The Fool and Other Moral Tales
by Anne Serre
tr. Mark Hutchinson
(New Directions, Sept. 2019)
Review by Tristan Foster
In “How I Write My Books,” French writer Anne Serre states that before she begins work for the day, she reads all she has written of a piece to that point. “During the writing, the part already written is always entirely present in my mind, with its details and micro-details. I’d be unable to advance, I think, if I didn’t have constantly present in my mind the overall shape, the movements, volumes and spatial geometry of the part already written.” A reader of her writing would do well to follow a similar approach: take it all in during the one sitting—sipped slowly or taken in one greedy draught, the toxin will have the same effect.
The three stories in The Fool allow for exactly this, each of them running to around fifty pages each. The collection opens with “The Fool,” a story told in fragments, the narrator’s meandering thoughts on life, love, and writing blended with her meetings with the Fool, whom the narrator first encounters in a pack of tarot cards gifted her by a friend. She approaches the figure with caution: “I believe in magic figures and distrust them. They have powers, of that you can be sure.” When the Fool appears to the narrator in real life, while out on a hike, she has difficulty pinning him down: “There was clearly something not right about him, something almost impossible to describe.” But, as we learn, the arrival of the Fool also brings clarity. “The moment he happens by, everything is named.” He brushes against a leaf and, for that moment, it becomes leaf, the one and only leaf in existence.
Serre’s essay “How I Write My Books” also discusses how her texts come together. There is a gestation process, a period of reading and thinking and living, until these disparate elements of her life converge as sentences on a page, manifesting as narrative:
There are sentences you produce one day—it’s rather mysterious—which carry within them a story that accounts for everything you know and have experienced in life, and articulates these matters more effectively than you could ever do in any other medium than the novel. This means that gathered together in sentences of this kind is your entire life, with all your memories and impressions, and all the books you have read, suddenly simultaneously present and alive.
This being “simultaneously present and alive” correlates with the powers of the Fool who touches things to make them—finally, and only for a moment—real. He infuses them with an essential energy. This is not to say it is only positive; this energy can also be destructive. A good mood pivots to a bad one, a car crashes or a fight breaks out. The Fool appeared to Virginia Woolf, who stuffed her pockets with stones and walked into the river.
It is from here that the idea of the Fool begins to be deconstructed. He is love, a mood, an energy, a feeling, to be feared but also embraced. The Fool is a desire which evolves into destruction. The narrator’s discovery of the tarot card is her way of clarifying this notion in her own mind—it is her way of naming this phenomenon and using the little figure to give it physical dimension. She tries to escape the Fool but with each attempt quickly discovers that she needs him. “I get bored without my fool,” she admits.
But putting a face to this power is the equivalent of finding a name for your sickness; now that she has conjured up her demon, she must also deal with it. “Behave impeccably,” she writes. “That way, he can’t touch you, he can’t exert that destructive influence over you, he jumps about with all the attributes of a pernicious, murderous fool, he tries in vain to kill you.”
She deals with it by writing. The Fool becomes the drive or even need to write, to risk writing against all good sense. To channel destructive energies into a creative force, one that is life-giving, if only on the page. The Fool, then, is the writer’s imagination in full flight.
Following a similar theme, “The Narrator” tells the story of the challenges a lowly narrator faces in trying to fit into the world and reconcile his one and only skill—as the teller of stories—with a normal life.
The piece opens with an image of a chalet and the surrounding land covered in snow, drawing to mind the International Sanatorium Berghof, the setting of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. The Narrator is a “lunatic” who gravitates towards other losers and dropouts. He is the subject of their admiration because he possesses what they as nutters do not—a coherent story. The limits to this become apparent, and quickly; the Narrator excels only at narrating. He lives for reading and hearing the stories of others; everything else is lost on him. When he encounters other people, he pretends. This serves a dual purpose, allowing him to interact with regular people while also hearing their stories, which he will incorporate into his own narrative. It is while he is on a hike with others that the Narrator realizes he cannot be himself and will never fit in. The Narrator is an observer, not the center of attention, necessarily on the periphery. He can’t make small talk yet he can’t engage in the subjects of the regular man, alienating him further. It is why he associates with other outcasts, those who themselves are in no position to judge.
But even then the Narrator faces a bind. The power of story is the power of others—after all, writers want readers, don’t they? This creates a catch-22 for the Narrator; he needs the company of others to absorb their stories but taking their stories upsets them. His friends view him as predatory. “You’re a wolf, Narrator,” one of them says. “How dare you turn me into some sort of paper puppet,” says another. His friends leave him with a choice: pursue his desires and be left in isolation, or put them away and enjoy the company of loved ones. The Narrator’s desperation rises while he tries to overcome his impulse for narrative, to find love and to grow up. “He puts away the diseased part of his brain, stops wanting to wield power, ceases to have a secret, and, when’s he walking in the countryside, take a serious interest in flowers, plants, geography, archaeology, history.” The Narrator is inevitably rejected by regular people but also by the misfits.
The three pieces in the collection were published separately in the original French, but coupling “The Fool” and “The Narrator” here is useful: one informs the other. Both titular characters are many things, but just as easily no thing. In fact, Serre makes this association between stories explicit when she writes of the Narrator: “He’s identical in every respect to the tarot card for death.” The two could almost switch places. Indeed, “The Narrator” could be told from the point of view of the Fool who, no longer a figure of disruption, becomes one of sympathy in this story, a loner who searches for acceptance and a little place of his own in the world. He lives in and for story. The comparison with death is a curse, for death “always walks alone.”
It almost goes without saying that Serre’s fable about the immense challenges the Narrator faces in his need to live in pursuit of story can be read as the challenges faced by the humble writer in a hostile world. But what becomes increasingly clear to her readers as they become more acquainted with her work is that it deals in ambiguities, and any single reading is not the only possible one.
The book’s subtitle is and Other Moral Tales. If the first two stories are moral firecrackers, “The Wishing Table,” the third and final piece in the collection, is a hand grenade. Serre tells the story of an incestuous family from the point of view of one of the daughters. Maman, who spends most of her time naked and aflame with sexual yearning, Papa, who cross-dresses when he leaves the house, and a small set of visitors to the family home have regular sex with each other as well as the young girls. “They did things with us that it’s absolutely forbidden to do with children,” the narrator says. “Especially Maman, who loved to fondle us.”
This behavior, unconditionally rejected in civilized society, means the family must keep their activities secret. The threats to this existence come from beyond the front door—for instance, neighborhood whispers lead to a visit from a social worker. But the family is not so paranoid as to become defensive, instead they are carefree in their Eden, even welcoming curious passers-by into their fold. Maman is especially inviting, a characteristic that is rationalized as follows: “She had an unhappy childhood; she needed a bit of madness.” This is where the story’s considerable tension comes from—everyone who occupies a space inside the house is happy, ostensibly at least, and if only for a time.
To overcome the shock of the narrative and begin to solve the riddles it creates for the reader, it is instructive to turn to Serre’s other writing, with the obvious place to look being The Governesses. Published in 2018, also by New Directions and in an excellent translation by Mark Hutchinson, it tells the story of a wealthy and freewheeling household, at the center of which are three governesses, Inès, Laura and Eléonore. The young women are ravenous and ruthless in the pursuit of their desires, uniting them so much so that they operate as a single entity, three parts of a whole.
Their behavior is tolerated by the heads of the household and their employers, Monsieur and Madame Austere, because they actually hold the ecosystem in balance:
Every once in a while, they pretend to leave. Just to stir up the household, which, in spite of the governesses’ behavior, is almost Apollonian in its staidness. It’s also an opportunity to see Madame Austeur cry and Monsieur Austeur looking bewildered, which excites them no end.
The boys and girls they take care of, their employers, the old man who watches them from afar through a telescope—they all orbit around the whimsical and impulsive young women. The brief novel is an entire universe unto itself, the world of the household operating under its own laws—of physics as well as morality.
The fulfillment of desire is a theme which unites all of these stories. “I have the demon of love in me,” Maman says in “The Wishing Table.” In each text, the main characters do as they please—maybe as they must—despite everything. The Fool disrupts. The Narrator narrates. The family in “The Wishing Table” do, for better or worse, what they hunger for. On the opposite side of this, either on the other side of the walls of the house in which the fiction takes place, or outside of the book, in the real world, is the normal, the expected, the proper. The place where longings of a certain kind are necessarily tucked away, out of view.
Until, of course, they aren’t. The last section of “The Wishing Table” explores the protagonist’s departure from home at fifteen and the trauma she must deal with. “Why is it so many people in life have wound up insane?” she asks. “Couldn’t they cling, like me, to the marvelous shining disc of the table, where our whole story is reflected?” Without saying it, she, like the Narrator, is at home with the misfits who, in this case, happen to be her abusive parents and their friends. It was easier to continue to stare into the abyss of the reflection in the table than “walk out of the dream.” As the protagonist of “The Narrator” learns, misfits or not, to be rejected by the group is the worst punishment of all.
Serre’s stories are beguilingly simple, hence the descriptions of them by critics as dream-like or as fairy tales. It’s partly because their style delights and they care nothing for any sort of world beyond the page, but it’s also because their subjects and energy are a dead giveaway that Serre is enjoying herself. Though to think this is all she is up to is reductive and simplistic; as the narrator of “The Fool” writes: “If things were simple, we would know about it.” These three stories are provocative and original works which explore the complexity of desire and the friction created by the pleasures and dangers deriving from its fulfillment. It is a subject which inevitably raises questions of morality. Serre’s preferred form of the fable allows her to explore these tangled subjects with if not freedom then at least with insouciance. It is an ingenious choice of conceit; we can only hope that more of Serre’s writing appears in English translation, and soon.
Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney, Australia. His short story collection Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father was published by Transmission Press. 926 Years, co-written with Kyle Coma-Thompson, is forthcoming from Sublunary Editions.