The Offering
Author: Salah el Moncef
Publisher: Penelope Books
Publication: 31.05.2015
pp. 432
Tags: Fiction
“To write a diary every day,” Enoch
Powell once said, “is like returning to one’s own vomit.” A harsh but fair
assessment of the writer’s motivation. Only writers keep diaries. This is their
“material,” from which the poetically inclined regurgitate their “stories.” In French
the story, or histoire,
in colloquial usage means “tale,” one you tell your children to send them to
sleep, for instance. Unless one is taking cours d’histoire
in order to better understand the past, one shouldn’t raconter des
histories, or “tell fibs.” Which brings us to the story of Tariq Abbassi,
the Tunisian poet and central protagonist of Salah el Moncef’s highly
disturbing and richly tantalising novel The Offering.
We encounter Tariq for the first time in
Paris in late summer 2007, where he’s embroiled with his German ex-wife,
Regina, in a bitter custody battle for their two young sons, Shams and Haroon.
Tariq, it’s fair to say, is some kind of neurotic. He tells his story – or
rather it is told for him – through a labyrinthine mise en abyme: a
story lodged deep in the belly of the whale of partial recollections, or set
beneath a metanarrative of scattered secondary reflections and free
associations. This narrative framing device is not destined to throw much light
on “the truth” he (apparently) seeks. Indeed, the protagonist’s diary-cum-novel
almost immediately becomes mired in psychological obfuscation. Regina’s voice
is never given the opportunity to emerge through the din of self-analysis and
the working-through of the protagonist’s own trauma. ‘“First, you need to spend
many, many months listening to your pain – the loss of your
relationship with Regina,” his close friend and confidant Zoe advises him. In
other words this is a story all about “you,” Tariq, in which your wife’s
“duplicity” must vie with the poet’s legendary narcissism.
The poet is forever in search of events.
He is the one most attuned to tragedy. “That was the beginning: Regina’s letter
and I running through the streets of Bordeaux at two o’clock in the morning,
all the way to the Riverside precinct,” in order to report an “abduction.”
Needless to say it is not within the purview of the French justice system to be
able to address the protagonist’s sense of existential dislocation – “an
unmoored atom drifting in vacuity.” Nor indeed is it able to treat Regina’s
decision to leave him as anything more than an acte manqué: a
message for the protagonist to decipher, rather than a genuine action
expressing genuine emotions. For the protagonist “Regina” is a mere symptom or
sign of his own misguided behaviour. As he observes on returning to their empty
apartment, “I… tried to figure out her motives, her fears, what she wanted to
tell me through this.” Such is Tariq’s obsession which –
by the very nature of obsession – is an unrealizable
desire, an objet petit a that
will keep him turning in circles.
The curse of the poet resides in
his only being attuned to the here and now, which “was like a wave endlessly
crashing.” (The subtitle of Zoe’s doctoral dissertation on Deleuze – “A Poetic
Machine” – is meant to underscore for us the curse of repetition). Time can
ordinarily create the sense of perspective, or distance from trauma, which is
needed to go on living. But the poet experiences time differently wherein the
monumentality of the event never fully recedes in to the past. Instead it takes
on a new direction or assumes new form. It isn’t long before Tariq admits to
his self-serving manipulation of Regina’s feelings – albeit at the price of a
lingering “intellectual subterfuge.” Where such obsessive-compulsive
recollections lead, or what phantasmagorical form they might adopt next, is the
central conundrum of el Moncef’s novel – the very puzzle from which Tariq’s
story is tantalisingly woven.
In the initial stages of the divorce
proceedings two loyal friends offer themselves as character witnesses: Zoe and
Sami Mamlouk, Tariq’s assistant chef at his Tunisian restaurant. Sami’s
testimony goes beyond loyalty: “His digression and the world of suppressed
suffering … suddenly generated a new common reality (a sharing) between us…
Something had to be done somehow – a symbolic gesture; and the fact that I was
still in the dark as to how that gesture would play out in our workaday
relationship did not make thinking about the new situation any easier.”
One is reminded of the “duplicity” of
love when both Zoe and Sami’s witness testimonies are dismissed by Tariq’s
solicitor as a “liability.” Its duplicity will return to haunt the protagonist
later on. What is the intensity of these emotional attachments hiding? These
love-hate relationships with friends whose words are beyond reproach?
In a moment of dubious (rev)elation
Tariq takes his boys to “The South” and his family home in Tunisia: “Through an
act of imaginary projection in which loss and hope converged,” the protagonist
assumes that “by going down to Tunisia in the summer I would allow myself to
work my way up the stream of time with ease – travelling back to the days when
my life was still a blank page and I had all the power to fill it as freely and
as beautifully as I wished.” But the page is far from blank and is
criss-crossed with the failures and disappointments of adolescence. What of the
protagonist’s “pro-democracy activism” alluded to at several points during his
stay? This is never treated as anything more than a footnote in a closed book,
at best as a self-pitying reflection on “how little I had to show for my toil.”
So much for his vacation of self-re-discovery, of being an “unmoored atom
drifting in vacuity.” (Let us add that for Deleuzian philosopher-poets inertia
is often a recurring fantaisie). So
much for the “agnosticism” that Kareem, his sanctimonious and devoutly
religious brother castigates him for.
Atoms don’t “drift.” Matter is directed
in an ever-expanding universe. The material reality of Tariq’s lamentable
separation from Regina is hammered home to him as he is shuttled between family
gatherings. There at the centre of it all is “Mother,” the gravitational force
and ethico-moral justification for all things: the Janus face of transitions;
but also the anchor of an inescapable past, the barrier against memory and
reinvention. Could this mercurial woman nonetheless hold the key to unlocking a
new life for the protagonist? Is there some lesson to be had from her endurance
of an unhappy marriage?
Tariq’s return to France puts his own
“endurance” to the test. He embarks on an unlikely yet liberating relationship
with the much younger Annaelle. It’s at this point that el Moncef’s novel takes
on the scintillating form of a psychological thriller, the dissociation of the
protagonist recalling the best of J. G. Ballard’s fiction (Super-Cannes is
the obvious comparison). The Left Bank with its distorted perspectives, hidden
courtyards and tropical gardens becomes the phantasmagorical setting for a
miraculous, masochistic and all-consuming love affair: what turns out to be a
last tango in Paris, since the sublime and mesmerizing Annaelle is also a bad
omen: “you mustn’t think of me as – Joan of Arc or something,” she warns her
lover. This is hardly the transition the protagonist has been striving for.
When the relationship ends catastrophically with the mysterious death of his
two sons we are confronted once again with the power of the protagonist’s
projections. (Recall that, for Lacan, transference is an act of love.) But who
is the subject here? Who is speaking? Or, rather, is a subject ever destined to
emerge from the analysis, or in Tariq’s case from “The Community,” the
psychiatric institution in which he finds himself stranded, and from where he
has to put back together, through “the labor of recollection,” the events
leading up to his sons’ deaths – the events of a vanished life?
Salah el Moncef’s novel is an
exquisitely drawn character study, not so much of a psychologically disturbed
individual as of a collective trauma in the making. Provocative and
intelligent, this is a beguiling story of the twin enigmas of love and
sacrifice.
