Pacific Index

The Origin of The World by Pierre Michon

Beneath the shadows, beneath the coat, the skirt, nylons, earrings, the pearls and the Sunday best, beneath Her braids and gathers, hugging the dark stockings lay this dazzling daylit flesh where at its whitest I imagined, twenty times over, beaten, received during intense thrusts and punctuated by sobs, the heavy, unanswerable phrase that remained forever redundant, forever jubilant, suffocating, black, the absolute authorship of her face. – Pierre Michon, The Origin of The World (1996).

   Pierre Michon is a contemporary French author, and though considering his lacking prolificness (nearing 500 pages altogether throughout his forty or so years of writing) he is perhaps regarded as one of the chief current writers of the language. His novels usually possess deceptively slim page counts, with his first and largest novel, Small Lives (1985) rounding in around 200 pages or so. 

   Reading, The Origin of the World (1996), after scraping through the inlaid layers of encrusted embellishments, the over-flowery language, the texture of the words, and the streaming digressions in hopes of finding a plot or a legitimate narrative to hold onto, what you instead are exposed to is a screaming bottomless hole, inflaming in you a combined flagellation similar to frenzy, disgust, horror and most ultimately awe. Though maybe you’ll allow yourself to slip into the hole and slide through the oozing black ink, becoming intensely uncomfortable with the whole experience, but still barreling through because whatever you’re following doesn’t allow you a way out and instead leads you deeper into the continuous event you’re watching. 

   The story, similar perhaps to The Wind by Claude Simon or even Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner, follows a young primary school teacher in the early 1960s (perhaps a stand-in for the author) who is posted in a two-bit, rain-drenched backwoods southern French town and soon becomes entirely infatuated with the mother of one of his students who works at the local cigarette and newspaper stand. Lacking the motivation to talk to her, and achieve whatever he initially wanted from her, he becomes a major customer of hers and contents himself to buying a pack of red Marlboros and a newspaper once a day just to see her, content with his ever burgeoning and Renaissance painter-esque panoramic daydreams of her, which while totally enveloping his life, soon begins to possess a masochistic flavor. Those daydreams quickly divulge into intensely violent and perhaps even terrifying scenarios, where he begins to gut her like a fish in the same manner of the fishermen who populate the region. He lashes her with a whip, he deeply wounds her and mans her, flagellating, biting and humiliating her, though soon he begins to notice that the very marks he leaves on her cheek and hips begin to appear on her as he notices that she develops a relationship with one of the chief businessmen of the Dordogne region. 

   Over the course of about eighty pages, when one peels the layers away from this incredibly slim novel, one will see an overwhelming, history spanning terror. Connections between his obsession and the entire history of atrocities in Europe: Huns and Mongols rampaging, the Holocaust, and spats between nobles in Medieval France. However, most ultimately and central is the Paleolithic past of the area; of reindeer hunters, shamans and cave-painters, culminating inevitably in an understanding that, much like the vassal stream of the Dordogne that the sleeping town lays on, time flows on. In the same manner as the cave-painter, who takes off his antlered hat and remembers brief childhood happiness and understands that he one day will have to die, the festering desires of the narrator, as well as understanding that not only are his desires futile, but they are the reality of another man, will one day be lost to time.