A redefinition of the contemporary novel

Unequal Loves by Xavier Hennekinne 

Some books cannot be explained; they can only be experienced. Unequal Loves belongs to this rare category. While reading it, these words of Gilles Deleuze about desire came to my mind: “I don’t desire a woman, I also desire a landscape that is enveloped in this woman, a landscape that I may not know but that I sense, and as long as I haven’t unfurled the landscape that she envelops, I won’t be satisfied, that is to say, my desire will not be fulfilled.”[1] These words came to my mind because Unequal Loves is about desire for women, but also desire for art and literature. The work of Xavier Hennekinne unfolds as follow: the narrator, a middle-aged man, travels in Japan with his wife and from chapter to chapter, he will revisit his love life. Even if the narrator’s memories take us back in a series of playbacks to different stages of his life, even if the text is deepened by multiple layers of references to art and literature in a subtle mirror effect, it journeys with incomparable fluidity.

But let’s start with the intriguing title. Unequal Loves is a painting the narrator saw in the company of his aunt Edmonde– a Flemish-inspired work by an anonymous 19^th century artist modelled on Quentin Matsy’s Ill-Matched Lovers. It depicts a couple, a man and a woman, whose ages don’t match. In this particular one held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Angers, an old man desires a young woman. But Unequal Loves is also a classic theme of the Dutch Golden Age and some other painting like that of Lucas Cranach depict a young man being enticed by a woman much older than him. Hennekinne plays with these various combinations. As the narrator gets older, his craving for young women will add a dramatic tension to his life. “What does youth make us say, make us do, make us believe?” he laments. In a reverse effect, we will discover at the end of the text how the young narrator is fascinated by his aunt Edmonde who is the guiding thread of the narration. She is twenty years older than him, has a passion for literature, has befriended the writer Henri Michaux, and was the personal secretary of renowned writers. Always dressed in white, she lounges on her sofa in her dressing-grown, sits on the toilet seat while her twelve-year-old nephew takes his shower, and asks him bluntly if he masturbates. No physical contact will ever take place between the narrator and his aunt except for kisses, some more insistent than others. But if Edmonde bewitches her young nephew, it is because she is the author of an erotic novel Hostel Frontera which caused a stir in its time. Edmonde will slowly become an object of desire as well as “the landscape” enveloped in Edmonde which the narrator will want to “unfurl”, landscape composed amongst other things by the distinctive smell of her cigarette, the drawings of Henri Michaux on her wall, the books she is reading, the taste of wine on her lips, her tumultuous past love life as well as the steamy Hostel Frontera which becomes for the narrator “a landmark of his sexual life.”

Does this mean that Unequal Loves is a coming-of-age novel? A novel of apprenticeship? Or a novel about the inner struggles of a writer? Or is it about the existential solitude of the narrator married to a woman who “has never written a story or an essay and (doesn’t) know what writing (is)?” A wife who has “never cried while reading a book […] alien to creative hunger, devoid of creative demons.” Or is it about the lamentation of a man who wanted to be a writer and never realised his dream? I would say that Unequal Loves includes all these themes blended in a unique contemporary work of literature, between fiction and autofiction. The narrator’s personality adds an uncanny grace to the work: he doesn’t live his life, he daydreams his life by viewing whatever comes to his attention, the country he is visiting as well as the women he desires, through an indirect language he finds in literature and art. Books operate as mute messengers, like unwritten love letters. With one of his first girlfriends, his desire is channeled through the book Hunger by Knut Hamsun. With Edmonde, he visits art galleries -instead of being openly described, their ambiguous relationship is implicitly suggested by the painting Unequal Loves.

Yet the complexity of any literary text defies categorization with its intricate interweaving of thoughts when writing doesn’t seek outside the self, by making up characters for instance, but when the work delves into the unconscious of the writer. In the many “erotic scenarios” of the book, Hennekinne plays with a series of selves, unknown and forgotten facets of the narrator’s persona like the private self invisible to anyone else but him, the intimate self, the desiring self, the melancholy self, the helpless and procrastinating self when it comes to start a new piece of writing, because a writer’s unconscious is a vast and wild universe he never tires of exploring. Somehow, any writer believes that he delves into his unconscious in his work, yet most writers don’t venture as boldly into this dark continent as Hennekinne does. Most authors prefer to walk at the rear and behind guards called in other words characters and stories. In contrast, the specificity of a true contemporary work of autofiction like Unequal Loves lies in its authenticity. As much as the work can be related to modern French literature of autofiction whose trademark is authenticity -I think of Marguerite Duras, or Annie Ernaux, 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, or Michel Houllebecq- it also bears the elegance of Japanese literature by its themes and its weightless prose “delicate and graceful like the steps of a cat.” Many references slip by as shadows in the background as if the colours of Tanazaki, Kawabata, Mishima or Natsume had overflowed to blend in the fabric of the text itself. The author’s attention to details and impressions adds another pictorial quality to the text as if we were oscillating between Japan where the first part of the book takes place and the Orangerie Museum in Paris were the book finishes -the Musée de l’Orangerie, home of Monet’s Water Lilies, the two places establishing symbolically the two aesthetic poles of the text.

The narrator of Lost Words, a succession of récits published by Xavier Hennekinne in 2019, is a young aspiring writer with a very clear idea of what his future might be: “My ambition then was to be a writer like Juliet. A writer of the intimate, capturing the essence of things and devoid of éclat.”[2] Writing the intimate, the details, the mundane and at the same time capturing the essence of things is what Unequal Loves achieves with perfection. In the first chapter for instance The New Capital, the narrator has an epiphany as soon as he arrives in Japan when he realises that he has been so far “impervious to beauty,” asking himself with a hint of regret: “When did I cease preoccupying myself with beautiful things?” This reawakening which comes as a shock triggers his wish of starting to write again, unfortunately this wish will not be fulfilled. Still, the following pages depicting an uninspired narrator are a tour de force. With a bittersweet irony, and an incomparable use of the conditional mode, the author describes his narrator sitting at his desk, ready to put pen to paper but distracted by other thoughts, watching a show on television, writing a letter to a friend, musing at hanging frames on his wall, walking back to his room, re-readying himself but unable to write, while in fact the text is being written. The narrator’s quandary finds its matching part in the central and important chapter “Voyage à Carcassonne.” The main character, then aged seventeen, meets the painter Guitard after being commissioned by an art gallery to write an article about the old artist’s work. A young student in philosophy then, keen to understand the how and the why of things, eager to know “what an artist (is) and how one (becomes) one,” the young man will not be taught how he could become an artist or a poet, or a writer, or a composer by applying the right series of tricks, he will instead be told in plain words that “an artist is someone who experiences sensations and feelings about everyday life.” Such a person, Guitard explains, is inhabited by “the need to recreate or transcribe these emotions and feelings through an art form.” Of course, this unsophisticated explanation isn’t what the aspiring writer wanted to hear, but he will understand for the first time how to transform feelings and sensations into a work of art. First, Guitard says, an artist is not an intellectual being. Furthermore, an artist tries to capture beauty because he can see beauty in every single thing, even in the most mundane ones like a blade of grass or a crumb on a table. These visions function as triggers, minute blows, tiny earthquakes, and this shock induces the work. In the same way, Rilke explained that writing only comes from an inner necessity. It doesn’t come from the outside world, but from the inner life, urging the writer to write. Guitard’s simple declaration of faith will become the narrator’s declaration of faith -writing is not about ideas and concepts, writing is not about mastering a perfectly crafted style, writing is not a research effort. Writing is simply the art of enclosing beauty as well as emotions and feelings in a text to defy decay, oblivion, and death.

With regard to emotions and feelings, I will add that any author believes that he imparts emotions and feelings in his work. Unfortunately, most writers don’t. They tell stories, thinking that a good story makes a good book. But literature is of a different nature. A work of literature must convey emotions and feelings in each of its words because true literature transports us, it helps us to look at the world through a different lens, it inspires us, meaning that it breathes into us dreams, images, and ideas. After reading a powerful work of literature, any writer wants to picks up his pen and start writing. After visiting an Art Gallery, any artist wants to pick up his brushes and start painting. Besides, while in most books, the main character is portrayed as a hero, or a heroin, the narrator of Unequal Loves is hesitant, trembling, unsure. He desires women with a discreet romantic grace, very similar to Antoine Doinel, the recurring character in François Truffaut’s movies. He isn’t an anti-hero; he is merely a dreamer, a kind of Professor Nimbus, looking at life with humor, because the truth is that none of us is a hero or a heroin in normal life.

In most novels and autofictions, the author remains shielded, unscathed, and safe behind conventions and clichés, especially when it comes to sexual life. Why? Because to reveal oneself isn’t that simple. It means to write unguarded and with generosity. The author is naked. It is a private affair. It isn’t any more the great Victor Hugo, the author of Les Misérables, but the man of the correspondence with Juliette Drouet, a stammering lover. Unequal Loves dares to plunge into intimacy and interiority. Like voyeurs, we enter the hidden room where the narrator becomes someone else driven by pleasure, excess, and bliss; and by shedding light on the “dark continent” to use Freud’s expression, the dark continent of women as well as the dark continent of men -something Freud failed to mention- we explore the complexity of a man’s sexuality far more sophisticated than what we are led to believe.

We follow the narrator through each stage of his sexual life, from his mature age to his pre-adolescent years. While travelling in Japan, the narrator is quickly bored with his wife, and one evening, he meets Aska, falls in love with her, chastising himself for being an old fool in front of this beautiful young woman, wanting secretly to suck her toes, a scene mirroring Tanazaki’s Diary of a Mad Old Man when the author is sexually aroused by his stepdaughter’s foot, which she offers by slipping it between the shower curtain. As for the troubling and subtle chapter The Holiday House, it describes the painful years of pre-adolescence. The narrator suspects that something, somehow, is happening to him but he hasn’t solved the mystery of sex yet. His erect penis in the presence of the young Claudia becomes a hindrance and even an object of shame, a kind of fleshy device he cannot conceal under the thin fabric of his shorts.

While reading Unequal Loves, I thought of how the contemporary novel could be redefined. Rejecting conventions, clichés, artificial story-telling to assume authenticity and sincerity might be the best way to be modern. The atmosphere of Unequal Loves, its freedom and straightforwardness, reminded me of the New French Wave movement in film with filmmakers like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Agnès Varda. They broke free from academism and traditional filmmaking rules to explore a new cinematographic language with spontaneous dialogues, quirky characters, filming in the street with portable equipment, but also bringing into light for the first time the erotic charge of the naked woman’s body like in Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Godard featuring Brigitte Bardot. The filmmakers of La nouvelle vague called for freedom. They sought naturalness, grace, feelings to reflect the way their generation looked at the world. They wanted emotion, and true emotion lies in the frailty and humanity of their characters “devoid of éclat.” Similarly, the man we follow step by step in Hennekinne’s work is so human, so close to us. He is not especially happy, not especially unhappy; he is an average guy who goes through an existential crisis and who could paraphrase Guitard’s statement by saying: “Rather than put a gun to my head, I write,” a sentence Emil Cioran could have written.

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Letter D for desire, Abecedaire, Interview with Claire Parnet, 1988.

[2] p.91, Lost Words, Xavier Hennekinne, Gazebo, 2019.