceux qui attendant d’un livre une claire leçon.” I don’t think the author want us walking away with fixed certainties. Maybe, in the end, NDiaye is simply suggesting: next time you go on vacation, pack a raincoat
Caroline M. Omolesky
